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Meditations of John Muir:
Nature’s Temple
Meditations of Henry David Thoreau:
Light in the Woods
Meditations of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Into the Green Future
Meditations of Walt Whitman:
Earth, My Likeness
Compiled and edited by Chris Highland
Wilderness Press, 2001, 2002, 2004.
I find books such as the four in this thought-provoking set to be difficult to review but easy to recommend.
They are difficult to review because, well, you either like this sort of meditation collection, or you don’t. They are difficult to review because they are made to be taken in bit by bit, over periods of weeks and months, so reading them in a more expeditious fashion to review them usually does not do them justice. And they are difficult to review because the impact of such books is often felt long after the act of reading, unlike a novel or memoir that bowls you over in the very moment of reading.
But Chris Highland’s compilations of nature meditations are, indeed, easy to recommend.
These books are exemplars of the “meditation” genre. They are small, about the size of a mass-market paperback and perfect for backpacks and purses. Whether your periods of nature meditation take place in the wilderness or on a Boston commuter bus, these books are easy to take along. The interiors and exteriors are beautifully designed; reading them is easy on the eyes, and reading them in public demonstrates that you are a person of good taste and erudition.
Then there is the content. Each book includes helpful introductory material. You will have to go elsewhere for definitive biographical and critical matter, but Highland presents more than enough information to get you started. Each selection from Muir, Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman is well-chosen, and each is paired with an epigrammatic snippet from essays, scriptures, and poems throughout the ages. This leads to many mind-expanding juxtapositions such as this one in which words from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resonate, together, even louder in the twenty-first:
From Thoreau:
They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountainhead.
And Martin Luther King, Jr.:
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
That’ll get you thinking whether you’re hiking the Cascades or sitting in traffic as your bus approaches Harvard Station, especially if you read the newspaper over breakfast. At least that’s how it happened to me, and it comes as no surprise that I had occasion to read those words to colleagues later in the day.
Chris Highland, an eclectic seeker and artist, has created a series of books that I cannot recommend too highly. They remind us who we are and where we come from and that the world in which we live is larger than our limited perception of it. I understand that a volume on Margaret Fuller is in the works, and will look forward to it, and many more.
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