Between Every Two Pine Trees

John Muir left marginal notes in a copy of The prose works of Ralph Waldo Emerson located at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

John Muir's marginal notes in The prose works of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marginal note 492 reads:

Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.
― John Muir

Soda Butte Creek

Muir expressed wonder at the rewards of the reverence of natural phenomena. Muir's optimism was to experience each trek into a pine forest or each introspective journey as a door to a life renewed.

“But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”
― Aldous Huxley

Nature is indifferent to space and time. Our home planet, an improbable satellite, rotates away from the Sun to create the illusion of time.

View west from Peet's Hill

REFERENCES

• The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.
• The prose works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1869.