Unitary World
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
John Muir (1911)
The flower is made only of non-flower elements. Sunshine is a non-flower element. Cloud is a non-flower element and there is a multitude of non-flower elements coming together to produce a flower. So a flower cannot be by itself alone.
Thích Nhất Hạnh (2021)
A rather ‘un-attached’ bridge, possibly seeming more aposite to the world we live in, than the quotations. However, it isn’t just any old unattached bridge, it is on the ‘John Muir Way’ in East Lothian, and firmly attached to the memory of that man. He lived in Dunbar, until 1849 by when he was 11 years old. Few years, but ones which left him with deep sympathy for the countryside. That link he believed was fundamental to human life. A view now more familiar to us with the increasing
access
Signs of Buddhist influence from earlier years.
there has been to Buddhist writers in the last 100 years. There is speculation about Muir’s interest in Daoist and Buddhist ideas. However, his practical work as ‘Father of the National Parks’ in the United States, together with his thoughts on the rich interconnected unity of human experience, clearly places him firmly as the inheritor of the
Transcendentalist
The inheritance that John Muir assumed.
mantle with Emerson and Thoreau as forebears - there have been many
roads
A reminder of the many ways that ideas articulate.
to this conclusion.
There are many near-quotes and paraphrases of quotes from John Muir’s writings. This one seems likely to be from My First Summer in the Sierra. Similarly there are also many place where Thích Nhất Hạnh discusses his ideas on the inter-connectivity of everything, the centrality of the idea to his thinking is such that he coined his own word for this interconnection - interbeing. This quote appeared posthumously, it is from a short YouTube talk, which can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuVqp4KmNWk where it was placed after the death of Thích Nhất Hạnh.
The photo was taken at high tide in the John Muir Country Park, just to the west of Belhaven, in southern Scotland.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 25th May 2024
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