Intro

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength…Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” So spoke Jesus, according to a book I read, and while I am not in any way religious, it has always seemed to me that regardless of spirituality these rules offer the best path to living a meaningful life and, as a byproduct, a happy one. Love may be occluded at times, but it is embedded in all of us, a north star that never dims, and one worthy of more than a little attention.

John Muir, the great, flawed evangelizer of the Sierra Nevada, saw god in every tree and rock, and while I don’t share his faith (and I find his writing distractingly breathless), I, too, am whelmed with emotions when I’m in nature. They range from awe to appreciation to fascination. In the face of photosynthesis,