Warm Stars
On A
Cold Night

"Philmont isn't just a shack in the woods, Mom.''

Great thanks goes to Jason Frtiz for supplying me with this copy.

EDITOR'S NOTE

ABOUT THIS COLLECTION. . .

Words power the mind and create an experience for the reader. When reading these quotations, our interpretations may differ from the experiences to which the authors refer. Yet, something drives us to reflect upon and reminisce about backcountry days for some inspiration and perspective on current endeavors. Whether sharing these quotations with Scouts, or spending time with friends at college trying to explain Philmont--the sensations and emotions will come to life and a feeling can be shared. A feeling can open up the minds of friends and let them share something of the mountains we call home.
``Wilderness,'' as a word, means the place where wild deer abound, and thankfully, they are still browsing the Philmont country in abundance. By sharing wilderness quotes and experiences, we might create a desire in others to preserve some precious moments for the next generation of Philmont campers.
There's something in the human spirit that reawakens, that flares and sparks in these hills and mesas of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. But something of this sense of adventure can slink away from the most stout-hearted of men and women back in the city, eating out of plastic bowls at a fast food village or trying to pick out the stars of Orion's belt through the hazy neon of a Raton strip.
Possibly some of what's here may make Orion a little brighter. Share the wilderness--it's been the Philmont way for 44 years.

Adobe Casa,

Susie Dobbs, Laura Lampe, & Ed Ohnemus
Philmont Scout Ranch, 1985

These properties are donated and dedicated to the Boy Scouts of America for the purpose of perpetuating faith -- self reliance -- integrity -- freedom. Principles used to build this great country by the American pioneer so that these future citizens may through thoughtful adult guidance and by the inspiration of nature visualize and form a code of living to diligently maintain these high ideals and our proper destiny.
--Waite Phillips, December 31, 1941

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
--Richard Bach, from Illusions

So much for me here. . .
Peace, air, sunlight, rain.
Happiness, discovery, lows & highs.
It's like a puzzle that fits together
perfectly, yet its parts are interchangeable
--Julie Fine

The best informed people are those with acute observation and who are inquisitive to be continually asking ``Why?''
--Waite Phillips

No person is entirely bad or entirely good. Therefore learn to forgive yourself for error the same as you should forgive others.
--Waite Phillips

And forget not that the earth delights to
feel your bare feet and the winds long to
play with your hair.
--Kahlil Gibran..

The words ``perseverance'' and stubbornness'' are not synonymous but it is distressing to observe that many people do not recognize the difference.
--Waite Phillips

No one should boast of being honest, dependable, courteous, and considerate for those are fundamental qualities essential to good character that everyone ought to develop and use.
--Waite Phillips

In the soft evenings of June, the rosy summits.
Above the lateral where the tree line crosses
Are like faces lifted up in serene torture,
Spilling blood of beauty over the foothills,
Of pinon and red juniper, each tree in itself,
A crucifix for the stretched--out soul.
--Phillips Kloss, Sangre de Cristo Mountains

Red exhaustion rips at your throat. And salt sweat spills off your forehead and mats your eyelids and brows. And drips on the burning ground. And your legs start to turn to rubber and collapse like a balloon. ``Pretty soon I've got to rest. How much farther? What's the good of this God damned work anyway?'' The long distance runner is paid by the snap of a white thread across his chest. You are paid by the picture at your feet.
--Terry and Renny Russell

So rests the sky against the earth. The dark still tarn in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife's body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning.
I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no -- but refreshed, rested -- while waiting.
--Dag Hammarskjold..

Happy is the man who loves the woods and waters,
Brother to the grass and well--beloved of Pan;
The earth shall be his, and all her laughing daughters----
Happy the man.

His gossips are the stars, and the moon his tavern;
He who seeks a better find it if he can --
And O his sweet pillow in the ferny cavern!
Happy the man.
--Richard le Galliene, Beatus Vir

A human being should be able to heal a wound, plan an expedition, order from a French menu, climb a mountain face, enjoy a ballet, balance accounts, roll a kayak, embolden a friend, tell a joke, laugh at himself, cooperate, act alone, sing a children's song, solve equations, throw a dog a stick, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, love heartily, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
--Lew Hitchner

I wonder if the mountains still stand when I turn my head or do they dip their peaks and nod at my retreating back.

You can feel the muscle knots tightening in your legs. And now and then you reach down to test the hard lumpiness. The passes get easier and finally you're just laughing over them. Every step and strain and hard breath and heart pump is an investment in tomorrow morning's strength. You're watching the change with your own eyes and feeling if under your skin and through your own veins. Fibers multiply and valves enlarge and walls thicken. A miracle. At least if the species has lost its animal strength its individual members can have the fun of finding it again.
--Terry and Renny Russell

There is a brook in the mountains,
Nobody I ask knows its name.
It shines on the earth like a piece
Of the sky. It falls away
In waterfalls, with a sound
Like rain. It twists between rocks
And makes deep pools. It divides
Into islands. It flows through
Calm reaches. It goes its way
With no one to mind it. The years
Go by, it's clear depths never change.
--Ch' u Ch'uang I..

Must we always teach our children with books? Let them look at the stars and the mountains above. Let them look at the waters and the trees and flowers on Earth. Then they will begin to think, and to think is the beginning of a real education.
--David Polis

Patience is the Companion of Wisdom.
--St. Augustine

You can not stay on the summit forever.
You have to come down anyway.
So why bother in the first place?
Just this:
What is above knows what is below.
But what is below does not know what if above.
One climbs, one sees, one descends. One sees no longer,
but one has seen.
--Terry and Renny Russell

I settled at Cold Mountain long ago,
Already it seems like years and years.
Freely drifting, I prowl the woods and streams
And linger watching things themselves.
Men don't get this far into the mountains,
White clouds gather and billow.
Thin grass does for a mattress,
The blue sky makes a good quilt.
Happy with a stone underhead
Let heaven and earth go about their changes.
--Gary Snyder..

All paths lead nowhere, so it is important to choose a path that has heart.
--Carlos Castenda

No servant brought them meals: they got their meat out of the river, or went without. No traffic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they mis-guessed whether or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes; which firewood made clean coals, and which only smoke. . .The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. These boys were ``on their own'' in this particular sense.
--Aldo Leopold, from Sand County Almanac

``I think,'' said Christopher Robin, ``that we ought to eat all our provisions now so we shan't have to carry them.''
--A.A. Milne

You cannot learn to fly by flying. First you must learn to walk, and to run, and to climb, and to dance.
--Nietzsche

About mountains it is useless to argue, you have either been up or you haven't. The view from halfway is nobody's view. The Best flowers are on top under a ledge, nourished by the wind. A sense of smell is of less importance than a sense of balance, walking on clouds through holes in which you can see the earth ---- the wind has its own level to find.

To the attentive eye, each movement of the year has it's own beauty, and in the fame field it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before and which shall never be seen again.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, from a conversation with John Muir

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ``twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew----
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
--Robert Frost, Into My Own

Natural wilderness is a factor for world stability -- an active agent in maintaining a habitable world.
--Sir Frank Fraser Darling

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond--side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
--Henry David Thoreau..

Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
The world of the flower, the whole of
the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower, the truth
of the blossom:
The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.
--Zenkei Shibayama..

Do not stand by my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am a diamond glint on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain
When you wake in the morning hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight
I am the soft starshine at night
Do not stand by my grave and cry
I am not there . . . I did not die
-unknown

Live as to die tomorrow. Learn as to live forever.
--Isadore of Seville

The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will look sourly upon; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly, kind companion.
--William Makepeace Thackeray

Expose yourself to the possibility of doing something remarkable.
--C. Cunningham

In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer
--Albert Camus

When I go quiet I stop hearing myself and start hearing the world outside me. Then, I hear something very great.
--anon

We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
--Tombstone, epitaph of two amateur astronomers

Awareness is becoming acquainted with environment, no matter where one happens to be. Man does not suddenly become aware or infused with wonder; it is something we are born with. No child need be told its secret; he keeps it until the influence of gadgetry and the indifference of teen--age satiation extinguish its intuitive joy.
--Sigurd Olson..

Ecological sanity and social justice are like two faces of the same coin -- they are inseparable.
--Jose Lutzenberger

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen--ground--swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending--time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again,
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make the balance:
''Stay where you are until my back is turned!''
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ``Good fences make good neighbors.''
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
''Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I build a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And who I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down,'' I could say ``Elves'' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old--stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go beyond his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ``Good fences make good neighbors.''
--Robert Frost, Mending Wall

At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.
--Louis Simpson

The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory.
--Blaise Pascal

Sea waves are green and wet,
But up from where they die
Rise others vaster yet,
And those are brown and dry.

They are the sea made land
To come at the fisher town
And bury in solid sand
The men she could not drown.

She may know cove and cape,
But she does not know mankind
If by any change of shape
She hopes to cut off mind.

Men left her a ship to sink:
They can leave her a hut as well;
And be but more free to think
For the one more cast--off shell.
--Robert Frost, Sand Dunes

I remember streams and lakes
clear and alive with life,
shores of sand moist and clean,
woodlands dense, birds that sang,
leaves that crunched beneath my
tread.
I remember sunshine so bright and
warm
And air so pure you wanted to take great gulps of
it in.

I remember . . .
And a tear runs down my cheek
for you,
My bright young face,
My bright young friend.
And I sorrow that you will never
see
What I remember
--Unknown, I Remember

The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew into the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.
--Chief Luther Standing Bear..

To look at any thing,
If you would know that thing,
You must look at it long:
To look at this green and say
''I have seen spring in these
woods; will not do -- you must
Be the thing you see:
You must be the dark snakes of
Stems and ferny plumes of leaves,
You must enter in
To the small silences between
The leaves,
You must take your time
And touch the very peace
They issue from.
--John Moffitt..

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
--Wallace Steger

Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never by young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
The disquieting thing in the modern picture is the trophy--hunter who never grows up, in whom the capacity for isolation, perception, and husbandry is undeveloped, or perhaps lost . . .
To enjoy he must possess, invade, appropriate. Hence the wilderness that he cannot personally see has no value to him. Hence the universal assumption that an unused hinterland is rendering no service to society. Those devoid of imagination, a blank spot on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part. (Is my share in Alaska worthless to me because I shall never go there? Do I need a road to show me the arctic prairies, the goose pastures of the Yukon, the Kodiak bear, the sheep meadows behind McKinley?)
It would appear, in short, that the rudimentary grades of outdoor recreation consume their resource base; the higher grades, at least to a degree, create their own satisfaction with little or no attrition of land or life . . . Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
--Aldo Leopold

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or were the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs, and comes short again and again -- who knows the great enthusiasms the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and at worst, if he fails, at least fails so greatly so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.
--Theodore Roosevelt

I expect to pass this way but once; any good therefore that I can do , or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature. Let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
--Etienne Griellet

There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the Gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.
If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: ``Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make.''
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.
And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha. He is the one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
He's a man who won't fit in.
--Robert Service, The Men That Don't Fit In

Now I see the secret of making the best person, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth
--Walt Whitman

The best way out is always through.
--Robert Frost

A man can fail many times but he isn't a total failure until he begins to blame someone else for his own deficiencies.

We should all realize that every right implies a responsibility, every opportunity an obligation, every position a duty, and that the most effective sermon is expressed in deeds instead of words.

Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful.

To become competent in governing others we must first learn to govern ourselves.

The trouble with many of us is that we would rather be ruined by flattery and praise than saved by honest criticism.
--Waite Phillips, from Waite Phillip's Epigrams

Nothing worthwhile was ever accomplished without the will to start, the enthusiasm to continue and, regardless of temporary obstacles, the persistence to complete.
--Waite Phillips, from Waite Phillip's Epigrams

To see is one of God's great gifts to man and to comprehend what we see is doubly so. Furthermore, He has endowed some people with the qualities to see the beauties of life and nature much more than others and they have the greatest gift of all.
--Waite Phillips, from Waite Phillip's Epigrams

Once in a while you find a place on earth that becomes your very own. A place undefined. Waiting for you to bring your color, your self. A place untouched, unspoiled, undeveloped. Raw, honest, and haunting. No one, nothing is telling you how to feel or who to be. Let the mountains have you for a day. . .
--Sundance

As for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good--natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by an unseen and unaccountable old joker . . . There is nothing like the perils of the wilderness to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy.
--Herman Melville

Your equipment stands between you and the wilderness. The less of it you have the closer you approach the wilderness. . . Expensive space--age technology makes backpacking easier, or at least more efficient, but it is not what backpacking is all about, merely a means to it. Do only what you have to do.
--Ed Burgen, Vagabonding in the USA

Somehow I can't believe there are many heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secret can be summarized in four Cs. They are curiosity, confidence, courage and constancy, and the greatest of these is confidence. When you believe a thing, believe it all the way. Have confidence in your ability to do it right. And work hard to do the best possible job.
--Walt Disney

Some think that happiness comes from getting, others know that it comes from giving.
--Baden Powell

Today the ``open road'' is a six lane highway, defaced with billboards and beer cans. Open space is vanishing, but our need for freedom to breathe pure air, to climb rocky trails and to observe the tiniest creature persists. From a sleeping bag on the high open ground, you get a fresh view of the world.

Where there seems no way to go, go anyway. Don't be put off by what you can't see. Get up any which way -- scramble on hands and knees, ditching your pride, slide along your bottom for a stretch, clutch at roots, but keep going on. Once there you can look back to the pathway you have cleared, that will make it easier next time you climb.

Climb often not just for the music, but for the in between. The lights and the darks, the patterns of touch make it a ritual -- a tradition by now, and yet you can never duplicate the climb; everytime is the first time.
--Eve Merrian

A New ``Pledge of Allegiance''
''I pledge devotion to the earth, our one and only home,
and to the life this earth sustains;
one nation, one spirit indivisible,
with freedom and fulfillment for all.
--Bruce Hagen, Petaluma, CA 1983

Money is the Wealth of the materialists and works miracles in the realm of the physical. Time is the wealth of the pilgrim, and works miracles in all realms.
--Ed Burgen, Vagabonding in the U.S.A.

That beautiful season the Summer!
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light;
and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Oh God of dust and rainbows, help us see that without dust the rainbow would not be.
--Langston Hughes

Far away there
in the sunshine are my highest aspirations.
I may not reach them,
but I can look up and see their beauty,
believe in them,
and try to follow where they lead.
--Louisa May Alcott

Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
--James Russell Lowell

How do you indicate to an individual that there is a potential experience without dictating it to him?
--Dr. Suess, from Do you like Green Eggs and Ham?

The wilderness needs no defense -- only more defenders.
--Aldo Leopold

Keep your face to the sunshine, and you cannot see the shadow.
--Hellen Keller

I helped Chris get to his feet.
``You were going a little too fast,'' I say. ``Now the mountainside's becoming steep and we have to go slowly. If you go too fast you get winded and when you get winded you get dizzy and that weakens your spirit and you think, I can't do it. So go slow for awhile.''
``I'll stay behind you, `` he says.
``Okay.''
We walk now away from the stream we were following, up the canyon side at the shallowest angle I can find.
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are the things you should notice anyway. To live for only some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. ``Here's where things grow.
But, of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides. So on we go . . . we have a long way . . . no hurry . . . just one step after the next . . . with a little Chautaugua for entertainment . . . Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV, it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant, but it never is.
--Robert Pirsig, from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

To laugh
is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep
is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings
is to risk exposing our true self.
To place your ideas, your dreams
before the crowd is to risk loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try at all is to risk failure.
But to risk we must,
Because the greatest hazard in life,
is to risk nothing.
The man, the woman,
who risks nothing, does nothing
has nothing, is nothing.
--Richard Bach, from Illusions

A ruin is not just something that happened long ago to someone else; its history is that of us all, the transience of power, of ideas, of all human endeavors.
--George Schaller

Nature is more than a refuge from human chaos, more than fresh air for smoke--filled lungs, and quietude for ears in torture. It is the common way of living, and as such it is our touchstone.
--Donald Culross

Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself.

Yes sir, yes madam, I entreat you, get off of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! Like Women! Like human beings! And walk--walk--WALK upon our sweet and blessed land!
Where's the Coke machine?
Sorry lady, we have no Coke machine out here. Would you like a drink of water? (She's not sure)
Say Ranger, that's a godawful road you got in here. When the hell they going to pave it? (They gather round listening)
The day before I leave. (I say it with smile, they laugh)
Well how the hell do we get out of here?
You just got here, sir
I know, but how do we get out?
Same way you can in. It's a dead end road.
So we see the scenery twice?
It looks better going out.
Are you married?
Not seriously.
You must get awfully lonesome out here.
No, I have good company.
Your wife?
No, myself. (They laugh. They think I'm kidding)
Don't you even have a T.V.?
T.V.? Listen lady, if I ever saw a T.V. out here I'd get out my cannon and shoot it like a mad dog, right in the eye.
Goodness, why do you say that?
What's the principle of the T.V., madam? The vacuum tube, madam. And do you know what happens if you stick your head in a vacuum tube?
If you stick your head . . .
I'll tell you; you get your brains sucked out. (laughter)
Hey ole buddy, how far from here to Lubbock?
Where's Lubbock, sir?
Texas, ole buddy, Lubbock, Texas
Well sir, I don't know exactly how far that is but I'd guess it's not nearly far enough.
Does it ever rain in this country, Ranger?
I don't know, madam, I've only been here two years.
Well, you said yesterday it wasn't going to rain and it did rain.
Well, that goes to show you can never trust the weather.
You work here all year round?
No sir, just for the summer.
What do you do in the winter?
I rest.
--Edward Abbey, from A Desert Solitaire

The great sea
Has sent me adrift
It moves me
As the weed in a great river
Earth and the great weather
Move me
Have carried me away
And move my inward parts with joy.
--Uvavnuk, an Eskimo woman shaman

Life . . . is an onion. One peels it while crying.
--Opus

It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self--glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we are paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way . . .

To the untrained eye ego--climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego--climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. he's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be ``here.'' What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it is all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
That seems to be Chris' problem now.
--Robert Pirsig, from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It's when you are safe at home that you're having an adventure. When you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
--Thorton Wilder

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.
--Richard Bach, from Illusions

``Come into the mountains, dear friend
leave society and take no one with you
but your true self
get close to nature
your everyday games will be insignificant
notice the clouds spontaneously forming patterns
and try to do that with your life''
--Susan Polis Schuetz

A little learning is not a dangerous thing for one who does not mistake it for a great deal.
--William Allen White

It's a shame that a race so broadly conceived should end with most lives so narrowly confined.
Why should we waste Childhood on children, Poverty on the poor, Antiquity on the antiquitarians, or Woods on the woodsmen?
-Terry & Renny Russell

So why do we do it?
What good is it?
Does it teach you anything?
Like determination? Invention? Improvisation? Foresight? Hindsight? Love? Art? Music? Religion?
Strength or patience or accuracy or quickness or tolerance or which wood will burn and how long is a day and how far is a mile
And how delicious is water and smoky green pea soup?
And how to rely
On your
Self?
-Terry & Renny Russell

How far is a mile?
Well, you learn that right off.
It's particularly different from ten tenths on the odometer. It's one thousand seven hundred and sixty steps on the dead level and if you don't have anything better to do you can count them.
''One and a half? You're crazy, There, we've been walking for hours!''

It's at least ten and maybe a million times that on the hills and no riverbed ever does run straight.

''What's this, Frog Creek? Is that all the further we are? Look, tomorrow we gotta start earlier.''
-Terry & Renny Russell

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay
--Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay

The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

Deep in the mountain wilderness
Where nobody ever comes
Only once in a great while
Something like the sound of a far off voice,
The low rays of the sun
Slip through the dark forest,
And gleam again on the shadowy moss.
--Wang Wei..

Adventure is not in the guidebook and Beauty is not on the map.
Seek and you shall find.
-Terry & Renny Russell

Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less--advanced life--forms, and they'll call you crazy.
--Richard Bach, from Illusions

Well,
Have we guys learned our lesson?
You bet we have.
Have we learned to eschew irresponsible outdoor'smanship, to ask advice, to take care and to plan fastidiously and to stay on the trail and to camp only in designated campgrounds and to inquire locally and take enough clothes and keep off the grass?
You bet we haven't.
Unfastidious outdoor'smanship is the best kind.
-Terry & Renny Russell

A human being is part of the whole, called by us ``universe,'' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.
--Albert Einstein

``What is real?'' asked the Rabbit one day. ``Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick--out--handle?''
``Real isn't how you are made,'' said the Skin Horse. ``It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.''
``Does it hurt?'' asked the Rabbit.
``Sometimes,'' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ``When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.''
``Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,'' he asked, ``or bit by bit?''
``It doesn't happen all at once,'' said the Skin Horse. ``You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.''
--Margery Williams from the Velveteen Rabbit

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass on invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
--Henry David Thoreau..

The world is your exercise--book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality although you can express reality there if you wish.
You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages.
--Richard Bach, from Illusions

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple--colour as a brinded cow;
For rose--moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh--firecoal chestnut--falls, finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced ---- fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow, sweet, sour, a dazzle, dim;
He fathers--forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

Perspective--
Use it or lose it. If you turned to this page, you're forgetting that what is going on around you is not reality. Think about that. Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place.
You're going to die a horrible death, remember. It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind.
--Richard Bach, from Illusions

The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing?
Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.
--Richard Bach, from Illusions

In this age, when a meager utilitarianism seems ready to absorb every feeling and sentiment, and what is sometimes called improvement in its march makes us fear that the bright and tender flowers of the imagination shall all be crushed beneath its iron tramp, it would be well to cultivate the oasis that yet remains to us, and thus preserve the gems of a future and purer system.
--Thomas Cole, from ``Essay on American Society''

If these mountains die,
where will our imagination wander?
If the far mesas are leveled,
what will sustain us in our quest to be larger than life?
If the high valley is made mundane by self--seekers and
careless users, where will we find another landscape so eager to
nourish our love?
And if the long--time people of this wonderful country are
careless users, where will we find another landscape so eager to
nourish our love?
And if the long--time people of this wonderful country are
carelessly squandered by Progress, who will guide us to a better
world?
--John Nichols from, If Mountains Die, A New Mexico Memoir
(2) taken from foreword

Hope and the future for me are not in the lawns and cultivated
fields, not in the towns and cities, but in the impervious and
quaking swamps.
--Henry David Thoreau, ``Walking''

Have you gazed upon naked grandeur where there's nothing else to gaze on,
Set pieces and drop--curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the binding sunsets blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it,
Searched the vastness for something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God's sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.
Have you wandered in the wilderness, the sagebrush desolation,
The bunch--grass levels where the cattle graze?
Have you whistled a bit of ragtime at the end of all creation,
And learned to know the desert's little ways?
Have you camped upon the foothills, have you galloped o're the ranges,
Have you roamed the arid sun--lands through and through?
Have you chummed up with the mesas? Do you know its moods and changes?
Then listen to the Wild -- it's calling you.

Have you known the Great White Silence, not a snow--gemmed twig aquiver?
(Eternal truths that shame our soothing lies.)

Have you broken trail on snowshoes? Mushed your huskies up the river,
dared the unknown, led the way, clutched the prize?
Have you marked the map's void spaces, mingled with the mongrel races,
Felt the savage strength of brute in every thew?
And though grim as hell the worst is, can you round it off with curses?
Then harken to the Wild -- it's wanting you.

Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down, yet
grasped at glory,
Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
''Done things'' just for doing, letting babblers tell the story,
Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul?
Have you seen God in His splendors, heard the text that nature
renders?

(You'll never hear it in the family pew.)
The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do
things--
Then listen to the Wild -- it's calling you.

They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with
their preaching,
They have soaked you in convention through and through;
They have put you in a showcase; you're a credit to their
teaching --
But can't you hear the Wild? -- it's calling you.
Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betides us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There's a whisper on the night wind, there's a star agleam to
guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling . . . let us go.
--Robert Service, The Call of the Wild , from Collected Verse of Robert Service

Wilderness is nature's bank of genetic variability.
--Aldo Leopold

Have you ever walked 34 miles on a straight--arrow dirt road with only a Tang--jar of rusty water because you expected somebody who didn't come and then walked past your turnoff in the dark and had to sleep on a cattleguard? Have you ever dropped your sleeping bag in the ocean by mistake? Have you ever followed a jeep--track in the rain which got worse and worse and fainter and fainter and petered out a vertical quarter mile from where you wanted to go? Have you ever slept on a cobblestone riverbank? Or on a sand dune on a windy night and spit sand all the next morning? Have you ever climbed on a mountain but missed the right peak by half a mile but the sun was down and you were freezing and had better find some dry wood and a place to sleep in the snow quick? Have you ever walked 234 miles of mountain trail to see how fast you could do it? Have you ever started a backpack trip and hit a storm on the first pass and spent 24 hours under a wet plastic tarp drinking lumpy ice chocolate and walked through the snow to a cabin and burnt your jeans drying them over a wood stove? Have you ever left your insect repellant behind on a rock? Have you ever had a cheese sandwich for Christmas dinner in Death Valley? Have you ever camped in a dump? Have you ever gone to sleep on a beach and woke up in water and had to sleep up on rocks under a cliff which rained sand on your neck all night and lost a tennis shoe and almost your glasses to the tide? Have you ever lain under a truck for five hours because it was the only shade in the desert in July? Have you ever walked 50 miles or 41.3 miles with blisters for glory? Have you ever fallen out of and under a boat in a rapid because the deck wasn't tied on right? Have you ever had just dried figs and sandy bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Have you ever floated a lake shore at night groping for a campsite midst bare rock and cactus? Have you ever built a fire with a water ski because it was the only wood?
No, I reckon not all of them, maybe. But that's how we've grown up, Ren and I; that and a thousand little glimmers on the water, a thousand red streaks in the sundown sky, a thousand puffs up the trail. Everybody goes about it differently, of course, but I don't guess we'd trade any of it. It's meant a lot of good humor. It's meant a few flashes of almost unbearable beauty which I can only call religious experiences (as if religion means anything, that's what they were). ``Fitness,'' experience are part of it too. Most important is an imperishable attitude, a philosophy if you like, a way of laying out the world and of planting ourselves in it. Now we know what is trivia and what is real . . .

Actually, the eloquence of the wilderness is not a pattern for human eloquence. There lives no hardier fool than whoever shouts, ``The scene inspired me to set pen to paper,'' or brush to canvas, or thumb to lyre. The wilderness inspires nothing but itself. Our babblings and scratchings resume in the den or studio, whenever things resume their comfortable and incorrect proportions.
. . . We live in a house that God built but that former tenants remodelled -- blew up, it looks like -- before we arrived. Poking through the rubble in our odd hours, we've found the corners that were spared and have hidden in them as much as we could. Not to escape from but to escape to; not to forget but to remember. We've been learning to take of ourselves in places that really matter. Crazy kids on the loose; but on the loose in the wilderness.
That really makes all the difference.
--Terry and Renny Russell, from On the Loose (7--9) the introduction

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the Sunset.
--Crowfoot

The mountains are calling and I must go.
--John Muir

My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream; and wisdom comes to us in dreams.
You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone. Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white men. But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?
--Smohalla

The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and soil. The white man is still troubled with primitive fears; he still has in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of its vastnesses not yet having yielded to his questing footsteps and inquiring eyes. He shudders still with the memory of the loss of his forefathers upon its scorching deserts and forbidding mountain--tops. The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent. But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefather's bones.
--Chief Luther Standing Bear's autobiography, 1933

Holy Mother Earth, the trees and all nature, are witnesses of your thoughts and deeds.
--A Winnebago wise saying

We love quiet; we suffer the mouse to play; when the woods are rustled by the wind we fear not.
--Indian Chief to the governor of Pennsylvania, 1796

Now the sun is rising calm and bright. The birds are singing . . .
The sky rejoices . . . All things that love the sun are out of doors.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may);
I shan't be gone long. ----You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. ----You come too.
--Robert Frost, The Pasture

Come said the wind to
the leaves one day,
Come o're the meadows
and we will play.
Put on your dresses
scarlet and gold,
For summer is gone
and the days grow cold.
--children's song, circa 1886

The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of civilization. And when native man left off this form of development, his humanization was retarded in growth.
--Chief Luther Standing Bear

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, --
The finger--points look through like rosy blooms;
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
''Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass
All around our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup--fields with silver edge
Where the cow parsley skirts the hawthorn hedge.
'Tis visible silence, still as the hourglass.
Deep in the sun--searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky --
So this winged hour is dropped to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close--companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love''
--Dante Grabriel Rossetti, Silent Noon

But these are human things,
The point of it all is Out There, a little
beyond that last rise you can just
barely see, hazy and purple on the sky.
These pages are windows.
And windows are to see through.
--Terry and Renny Russell

The car has made our cities uninhabitable. It is also the best way to escape them. Hurry and take the road to the roadless area, because it won't be roadless long. Too much demand. The gas pump doesn't know the beauty which it helped to see; and so the gas tax comes pouring in the the pavement comes pouring out. And so we push that Big Wheel nearer the edge. The land of the free and the home of the auto dump. But man was born to wander.
--Terry and Renny Russell

Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day -- farther and wider -- and rest thee by many brooks and hearthsides without misgiving.
--Terry and Renny Russell

Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home.
There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games may
here be played . . .
--Terry & Renny Russell

Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become the English hay. Let the thunder ramble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers' crops? That is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living by thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not . . .
--Terry & Renny Russell

One of the best--paying professions is getting ahold of pieces of country in your mind, learning their smell and their moods, sorting out the pieces of a view, deciding what grows there and there and why, how many steps that hill will take, where this creek winds and where it meets the other one below, what elevation timberline is now, whether you can walk this reef at low tide or have to climb around, which contour lines on a map mean better cliffs or mountains. This is the best kind of ownership, and the most permanent.
It feels good to say ``I know the Sierra'' or ``I know Point Reyes.'' But of course you don't -- what you know better is yourself, and Point Reyes and the Sierra have only helped.
--Terry & Renny Russell

Nature might have made Sphinxes in her spare time or Mona Lisas with her left hand, Blindfolded. instead she gave the grain of sand, the polished river stone, The Grand Canyon. So you went to the Louvre: What did you see? After the first Artist Only the copyist.

The World is round and the place which may seem like the end may only be the beginning.
--Ivy Barker Priest

The sunshine on my path
was to me a friend.
--William Cullen Bryant

He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will soon be reduced, from mere bareness, to the poorest of all limitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated.
--Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourse to Students of the Royal Academy, December 10, 1974

Without enough wilderness America will change. Democracy, with its myriad personalities and increasing sophistication, must be fibred and vitalized by the regular contact with outdoor growths -- animals, trees, sun warmth, and free skies -- or it will dwindle and pale.
--Walt Whitman

I looked into the face
of a beautiful woman.
Her eyes
were the trees.
Her smile
was the sunlight that floated
on and through
the grass.
Her hair
was the blue sky and clouds
soft to the touch.
It was a perfect romance
as I
stood on the mountain
and stared
at her face.
--Unknown, I Looked Into The Face

Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day.
--W. Earl Hall

To My Friend
You have such a positive outlook on life
Your words are always encouraging
Your face is lit up with excitement
Your actions are so straightforward
Your inner self helps you achieve so much
When people are around you
they seem to absorb uplifting attitudes
When I think of you
I can only think of happiness
and how lucky I am to know you.
--Susan Poliz Schirtz

I am part of my environment, and my environment is part of me.
When I maim the earth, I wound me. When I pollute a stream, I
poison me. When I fill the sky with smog, I choke me. For this is
my world. I am the world, and the world is me.
--Unknown

They sleep generally in the open air, in winter as well as in summer, subjected to every inclemency of the weather. As may well be imagined, a buffalo hunter, at the end of the season, is by no means prepossessing in his appearance, being, in addition to his filthy aspect, a paradise for hoards of nameless parasites. They are a rollicking set, and occasionally include men of intelligence, who formerly possessed an ordinary amount of refinement.
--J.A. Allen

Play for more than you can afford to lose, and you will learn the game.
--Winston Churchill

Mountains and deserts, with their sparse life at the limit of existence, make one restless and disconsolate; one becomes an explorer in an intellectual realm as well as in a physical one.
--George Schaller

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.
--Henry David Thoreau

For oft when on my couch I lie,
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
--William Wordsworth

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and glowing, on sea and continues and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.
--John Muir

Thus is appears that everything here is marching to music, and the harmonies are all so simple and young they are easily apprehended by those who will keep still and listen and look
--John Muir

O', these vast, calm, measureless mountain days inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.
--John Muir

These beautiful days must enrich all my life. They do not exist as mere pictures -- maps hung upon the walls of memory . . . but they saturate themselves into every part of my body and live always.
--John Muir

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
--John Muir

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.
--Henry David Thoreau

No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the
future . . . Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air.
--John Muir

I . . . am always glad to touch the living rock again and dip my hand in the high mountain air.
--John Muir

Society speaks and all men listen, mountains speak and wise men listen.
--John Muir

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village through;
He will not see me topping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely dark and deep . . .
But, I have promises to keep
and miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.
--Robert Frost, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The wind will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
--John Muir

The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry that I couldn't travel both
And be one traveler I stood
And looked as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other one just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as far as the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step and trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two roads diverged in a woods, and I
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.
--Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a--flying:
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying
--Robert Merrick

In a field I am the absence of field. That is always the case.
Wherever I am, I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and
always the air moves in to fill the space where my body has been.
We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.
--Mark Strand

Then here's a hail to each flaming dawn
And here's a cheer to the night that's gone
And may I go a roaming on -- until the day I die
--On a grave marker in the Adirondacks

God has infinite time to give us; but how did He get it? In one immense tract of lazy millenniums? No, He cut it up into a neat succession of new mornings.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
--William Blake (on his grave in St. Pauls, London)

An agreeable companion on a journey is as good as a carriage.
--Max 143, Publius Syrus

He that riseth late must trot all day.
--Ben Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac

He who reads the landscape without the aid of maps as a matter of habit, becomes as sophisticated of eye as it is popular to believe the bat is sophisticated of ear.
--Barry Lopez

Always in a big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off into a new place there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into. What you are doing is exploring. You are undertaking the first experience of our essential loneliness for nobody can discover the world for anyone else. It is only after we have discovered it for ourselves that it becomes a common ground and a bond, and we cease to be alone.
--Wendell Berry

For afterwards a man finds pleasure in his pains, when he has suffered long and wandered long. So I will tell you what you ask and seek to know.
--Homer, The Odyssey

I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.
--Steve McQueen

The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy.
--Henry Ward Beecher

Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open roads
Healthy and free, the world before me.
The long brown path before me leading
wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good fortune,
I myself am good fortune.
Henceforth I whimper no more,
Postpone no more, need clothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries,
querulous criticisms.
Strong and content I travel the open road.

--Walt Whitman, from: Leaves of Grass

It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs, looking up at stars, and we didn't even feel like talking aloud.
--Mark Train, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

All that glitters is not gold. All who wander are not lost.
--William Shakespeare

This is about a stretch of mountain country that started out as just a place. It is only an uncivilized piece of country, but something is there that can touch a person. Those summer days somehow brought me closer to an earth that was real and good. I began to discover a few simple goods that satisfied more than all the entertaining gadgets and conveniences a factory could turn out. I discovered self--dependence and time that flowed without calibrations, and a kind of beauty that appeared in the absence of invented things. I met people. The days were not loaded in advance, but the sun would come up and there would be, and by dusk it had proved its worth.
--Dave Caffey, from Head for the High Country

. . . A thousand fantasies begin to throng into my memory . . . On sands and shores and desert wildernesses
--John Milton

I have been told with some regularity that by walking out and away I am ``escaping from reality.'' I admit that the question puts me on the defensive. Why, I ask myself, are people so ready to assume that chilled champagne is more real than water drawn from an
ice--cold mountain creek? Or a dusty sidewalk than a carpet of desert dandelions? Or a Boeing 707 than a flight of graceful white pelicans soaring in unison
against the sunrise? Why, in other words, do people assume that the acts and emotions and values that stem from the city life are more real than those that arise from the beauty and the silence and the solitude of wilderness?
--Colin Fletcher, from the Complete Walker

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. To affect the quality of the day -- that is the highest of arts.
--Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
--Henry David Thoreau

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
--Henry David Thoreau

Sometimes it is better to travel than arrive. For my part, I travel not
to go anywhere, but to go.
--Travels with a Donkey

Of what avail is an
open eye, if the
heart is blind?
--Solomon Ibn--Gabirol..

I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.
--Nigerian Chieftan

Yet I have a quirk inside. I kind of like it when the natural world clobbers our technological universe. So what if hurricanes, earthquakes, mosquitos, and idiot cattle make my life miserable? Thank God nature can still kick me and all my gadgets in the teeth!
There has to be something else, going deeper, traveling farther back. When you wind up in a place that becomes a real home, you cannot simply attribute your arrival to casual accident, not in this nation of inveterate rovers. And when the place is so much of a home that almost immediately the land back East, where you did most of your growing up, looks like a foreign and cluttered planet covered with sickly green mold, you cannot cavalierly slough off this arid, wide--open territory as just another casual watering spot in the musical chairs of life.
One of the oldest and most important drives is to locate, return to, stake claims upon the country of one's origins. These origins are physical, psychic, spiritual. Many of us forgot them generations ago -- perhaps our forefathers, or our ``melting pot'' politicians, forgot our roots for us: and in a lifetime, we never discover them again. Others among us are luckier: our people protected these sacred origins, sometimes by refusing to lose a native language or to sell an old house or a piece of land . . . sometimes by saving letters, diaries, old photographs . . . and sometimes by passing down, from one generation to the next, stories, history, and a special sensibility -- approaching instinct -- to land, politics, religion that becomes almost a genetic trait in the blood.
I set sail for this place, then, many generations ago.
And I cannot lose it now, for I have always had it. It is as strong in me as the stone that rolls from the top of the mountain to the bottom of the gorge: it is as swift in me as the darting swallows: it is inevitable as the snow falling past my window. Before I even knew the name of this place I could have proven to you that had always existed in my heart, and in the hearts of my family that went before me. It is as immaterial in me as a dream, and as solid as sunshine and horses. That star, my star, has always been suspended exactly above this spot on earth: its shadow, the size and brightness of a dime, contains the mystery of my unique, and universal, heritage. I have known that crab apple tree outside my window all of my life, and all of my father's life before that. There is a continuity in the blood that transcends geography, language, skin color, time. In 1942, in Castle Hot Springs, Arizona, my maternal great--grandfather, writing in his native French, began a poem by saying ``Arizona skies, your splendor haunts me.'' So I embrace ravens, magpies, killdeer, my neighbors, their sheep, the mountains. My brothers speak many languages. In Taos I learn new superficial statistics that differentiate slightly the customs here from the customs over there, but deep down I have always understood the pattern of clouds over these tiny pastures. And I have these same times before on my mother's guitar, on a great--grandfather's clarinet.
When I got here, finally (when my body caught up to the rest of me,) my life became a victory.
--John Nichols, from If Mountains Die, A New Mexico Memoir (pg. 5)

No sane man in the hands of nature can doubt the doubleness of his life. Soul and body receive separate nourishment and separate exercise, and speedily reach a state of development wherein each is easily known apart from each other. Living artificially, we seldom see much of our real selves. Our torpid souls are hopelessly entangled with our torpid bodies, and not only is there a confused mingling of our own souls with our own bodies, but we hardly possess a separate existence from our neighbors.
The life of a mountaineer seems to be particularly favorable to the development of soul--life, as well as limb--life, each receiving abundance of exercise and abundance of food.
--John of the Mountains, 77

For there are some people who can live without wild things about them and the earth beneath their feet, and some who cannot. To those of us who, in a city, are always aware of the abused and abased earth below the pavement, walking on grass, watching the flight of birds, or finding the first spring dandelion are rights as old and unalienable as the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We belong to no cult. We are not Nature Lovers. We don't love nature any more than we love breathing. Nature is simply something indispensable, like air and light and water, that we accept as necessary to living, and the nearer we can get to it the happier we are.
--Louise Dickenson Rich

When night is almost done,
And sunrise grown so near
That we can touch the spaces,
It's time to smooth the hair

And get the dipples ready,
And wonder we could care
For that old faded midnight
That frightened but an hour.
--Emily Dickinson

The morning hangs a signal
Upon the mountain crest,
While all the sleeping valleys
In silent darkness rest.
From peak to peak it flashes,
It laughs along the sky
Till glory of the sunshine
On all the land shall lie.

Above the generations
The lonely prophets rise
While truth flings dawn and daystar
Within their glowing eyes:
And other eyes, beholding,
And kindled from that light;
And dawn becomes the morning,
The darkness put to flight.

The soul hath lifted moments,
Above the drift of days,
When life's great meaning breaketh
In sunrise on our ways . . .
Behold the radiant token
Of faith above all fear;
Night shall be lost in splendor
And morning shall appear.
--unknown, The Morning Hangs a Signal

Who walks with Beauty have no need of fear; The sun and moon and stars keep pace with him.
--David Morton

The birds I heard today, which, fortunately, did not come within the scope of my science, sang as freshly as if it had been the first morning of creations.
--Henry David Thoreau..

He who has achieved this state
Is unconcerned with friends and enemies,
With good and harm, with honor and disgrace.
This therefore is the highest state of man.
--Lao Tzu..

This is the first time for the girl, a
time of revelation.
Mysteries unravel at this height,
patterns emerge.
She stands woman--tall, shoulder to shoulder,
with the sun and laughs to think that
such a splendid world had ever frightened her.
All that she sees, farm and forest, pasture and
prairie, city and country, and continent,
stretches before her like tomorrows filled with promise . . .
She was born to this kingdom.
In time it will be hers to explore, to
make her own.
One climb is over, another just beginning.
She is rich in days, wealthy in possibilities.
And here in this crowning moment,
For the very first time . . .

She knows.
--Edward Cunningham, King of the Mountain

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan--like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to ``glorify God and enjoy Him forever.''
--Henry David Thoreau..

Those who know do not talk.
Those who talk do not know.

To Touch and Feel is to Experience. Many people live out their entire lives without ever really Touching or being Touched by anything. These people live within a world of mind and imagination that may move them sometimes to joy, tears, happiness or sorrow. But these people never really Touch. They do not live and become one with life.
--Hyemeyohsts Storm Seven Arrows..

I touched the nothingness of air once and felt nothing. I
touched it again and felt a breeze.
I filled my lungs with air and smelled nothing. I filled my body
and soul with it and smelled the violets.
I read a tight--fisted poem once and realized nothing. I read it
again and was surprised to see it burst into blossom and reveal its
inner palm.
To look once is to be blind. To look again is to see inside.
To run quickly and glance is to realize nothing. To move slowly
and become what you look at is to realize that nothing does not
exist.
Do you see what really is or do you see what you want it to be?
Is he saying what's in his heart or what he thinks is in yours?
To see a person is to know what he is.
To see through a person is to know why he is like that.
To know what a forest is you must become part of the green
coolness that is that forest. And when you return they'll say
''Where have you been,'' and you'll reply ``I've been in a forest.''
And they will look at you and sigh and wonder when you will learn that you can't go around pretending to be what you aren't. And you will know what they are thinking and say ``But how can I know what a forest feels unless I feel it too?'' And they'll wonder when their problem child is going to change and begin to learn something useful.
--Nancy Woods

What a joy it is
to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet
once more,
to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks
where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling
notes,
or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that
tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness!
--Helen Keller..

The fact remains that the people who profess to know about these things and to love them haven't the vaguest notion of how to see nature. They don't know where to find it, they don't know how to experience it , and if they demonstrate the existence of it they do so on a field trip which is more a social outing than a field trip. If anything, they do more damage to nature by their activity than they do if they never brought the kids out at all. The point is that people should find these things out for themselves. You shouldn't have to go to some expert to know that if you look here or there you'll find something. You're there -- look! It's as simple as that.
--T.J. Walker..

To allow mystery, which is to say to yourself: there could be more, there could be things we don't understand; is not to damn knowledge.
--Barry Lopez

We are affected like the earth, and yield to the elemental tenderness; winter breaks up within us; . . . accumulated masses of ice and snow dissolve, and thoughts like a freshet pour down unwonted channels.
--Henry David Thoreau, Journals 1853

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you;
But make allowance for their doubting, too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting.
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken
And stoop and build them up with worn--out tools.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings,
And risk it on one turn of pitch--and--toss,
And lose, and start at the beginning
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone;
And hold on when there is nothing in you,
Exact the Will, which says to them ``hold on!''

If you talk with crowds and keep your virtue
Or walk with Kings, nor lost the common touch;
If neither foes nor living friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth, and everything that's in it,
And -- which is more -- You'll be a man, my son!
--Rudyard Kipling, If, from Waite Phillip's Epigrams

While we are born with curiosity and wonder
and our early years full of the adventure
they bring,
I know such inherent joys are often lost.
I also know that, being deep within us,
their latent glow can be fanned to flame again
by awareness and an open mind.
--Sigurd Olson..

Experimenting . . .
I hung the moon
on various
branches of the pine
--Hokushi -- The Four Seasons: Japanese Haiku..

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them but to be indifferent to them -- that's the essence of inhumanity.
--George Bernard Shaw

And a youth said, Speak to us of Friendship.
And he answered, saying:
Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow and reap with thanksgiving.
And he is your board and your fireside.
For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for
peace.

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the ``nay'' in your
own mind, nor do you withhold the ``ay.''
And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;
For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all
expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.
When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his
absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

And let there be no purpose in friendship. Save the deepening of
the spirit.
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of it's own mystery is
not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.

And let your best be for your friend.
If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.
For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to live.
For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.
And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and
sharing of pleasures.
For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is
refreshed.
--the prophet, Kahlil Gibran

Keep your mouth closed.
Guard your senses.
Temper your sharpness.
Simplify your problems.
Mask your brightness
Be at one with the dust of the earth.
This is primal union.

I am in love with this world. I have nestled lovingly in it. I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings.
--John Burroughs..

Since water still flows, tough we cut it with swords
And sorrow returns, though we drown it with wine,
Since the world can in no way answer to our craving,
I will loosen my hair tomorrow and take to a fishing boat.
--Li Po..

There is more to life than increasing it's speed.
--Ghandi

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this. There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiselessly through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that ``for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day.'' This was sheer idleness to my fellow--townsmen, no doubt; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence.
--Henry David Thoreau..

One aspect of the machine world which has not had sufficient attention is the relation of the machine age to the mystery of human joy. If there is one thing clear about the centuries dominated by the factory and the wheel, it is that although the machine can make everything from a spoon to a landing--craft, a natural joy in earthly living is something it never has and never will be able to manufacture. It has given us conveniences (often most uncomfortable) and comforts (often most inconvenient) but human happiness was never on its tray of wares. The historical result of the era has been an economic world so glutted with machine power that it is being shaken apart like a jerry--built factory, and a frustrate human world full of neurotic and ugly substitutes for joy.
Part of the confused violence of our time represents, I think, the unconscious search of man for his own natural happiness. He cannot live by bread alone and particularly not by sawdust bread. To speak in paradox, a sense of some joy in living is one of the most serious things in all the world.
--Henry Beston..

The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew into the air came to rest upon the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing.
--Chief Luther Standing Bear..

I feel . . .
we could be happy in the mountains.
Everybody's talking about the place of their dream,
where they can find peace of mind.
I'm not sure, but I think it seems
I've finally found mine. . .
in the mountains
--Hoyt Axton

Nature shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair
and let us huddle together as darkness takes over
We are at home amidst the birds and the trees, for we are
children of nature.
--Susan Polis Shutz

Learning is finding out what you already know.
Doing is demonstrating that you know it.
Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.
You are all learners, doers, teachers.
--Richard Bach, from Illusions

The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives.
--Indian Proverb..

In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people's curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them. Put there just a spark. If there is some good inflammable stuff, it will catch fire.
--Anatole France..

Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in life; Glory in your strength and beauty. Rejoice in the fullness of your aliveness. Seek to make your life long and full of service to others, to your people. And prepare a noble Death Song for the day when you are about to cross the Great Divide.
--The Twelfth Commandment of the Redman

Don't be dismayed at good--byes.
A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.
And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes,
is certain for friends.
--Richard Bach

''. . . and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and I ain't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize and I can't stand it. I been there before.''
--Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckelberry Finn

I also knew there would be some things that would never be dimmed by distance or time, compounded of values that would never be forgotten. The joys and challenges of the wilderness, the sense of being a part of the country and of an era that was gone. The freedom we had known, silence, timelessness, beauty, companionship and loyalty and the feeling of fullness and completion that was ours at the end. . .
--Sigurd F. Olson

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they flowed light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
--Mary Oliver, Sleeping in the Forest

Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up, as did men of another age, to the challenge of nature. Modern man lives in a highly synthetic kind of existence. He specializes in this and that. Rarely does he test all his powers or find himself whole. But in the hills and on the water the character of a man comes out.
--Abram T. Collier

There are beginnings and there are endings. What meaning and effect your experience here will have in your life only you will ultimately know. The responsibility as always, is yours to make of it what you will. Bon Voyage, my friends.
--John Hurst

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
--A. Lincoln

The mountains can be reached in all seasons. They offer a fighting challenge to heart, soul and mind, both in summer and winter. If throughout time the youth of the nation accept the challenge the mountains offer, they will keep alive in our people the spirit of adventure. That spirit is a measure of the vitality of both nations and men. A people who climb the ridges and sleep under the stars in high mountain meadows, who enter the forest and scale peaks, who explore glaciers and walk ridges buried deep in snow -- these people will give their country some of the indomitable spirit of the mountains.

--William O. Douglass

Today is a new day; you'll get out of it just what you put into it. If you have made mistakes, even serious mistakes, you can make a new start whenever you choose. For the thing we call failure is not the falling but the staying down.
--Mary Pickford

You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous in risking one's life. So you lose it, you go to your hero's heaven and everything is milk and honey 'til the end of time, right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That's not courage. Real courage is risking something that you have to keep on living with, real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's cliches.
--Tom Robbins

I will act as if what I do makes a difference.
--William James

Live each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance towards the summit puts the goal in mind. Many beautiful scenes can be observed from each new vantage point. Climb steadily, slowly, enjoy each passing moment; and the view from the summit will serve as a fitting climax to the journey.
--Joe Porcino

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard taskmasker to yourself -- and be lenient with everybody else.
--Henry Ward Beecher

Winning is realizing you already have won by being in the running. You may not finish ahead of many other runners, but you already have beaten the much bigger pack of people who choose to move on wheels instead of on foot.
Losing is not starting, but being content to talk about what might be, or what might have been if...
Winning is finishing the distance you set for yourself, however humble it might be. Speed is a gift your parents either gave you or couldn't. Your had little to say about it, so the time you take to run your distance doesn't say much about your spirit. But endurance and persistence are qualities that are largely trained and learned. Finishing is a victory of strong spirit over weak flesh.
Losing is dropping out for no other reason than a weak will. Quitting in the face of actual or potential injury is wisdom, but giving up to moderate inconvenience or mild discomfort is defeat.
Winning is measuring yourself against yourself. It is learning to take pride in your improvements, no matter how small. Later it is taking pleasure in more subtle measures of victory which have little to do with time and place.
Losing is matching yourself against everyone else who runs. This is self-defeating, because few people win this way and those who do don't keep it up very long.
--Joe Henderson

Difficulties and obstructions throw a man back upon himself. While the inferior man seeks to put the blame on other persons, bewailing his fate, the superior man seeks the error within himself, and through this introspection the external obstacle becomes for him an occasion for inner enrichment and education.
--from I Ching

I was walking with my friend, and American Indian, on a crowded street in New York City when he suddenly exclaimed, "I hear a cricket."
"You're crazy," I said, as I observed the crowded noon-time street scene in mid-town. Cars were honking, construction crews working, plans flying overhead.
"No, I hear a cricket," he insisted, and proceeded to walk to a flower bed in front of a fancy office building. There, under a leafy plant, he showed me a cricket chirping with life.
"That's amazing," I responded. "You must have fantastic hearing."
"Not really. It all depends on what you're tuned into," my friend explained.
"I find that hard to believe," I said.
"Watch," my wise friend offered, and he proceeded to drop a handful of coins onto the crowded sidewalk.
Instantly heads turned, eyes darted, and hands reached for pockets to see if they were the poor soul who'd lost his or her money.
"See," his eyes twinkled, "it all depends on what you're tuned into."
--Dave Moriah, The Indian & the Cricket, adapted from "Summit Expedition" staff manual

Last Modified: 05:11pm EST, February 14, 1996