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