John Muir: A Breath of Fresh Air
On the Cycles of Life & Death, Love & Grief
Just over a century after his death John Muir (1839–1914) offers us a natural model of death and green end-of-life care, an offering that comes as a breath of fresh air with our 21st century industrialization of death. Despite the social mores of the 1870’s, when the post-Civil War ushered in the Victorian funeral industry, Muir called for a natural view of death. Arriving from Scotland at a young age, Muir would remember the village wakes of local families in Dunbar who buried their loved ones at the home property or in the local churchyard.
Muir’s official biographer, Linnie Marsh Wolfe, wrote of the young Muir’s first brush with death. Following a childhood steeped in his father’s harsh Scottish Calvinism, hard farm labor and University years that seemed only to prepare him for a life of making money through inventions, Muir became deeply conflicted about how to pursue his dream of a life in nature. For several years he found lucrative jobs in mills as an inventor, but yearned to live and work in nature.
In March 1867, at age 29, “Fate took a hand and brought an end to John Muir’s long inner conflict.” A sharp machine file slipped from his hand, propelled by the machine and cut into his right eye. The aqueous humor of his eye dropped into his hand. “In that moment of horror, he declared: ‘I would gladly have died where I stood. My right eye gone! Closed forever on all God’s beauty.” The doctor’s orders were to lie still in a dark room for a month, though he might never regain the vision in either eye. However, slowly his vision recovered so that within a month he was able to emerge from the darkness. “The sudden revulsion from sick despair was like a resurrection. ‘Now had I arisen from the grave! The cup is removed and I am alive!”
His left eye, blinded from the shock, also improved. After a month of convalescence with kind friends “when soft gray clouds filtered the sunlight,” he headed south for the woods on his first walk. When he returned a few hours later, he had made his final decision. He found two new reasons for living: “that I might be true to myself and find no joy apart from nature! God has to nearly kill us sometimes to teach us lessons.” He then planned the trip of a lifetime, to walk across America and travel on to South America to discover the tropical flora and fauna that he had learned of from reading ancient classical texts at the University of Wisconsin. Over a lifetime of wilderness adventures, Muir would later face death numerous times in his mountain and glacial expeditions.
Muir’s thousand-mile walk across America
By October 1867, the 29-year old Muir had already hiked from Indiana to Georgia in just two months. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist professor, advised young men of the times to keep a journal, so Muir kept a daily record. He arrived in Savannah hoping to receive an envelope of money from his savings. While waiting for it, Muir spent 5 days “camping out” in a century-old abandoned cemetery where he experienced a revelation about his own mortality and the beauty of death when cradled by Mother Nature. “If that burying-ground across the Sea of Galilee, mentioned in Scripture, was half as beautiful as Bonaventure, I do not wonder that a man should dwell among the tombs.”
It was likely there, that he would confront the cultural illiteracy around death, and also his own mortality. He enjoyed insights and revelations as written in his extensive journals, but also probably acquired the malaria virus while lying not far from mosquito-ridden ponds adjacent the cemetery. Near fatal symptoms of malaria emerged about a week later, but meanwhile he received the revelation of a lifetime, that death brings an awareness of the preciousness of life. Muir nearly met death in the high fevers of malaria over two months. As fate would have it, Muir would barely recover in this brush with death to board a boat to the Panama Canal and San Francisco to finally come home to his place in the universe, the Yosemite Valley in the Sierra mountains. Meanwhile, he experienced the spiritual conversion of a lifetime, in which he completely lost his fear of death and life purpose for nature.
“The most conspicuous glory of Bonaventure [Cemetery] is its noble avenue of live-oaks. They are the most magnificent planted trees I have ever seen, about fifty feet high and perhaps three or four feet in diameter, with broad spreading leafy heads…There are also thousands of smaller trees and clustered bushes, covered almost from sight in the glorious brightness of their own light… Many bald eagles roost among the trees along the side of the marsh…Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive gladness. The whole place seems like a center of life. The dead do not reign there alone.”
“I gazed awe-stricken as one new-arrived from another world. Bonaventure is called a graveyard, a town of the dead, but the graves are powerless in such a depth of life. The rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the joyous confidence of flower, the calm grandeur of the oaks, mark this place of graves as one of the Lord’s most favored abodes of life and light…”
“On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Instead of the sympathy, the friendly union of life and death so apparent in Nature, we are taught that death is an accident, a deplorable punishment for the oldest sin, the arch-enemy of life, etc. Town children, especially, are steeped in this death orthodoxy, for the natural beauties of death are seldom seen or taught in town.”
“Of death among our own species, to say nothing of the thousand styles and modes of murder, or best memories even among happy deaths, yield groans and tears, mingled with morbid exultation; burial companies, black in cloth and countenance; and last of all a black box burial in an ill-omened place, haunted by imaginary glooms and ghosts of every degree. Thus death becomes fearful, and the most notable and incredible thing heard around a death-bed is ‘I fear not to die.”
“ But let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights.”
“Most of the graves of Bonaventure are planted with flowers. There is generally a magnolia at the head, near the strictly erect marble [of the headstones], a rose-bush or two at the foot, and some violets and showy exotics along the sides or the tops. All is enclosed by a black iron railing, composed of rigid bars that might have been spears or bludgeons from a battlefield in Pandemonium.”
“It is interesting to observe how assiduously Nature seeks to remedy these labored art blunders. She corrodes the iron and marble, and gradually levels the hills which is always heaped up, as if a sufficiently heavy quantity of clods could not be laid on the dead. Arching grasses come one by one; seeds come flying on downy wings, silent as fate, to give life’s dearest beauty for the ashes of art; and strong evergreen arms laden with ferns and Tillandsia drapery are spread over all — Life at work everywhere, obliterating all memory of the confusion of man…”
“All the avenue where I walked was in shadow, but an exposed tombstone frequently shone out in startling whiteness on either hand, and thickets of sparkleberry bushes gleamed like heaps of crystals. Not a breath of air moved the gray moss, and the great black arms of the trees met overhead and covered the avenue…Though tired, I sauntered a while enchanted, then lay down under one of the great oaks. I found a little mound that served for a pillow, placed my plant press and bag beside me and rested fairly well… When I awoke, the sun was up and all Nature was rejoicing… On rising I found that my head had been resting on a grave, and though my sleep had not been quite so sound as that of the person below, I arose refreshed, and looking about me, the morning sunbeams pouring through the oaks and gardens dripping with dew, the beauty displayed was so glorious and exhilarating that hunger and care seemed only a dream.”
Near-fatal symptoms of malaria emerged about a week later, but meanwhile he received a “conversion” experience, that Nature was both God and great Healer, and that death brings an awareness of the preciousness of life. Muir nearly died with high fevers of malaria over the six week illness. As fate would have it, Muir would just barely recover enough to board a boat to the Panama Canal and San Francisco. On arriving in the Sierra mountain range he had finally come home to his true place in the universe, the Yosemite Valley and the great natural wonders of the West he helped establish into six National Parks and Monuments. Meanwhile, he experienced the spiritual conversion of a lifetime, in which he completely lost his fear of death and found his God in nature. At Bonaventure Cemetery he saw the largest trees he had yet seen, not even imagining the massive Sequoias, Sugar Pines and virgin redwood forests of the West. He has since inspired hundreds of thousands of nature lovers and preservationists to speak out on behalf of the earth.
On the immortality of the earth
“The death of flowers in this garden is only change from one form of beauty to another.” -1869, John Of the Mountains, p. 32.
On the immortality of humanity
“Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems nether long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.” - 1869, Atlantic Monthly 1911, MFS page 52.
Nature as friend
“To lovers of the wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away. Their spiritual power and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends….You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature.” -Summer 1868, My First Summer In the Sierra, p. 116.
“We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us… How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is… In this newness of life we seem to have been so always.” -June 1869, MFS p. 20–21.
On the healing power of nature
“Only spread a fern-frond over a man’s head, and worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in.” -June 1869, MFS, p. 54.
“One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.” — September 2, 1869 entry, My First Summer in the Sierra
On Eternity
“Bears are made of the same dust as we, and breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters. A bear’s days are warmed by the same sun, his dwellings are over-domed by the same blue sky, and his life turns and ebbs with heart-pulsings like ours, and was poured from the same First Fountain. And whether he at last goes to our stingy heaven or no, he has terrestrial immortality. His life not long, not short, knows no beginnings, no ending. To him life unstinted, unplanned, is above the accidents of time, and his years, markless and boundless, equal Eternity. -October 1871, JOM p 82–83.
On the death of Emerson
“Since Emerson was so soon to vanish, I concluded to stop with him. He hardly spoke a word all the evening, yet it was a great pleasure simply to be near him, warming in the light of his face as at a fire. In the morning we walked through a fine group [of sequoias], he said “There were giants in those days.” Later I urged him to stay. “You are yourself a sequoia.” But he waved me a last good-bye. [Seventeen years later] I stood beside his grave. He had gone to higher Sierras, and, as I fancied, was again waving his hand in friendly recognition. -1871, journals, as compiled in Meditations of John Muir, by Chris Highland.
On grief
Although our society has made many advances in the areas of psychology, and even in the grief process of Dr Kubler-Ross and others, we still institutionalize death, grief, and the mourning process. The last twenty years has created the green burial movement, bringing death back to people with the home funeral movement, the hospice movement, and moving more easily through grief. However, there is still a disconnect for many respecting the need for each individual to grieve in their own unique way. In his own time, Muir took a year away from writing in mourning the loss of his wife Louie. Later he found solace in nature and friendships, which became increasingly tender and dear.
After a year or so, Muir found joy again, with his daughters and their families and long-time friends. “Muir made many trips to the mountains with the Sierra Club in his latter years. Once in the high Alpine air, he threw off his burdens and became his old-time joyous, rollicking self. Stroking his beard and wrinkling his nose, he was an ever gushing foundation of puckish humor…’Never was there a naturalist who could hold his hearers so well, and none had so much to tell. Modest and low-voiced, he would set the whole camp in a roar.”
On Sorrow
“[The] Earth has no sorrow that earth cannot heal.” -1872, JOM p. 99.
“There need be no lasting sorrow for the death of any of Nature’s creations, because for every death there is always born a corresponding life. And what life shall follow the death of a glacier!” -1873, John of the Mountains p. 168.
Linnie Marsh Wolfe wrote that for Muir, the beauty of nature was a continual reminder of a great and loving creator, one who created a natural world more awesome than that of the great cathedrals of Europe or the Seven Wonders of the World. “It was John Muir’s destiny to lead men back to a realization of their origins as children of nature. ‘In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world,’ he said. He dared to dream of a day, and to work for it, when our government would cherish this wildness as a perpetual heritage of raw resources for all the people, and a source of healing for body and spirit, and of faculties fostered into fulfillment by intimate communion with the Great Mother.” — Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness, p. ix.
On surrendering one’s self to the earth
“It is blessed to lean fully and trustingly on Nature, to experience, by taking to her a pure heart and unartificial mind, the infinite tenderness and power of her love.” -1872, The Life and Letters of John Muir, p. 325.
On the naturalness of death and ‘green’ burials
“The common purity of Nature is something wonderful — how she does so vast a number of different things cleanly without waste or dirt. I have often wondered by what means bears, wild sheep, and other large animals were so hidden at death as seldom to be visible? One may walk these woods from year to year without even snuffing a single tainted smell. Pollution, defilement, squalor are words that would never have been created had man lived conformably to Nature. Birds, insects, bears die as cleanly and are disposed of beautifully as flies. The woods are full of dead and dying trees, yet needed for their beauty to complete the beauty of the living…How beautiful is all Death! -1875, journal entry near the Joaquin River, California
“People read [Bibles and books] and remain fearful and uncomfortable amid Nature’s loving destructions, her beautiful deaths. Talk of immortality! After a whole day in the woods, we are already immortal. When is the end of such a day?” -1875, JOM p 213.
On planting a tree
“When a {hu}man plants a tree he plants himself. Every root is an anchor over which he rests with grateful interest, and becomes sufficiently calm to feel the joy of living.”
-1877, Steep Trails, San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, p 141.
On happiness and nature
“…we are overpaid a thousand times for all our toil, and a single day in so divine an atmosphere of beauty and love would be well worth living for, at at its close, should death come, without any hope of another life, we could still say, ‘Thank you, God, for the glorious gift!’ and pass on. Indeed, some of the days I have spent alone in the depths of the wilderness have shown me that immortal life beyond the grave is not essential to perfect happiness… After days like these we are ready for any fate — pain, grief, death or oblivion — with grateful heart for the glorious gift as long as hearts shall endure. In the meantime, our indebtedness is growing ever more. The sun shines and the stars, and the new beauty meets us at every step in all our wanderings.”
-1890, The Alaska trip, JOM p. 301.
On the ultimate death
“Man, man; you ought to have been with me! You’ll never make up what you have lost to-day. I’ve been wandering through a thousand rooms of God’s crystal temple. I’ve been a thousand feet down in the crevasses, with matchless domes and sculptured figures and carved ice-work all about me. Soloman’s marble and ivory palaces were nothing compared to it. Such purity, such color, such delicate beauty! I was tempted to stay there and feast my soul, and softly freeze, until I would become part of the glacier. What a great death that would be! — circa 1890s, The Alaska trip.
On our civilization’s spiritual need for trees
Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America barren as Palestine or Spain…God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools [lumbermen] — only Uncle Sam can do that…Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed — chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides…” -1897 “The American Forests”, Atlantic Monthly p. 148 and 364–5.
On the restorative powers of nature: a poem from Muir
Come to the woods, for here is rest.
There is no repose like that of the green deep woods.
Here grow the wallflower and the violet.
The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee,
the logcock will wake you in the morning.
Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill.
Of all the upness accessible to mortals,
there is no upness comparable to the mountains.
- from Meditations of John Muir, by Chris Highland, editor., p. 129.
On the need for preservation and restoration (of the human spirit)
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as foundations of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” -January 1898, Atlantic Monthly p. 15.
“I never saw one drop of blood, one red stain in all this wilderness. Even death is in harmony here. Only in shambles and the downy bed of homes is death terrible.”-1872, JOM p. 93.
On dying
“…like trees in autumn shedding their leaves, going to dust like beautiful days to night, proclaiming as with the tongues of angels the natural beauty of death.” -November 1902, Century Magazine, p. 380.
On death as going ‘home’
“The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang — home-going. So the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock ferns, often un-rolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil.” -1913, JOM
Death as mother
“Death is a kind nurse saying ‘Come, children, to bed, and get up in the morning,’ — a gracious Mother calling her children home.” -1913, Son of the Wilderness, p. 348.
On eternity
“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 gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls…” -Undated journal entry, probably 1914, JOM.
On the inherent goodness of the human heart
“The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when light comes, the heart of the people is always right.” -January 1920, published posthumously in the Sierra Club Bulletin “Save the Redwoods” article
Muir’s Own “Green” Burial
Aside from the granite headstone and iron fence surrounding his grave, Muir did receive a more “green” burial not typical of his times, probably without embalming and certainly without pesticides, herbicides, or a concrete burial vault. In a webpage on Muir’s funeral and burial, Harold Wood wrote, “John Muir’s burial site is in a quiet, tree-shaded spot near the banks of Alhambra Creek, about one mile south of the Muir homestead and the National Historic Site managed by the U.S. National Park Service. John Muir, the champion of the wilderness, died on Christmas Eve 1914 in California Hospital, Los Angeles. From the heart-breaking loss of the Hetch Hetchy battle, and by what he called “the grippe” (influenza) …his body was shipped home to Alhambra Valley, where he was to be buried next to his dear wife Louie. On December 26, the Sierra Club held a memorial service at Muir Lodge for their beloved leader, and over several days newspapers all around the nation carried his obituary and published tributes to him.”
“The funeral was attended by over 100 members of the Sierra Club…At the Muir House, the simple casket rested in a bay window just below the study where he wrote most of his books. It was covered with a drapery of ferns and violets…Some mourners brought branches of fir or pine to place beside the coffin. Among the floral tributes were a large laurel wreath with purple and gold ribbon, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a wreath of red roses from the National Institute of Arts and Letters….
“Moving to the gravesite a mile away, a brief ceremony was held… As the coffin was lowered into the ground, ‘A member of the Sierra Club placed on the coffin a bough of the Sequoia gigantea tree which the naturalist had planted with his own hand near what is now his grave.’ The San Francisco Chronicle, in uncharacteristic poetic fashion, reported that ‘As the beloved body was being lowered into the grave, quail on the side hills called out their farewells and overhead, in trees Muir himself planted forty years ago, God’s feathered creatures, that had come to know, and not to fear the man, sang his requiem.”
Linnie Wolfe wrote, “After his death some of his admirers deplored the fact that he was not buried among the mountains, perhaps in Yosemite. They thought he would have wished it so. But as he often said: “Evenin’ brings a hame” and home to him was where his loved ones were.”
References
Earl, John. John Muir’s Longest Walk: John Earl, a Photographer, Traces His Journey to Florida.East Woods Press, 1975.
Hunt, James B. Restless Fires: Young John Muir’s Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf in 1867–68.
Muir, John A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, edited by William Frederic Bade, Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1916, reprinted 2019.
Wolfe, Linnie Marsh. Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir, U. of Wisconsin Press, 2003.
