"When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, 

striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through 

space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, 

the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty"

                  from Travels in Alaska

                       by John Muir

" I reached Cold Mountain and all cares stopped

no idle thoughts remained in my head

nothing to do I write poems on rocks

and trust the current like an unmoored boat"

from the Collected Songs of Cold Mountain

" Is the soul solid, like iron?

Or is it tender and breakable, like

the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?"

from Some Questions You Might Ask

by Mary Oliver

" But in memory, the safe places never fall into themselves. They 

remain warmly lit by lantern. Burlap bags always full of potatoes, 

 damp wooden shelves jewelled with jars of preserves." 

from Winter Morning Walks, february 24

 by Ted Kooser

"Most people are on the world, not in it -- have no conscious 
sympathy or relationship to anything about them -- undiffused,

 separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone,

 touching but separate."

from John of the Mountains: 
The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

We were lucky enough to catch the glacier calving.

"As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing.

I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the

avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, 

and get as near the heart of the world as I can." 

                                                                                  Journals of John Muir

"Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into 

the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and 

baggage and chatter."

from Life and Letters of John Muir

I will be using some quotes from John Muir for a series of posts. This Sept. my wife, my mother-in-law and I took a cruise to Alaska. We saw the mountains and glaciers so beloved of John Muir and in Ketchikan my wife bought me two books, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire by Kim Heacox, and Alaska Days with John Muir by Samuel Hall Young. I had not realized that Muir visited Alaska and certainly not that his experiences there were so central to his work promoting  the formation of the US National Parks system.  Muir's writings about Alaska spurred a tourist rush to see the Alaskan glaciers even in his day and I can only image, given the quote above what he would have thought of the great progression of cruise ship/hotels that venture north every  summer to retrace his trips to the area that is now Glacier Bay National Park. I do wish I had done a little more research/reading before the trip, that might be the old librarian surfacing.

Things that struck me about the glaciers, how blue they were and the great black striations indicating that they are old enough to be geology rather than mere ice, 

and their size, the folks below are included for scale, the deck that are standing

on is five decks above water level,

for scale again, at the base of the glacier I saw want I assume are sea lions 

they were barely visible with my 100-400 mm lens.

Ice

Once you folded entire continents, oceans rose and fell, lived, died at your whim

you coughed up boulders big as houses, pulled vast sheets of rocks across

thousands of miles, as effortlessly as a child with a blankie.

No one stood against you not man, not mammoth not muskox well maybe muskox

but mostly you came out on top, your gallstones ground a world to stretch marks and 

your cousins rolled through space with a heedlessness that made dinosaurs tremble.

Now it's all downhill, you clutch little boys tongues, nip their noses, lurk

in the mouths of alleys to attack someone home from the shops with a bag of apples 

and today you tripped a small white dog in red boots who bumped his chin on the curb.

Despite a short lived triumph as the screaming eagle centrepiece in a buffet

your future is mostly ice hockey, curlers in loud sweaters, and bobbing 

around an unfriendly world in a gaudy pink drink with a paper umbrella.

So there!

by Me