The Spring Mountains ECHO

THINK LIKE A MOUNTAIN

Love Nature More

By Bob Maichle

Homo Sapiens Sapiens is a social animal who seeks the company of his/her own kind. I have often mused on why I prefer escaping to the solitude of the mountain over the social interaction so inherent to our species.

There is a sentiment I've often read from the works of Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Henry Thoreau, Sigurd Olsen and others. This sentiment concludes that the writer doesn't appreciate humanity less, but nature more. I determined to locate the origin of this saying. These writers were well-read individuals who "appreciated books, friends, and nature" (That quote is another sentiment I must chase down).

I have concluded that this verse, written by George Gordon, Lord Byron sometime in the early 19^th century is the origin of that sentiment:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar:

I love not man the less, but Nature More.

To think like a mountain is to embrace the mountain and, amidst this place of wonderment and awe, gain understanding of our role and purpose in nature. When surrounded by the mountain, we can appreciate the order and complexity of life. It is when we view the world of nature, not from our own ethnocentric perspective, but as one interrelated piece of an intriguing and complex puzzle, that we begin to think like a mountain. Lord Byron put it well when he wrote:

I live not in myself, but I become

Portion of that around me: and to me

High mountains are a feeling, but the hum

Of human cities torture.

The Spring Mountains can provide glimpses of these patterns of life from the intricacies of the smallest belly-flower to the mighty elk and towering Ponderosa Pine. The mountain, observed where nature, not man is at the center of this world, can educate, inspire and provide a tranquility far removed from the "hum of human cities . . . "

To think like a mountain is to embrace the natural world and, not to appreciate humankind less, but to appreciate nature and the mountain more.