Today my dear friend Jocelyn is coming to visit me in Asheville! (I’m loving all of my amazing visitors!) Last week when we were discussing our plans for our adventures here in my new hometown, she made an astonishing statement to me- she’s never really been hiking! Well, now I know how we’re going to be spending our day! This week’s Wanderlust Wednesday is dedicated to my dear friend, in hopes that these beautiful quotes about hiking and nature will inspire her to LOVE the outdoors- and especially these beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains!
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“Keep close to nature’s heart… And break clear away once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
-John Muir-
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“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson-
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“Something hidden. Go and find it.
Go and look behind the Ranges-
Something lost behind the Ranges.
Lost and waiting for you. Go!”
-Rudyard Kipling-
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“Real freedom lies in wilderness, not in civilization”
-Charles Lindberg-
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“Hiking- I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains- not hike! Do you know the origin of that word, ‘saunter’? It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middles Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la saint terre.” “To the Holy Land.” And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”
-John Muir-
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“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery- air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, This is what it is to be happy.'”
-Sylvia Plath-
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“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for mailed with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and desserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”
-Cheryl Strayed-
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“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.”
-Paul Theroux-
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