On Nature
Pt. 2 - The Majesty of Mountains and Sublimity of Stars
[Greetings, friends, from St. George, Utah! As a quick update on my upcoming book: I finished editing it, and the time has come to ship to my editor. It’s probably another two months from completion and release, but things are humming along, and we are on track to have the book out by December! I’m not exactly sure what it will look like yet, but I will figure out something special for those who read my Substack and want a copy… so if that’s you, let me know, and I’ll get your name on the list! :)
Anyway, as happens every time I am in Utah, the red mountains and clear skies move me in a special kind of way. Any attempt at describing the experience is an attempt to describe the indescribable. I firmly believe that most of our modern ails can be cured by Nature. In its presence, restless spirits are made still. As we draw nearer to the source of everything, we are lifted out of the petty problems of our individual experience and brought into the embrace of eternity.
I’ve written before about the beauties of Nature (see On Nature and On Beauty) but Utah requires another entry in the catalog. For me, Utah is where Heaven meets Earth, and time touches eternity. The landscape offers an experience of God in every corner. You can watch rosy-fingered dawn rise with a morning glow and feel His warmth, or hike a steep cliff and meet Him in the thin air. Whether your eyes or your feet go up the mountain, the invitation is to travel further up and further in.
What can be said of the mountains here can also be said of the stars: encounters with them are an encounter with God. One remarkable thing about St. George is that most roads don’t have street lights. This, combined with the clear night skies, makes for marvel in the evenings. Hundreds of stars hanging against a dark canvas pour light down on Earth and God into our hearts.
It is to these phenomena—the sublimity of stars and the majesty of mountains—that we devote the rest of today’s essay.]
I lift up my eyes to the mountains— where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.1
There are certain experiences that words and descriptions can never prepare us for. Many come while beholding the Wonders of Nature. The vast and deep sea, with its cascading waves. The brilliance of a billion burning stars piercing a dark night with their light. The towering mountains standing in majesty as Nature’s castles and cathedrals. The strength of an expanding oak as its branches reach upward. The roaring rivers and waterfalls rushing through Earth’s veins and rivulets. The familiar warmth of bathing in the beams of sunrise or soaking in the glow of a sunset.
Something in these things speaks to us. Deep calls to deep, divine to divine. Near mountains, oceans, and forests, we will feel nearer the depth of life itself, and a restless spirit finds peace… the Mother brings us to the Father.
[S]peak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.2
Nature lifts us out of our petty troubles and sorrows and puts us in the company of the divine and eternal—it puts us in a place of peace as if our unsettled soul recognizes home in a way that logic and reason are incapable. Why would it have this effect if it did not sing to us of home? If it did not echo of our origin, why would it stir a longing inside us?
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.3
Mountains and Stars: The Majestic and Sublime
Among the many ways we might meet the divine in Nature, two stand out: the majesty of mountains and the sublimity of stars. We start with the mountains.
Mountains, again, ‘seem to have been built for the human race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons for the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker glorious in holiness for the worshipper. And of these great cathedrals of the earth, with their gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars.’4
The very Earth seems to worship the Maker with its mountains—Nature’s castles, cathedrals, and temples. They stand like kings, stirring the king inside us to wake… the one that wants to climb steep cliffs, chase rivers, explore caves, and trade our walking sticks for swords. Among the mountains, we can’t help but feel we are standing in the strength of an author outside time… one who commands the stones to cry when all else is silent.
And then there are the stars and their sublimity (see On the Stars as a Guide). The Latin root of sublime, sublimis, means “uplifted, high, or exalted.” And that’s precisely how we feel in the presence of stars. The exalted exalt and the uplifted uplift. Standing under a sky full of stars, we can’t help but be filled with feelings of grandeur and magnanimity.
In the heavenly bodies we have before us ‘the perpetual presence of the sublime.’ They are so immense and so far away, and yet on soft summer nights ‘they seem leaning down to whisper in the ear of our souls.’ ‘A man can hardly lift up his eyes toward the heavens,’ says Seneca, ‘without wonder and veneration, to see so many millions of radiant lights, and to observe their courses and revolutions, even without any respect to the common good of the Universe.’
Who does not sympathize with the feelings of Dante as he rose from his visit to the lower regions, until, he says, ‘On our view the beautiful lights of heaven / Dawned through a circular opening in the cave, / Thence issuing, we again beheld the stars.’ As we watch the stars at night they seem so still and motionless that we can hardly realize that all the time they are rushing on with a veolicty far exceeding any that man has ever accomplished.5
In the face of these magnificent monuments of Nature, we can’t help but be moved by their surrender to their station and devotion to their duty. We can’t help but want to be that which we are. To be beautiful and without fear. To want nothing to be different and love our fate.
These are the only hours that are not wasted—these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance. To be beautiful and be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of Nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think of it.6
This is the medicine of Nature. It testifies to a state of being that does not rebel against what it was created to be. It is the lillies that neither toil nor spin and the mountains that do nothing but stand firm. It is the stars that shine without discrimination and resentment and the sun that rises every morning. There is a devotion in Nature that teaches us of an intelligence at work in the world. If only we would submit to it. In the words of Rilke:
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left [God].This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.7
So like children, we begin again, and like kings, we rise. The mountains are always calling. The winds are always whispering. The rivers are always roaring. The ocean is constantly rumbling. The trees are always talking. The stars are always singing. Nature is the medicine woman that wants to heal… the guide waiting to walk us back Home when we lose our way.
All we have to do is answer the invitation.
Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.8
P.S. Two of my favorite artists, C.S. Lewis and Dante, loved using mountains symbolically in their allegories. Dante, of course, used Mount Purgatory as the place where souls were purged as they climbed toward Paradise. C.S. Lewis uses a similar metaphor with his mountains in The Great Divorce. But perhaps my favorite line on mountains from their literature comes from Lewis’s Till We Have Faces:
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from … my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.9
As for star references in literature, Tolkien and Dante have some of my favorite lines… Dante makes stars the last word of every installment of the Divine Comedy (see On the Stars as a Guide), and Tolkien wrote this in the Return of the King:
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.10
—
P.P.S. I just returned from a day trip to Zion National Park, and the wonders there are overwhelming. The story goes that, in the late 1800s, Isaac Behunin looked at the grandeur of the canyon in the presence of friends and declared, “A man can worship God among these great cathedrals as well as he can in any man-made church; this is Zion.” It’s easy to see why Behunin thought Zion’s mountain landscape resembled a natural temple and named it what he did. The word Zion has roots in Hebrew ṣiyyôn (“castle”) and ṣiyya (“desert”) and carries in it the symbolic meaning of “highest point,” in reference to Jerusalem’s ancient citadel conquered by David.
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’11
Psalm 121:2.
Job 12:7-10.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.1.15-17.
Sir John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life (“The Pleasures of Life”), p. 254-255.
The Pleasures of Life, p. 257-258.
The Pleasures of Life, p. 242.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Rise Up Rooted Like Trees.
Psalm 90:2.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, p. 75.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, p. 901 (Chapter Title: The Land of Shadow).
Isaiah 52:7.