To me, every heart that beats is a spark from the breath of God. I believe that the warm and beating heart in the breast of a singing robin is as precious to the Creator of things as the heart of a man counting money. I believe that a vital spark exists in every blade of grass and in every leaf of the trees. It is the great law of existence that life must destroy in order to live, and when destruction is inevitable and necessary, it ceases to be a misdemeanor. But to let live, when it is not necessary to destroy, is a beautiful thing to consider.
Before men find a satisfying faith and peace, they must come to see their own littleness. They must discover that they are not alone in a partnership with God, but that all manifestation of life, whether in tree or flower or flesh and blood, is a spark loaned for a space by that Supreme Power toward which we all, in our individual ways, are groping. There is one teacher very close to us, as close to the poor as to the rich, to show us this littleness and make us understand. That teacher is nature – and, in my understanding of things, all nature is rest and peace. I believe that nature is the Great Doctor, and, if given the chance, can cure more ills and fill more empty souls than all the physicians and preachers of the earth. I have had people say to me that my creed is a beautiful one for a person as fortunately situated as myself, but that it is impossible for the great multitudes to go out and find nature as I have found it. To these people, I say that one need not make a two-thousand-mile trip along the Arctic coast and live with the Eskimo to find nature. After all, it is our nerves that kill us in the long run, our over-restless minds, our worrying, questing brains. And nature whispers its great peace to these things even in the rustling leaves of a corn field – if one will only get acquainted with that nature. And my desire – my ambition – the great goal I wish to achieve in my writings is to take my readers with me into the heart of this nature. I love it, and I feel that they must love it – if I can only get the two acquainted.
“Fine line of talk for a man whose home is filled from cellar to garret with mounted heads and furs,” I hear some of my good friends say.
Quite true, too. It is hard for one to confess oneself a murderer, and it is still harder to explain one’s regeneration. Yet, to be genuine, I must at least make the confession, though it is less the fact of murder than the fact of regeneration that I have the inclination to emphasize, now that I have the opportunity. There was a time when I took pride in the wideness and diversity of my killings. I was a destroyer of life. Now I am only glad that these killings ultimately brought me to a discovery which is the finest thing I have to contemplate through the rest of my existence.
In my home are twenty-seven guns, and all of them have been used. Many of the stocks are scarred with tiny notches whereby I kept track of my “kills.” With them, I have left red trails to Hudson’s Bay, to the Barren Lands, to the country of the Athabasca and the Great Bear, to the Arctic Ocean, to the Yukon and Alaska, and throughout British Columbia. This is not intended as a pæan of triumph. It is a fact which I wish had never existed. And yet it may be that my love of nature and the wild things, at the last, is greater because of those reckless years of killing. I am inclined to believe so. In my pantheistic heart, the mounted heads in my home are no longer crowned with the grandeur of trophies, but rather with the nobility of martyrs. I love them. I commune with them. I am no longer their enemy, and I warm myself with the belief that they know I am fighting for them now.
In this religion of the open, I have come to understand and gather peace from the whispering voices and even the silence of all God-loving things. I have learned to love trees, and there are times when I put my hands on them because I love them, and rest my head against them because they are comrades and their comradeship and their might give me courage. There is a gnarled old cripple of an oak in the yard of my Michigan home, a broken and twisted dwarf which many people have told me to destroy. But that tree and I have “talked over” many things together; it has pointed out to me how to stand up under adversity, has shown me how to put up a man’s fight. For, eaten to the heart, a deformity among its kind, each spring and summer saw it making its valiant struggle to “do its best.” It was then I became its friend, gave it a helping hand, stopped its decay and death, and each season now the old oak is stronger, and often I go out and sit with my back against it, and I hear and understand its voice, and I know that it is a great friend that will never do me wrong.
It is thus that this religion of mine finds its strength from the sources of great and unknown power. But before it comes in all its peace and joy, man must bring down his head from out of the clouds of egoism, and say, “The oak is as great as I – perhaps greater.”
Not long ago, it seemed to me that my world had gone dark and that it would never grow completely light again. In perhaps the darkest hour, I flung myself down upon the ground close to the bank of a stream. And then, close over my head – so close I could have tossed a pebble to it – a warbler near burst its little throat in song. And the miracle of it was that it was a dark and sunless day. But the warbler sang, and then he chirped in the boughs above; and when I looked at the ground beside me again, I saw there, peeping up at me out of the grass, a single violet. And the bird and the violet gave me more courage and cleared my world for me more than all the human friends who had told me they were sorry. The violet said, “I am still here; you will never lose me,” and the little warbler said, “I will always sing – through all the years you live.” And stronger than ever came the faith in me that these things were no more an accident of creation than man himself.
Once I saw this Great Doctor of mine a burning, vibrant force in a room of a crowded tenement, from the roof of which one could not see a blade of grass or a tree. In fact, that force filled three rooms, in which lived a man and woman and five children. I spent an hour in those rooms on a Sunday afternoon, and the experience of that hour in a hot and crowded tenement was a mightier sermon than was ever preached to me in the heart of a forest. At every window was a box in which green stuff was growing. There were flowers in pots. A pair of canary-birds looked down upon the smoky roofs of a great city and sang. What interested me most was two contrivances the man had made to force oats into swift germination and growth. In a week, he told me, the green sprout of an oat would be two inches long. Then I saw why they were grown. Several times while I was there would a dove come to a window and wait for a bit of the green. I could see they were different doves. They told me at least a dozen were accustomed to come in that way. They were the children’s pets. A little baby in arms cooed at them and waved his arms in delight. I have seen many poor tenement families, but that, I think, was the only happy one. The singing of the birds, the coming of the doves, the growing of green things in their room were their inspiration, their hope, the promise of dreams that would some day come true. Nature had become their religion, and yet they did not know it as such. It was calling them out into the great open spaces – and they were living in anticipation of that day when they would answer the call.
Because I have spent much of my time in adventuring in distant wildernesses, and exploring where other men have not gone, it has been accepted by many that my love for nature means a love for the distant and, for most people, the inaccessible wilds. It is true that in the vast and silent places one comes nearer, perhaps, to the deeper truths of life. Of the wild and its miracles I love to write, and when I come to that part of my story, I shall possibly be happiest. But I would be unfair to myself, and the religion of nature itself, if the great truth were not first emphasized that its treasures are to be possessed by mankind wherever one may turn – even in a prison cell. I was personally in touch with one remarkable instance of this in the Michigan State Penitentiary, at Jackson, where a canary-bird and a red geranium saved a man from madness and eventually gained him a pardon, sending him out into the world a living being with a new and better religion than he had ever dreamed of before.
But the open skies and the free air were intended from the beginning of things as the greatest gifts to man, and it is there, if one is sick in body or soul, that one should seek. Whether it is a mile or a thousand miles from a city makes little difference. For nature is the universal law. It is everywhere. It is neither mystery nor mysterious. Its pages are open; its life is vibrant with the desire to be understood. The one miracle is for man to bring himself down out of the clouds of his egoism and replace his passion for destruction with the desire to understand.
I have in mind a case in point.
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