Jan 6, 2022
Here are on this Walden Wednesday, we are celebrating National Bird Day by taking a few moments out of our day to slow the heart and mind down enough to truly listen, and absorb the thoughts, ideas, philosophies and writings of great thinkers, naturalists and lovers of Nature like Emerson, Whitman, Muir and Thoreau. And then, as always, we give you a little time at the end to just “Be”, in a natural environment, and settle into a deeper state of awareness as you go through your day, fully-awake, fully-present, alive and intentionally growing into becoming your best self.
Today we are visiting the writings of one of my heroes - naturalist, wildlife photographer, and Nature writer Enos Mills, who lived at the base of Longs Peak, one of the highest mountains in Colorado. Widely regarded as the “Father of Rocky Mountain National Park”, he worked and fought hard for the legislation that, in 1915, eventually won the preservation and protection the 415 square miles of paradise in the Colorado Rockies that now make up what is the 10th oldest, and now the 3rd most visited national park in the U.S.
This was all due to a “chance” meeting he had as a young man with the wizened old nature sage John Muir, who inspired and encouraged him to establish Rocky Mountain National Park, considered by many to be the “Crown Jewel” of the national park system.
Mills went on to not only take on Muir’s advice, but he wrote about the beautiful mountain wilderness of the area and its wildlife that he loved and treasured so much. It was said of him that he was a kind of evangelist of the wilderness, and that when he preached the gospel of the wilds, you were convinced of the sincerity of its divine invitation.
Today we will visit with Mills in a passage from his book, Wildlife on the Rockies, (one of my favorites), titled “Bob, and Some Other Birds”.
Something to consider as you listen, is Mills’s heart for educating people about the preservation of our precious wild lands. In fact he coined the term “Nature Guide” and is the founder of the nature interpretive program widely used by our rangers today.
So now, in honor of National Bird Day, I invite you to sit back and enjoy this passage from Wildlife on the Rockies, one of his 18 beloved nature books. I love how he poetically reveals to us the “brave pines”, and the eagles soaring in the “quiet bending blue” sky over the Rockies. May you be inspired by the beauty and intimate connection with birds and nature that Enos Mills so greatly treasured.