Meditations of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Into the Green Future

Chris Highland is an interspiritual chaplain, author, songwriter, and poet. He completed his undergraduate studies in religion and philosophy in Seattle, Washington, before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area to complete his master’s degree. A passionate saunterer, he enjoys an intimate relation with Nature in forests, mountains, and waterfalls. An avowed heretic (“one who seeks new paths”), Chris’s writing reflects his exploration of the edges of human society and his playful search for what Emerson called “high, clear, and spiritual conversation,” to be had by each and every one of us as “beggars on the highway.” Chris is the author of Meditations of John Muir: Nature’s Temple, Meditations of Henry David Thoreau: A Light in the Woods, and Meditations of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Into the Green Future, all from Wilderness Press.

Worship

Through all its kingdoms, to the suburbs and outskirts of things, [Nature] is faithful to the cause whence it had its origin. It always speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is a perpetual effect. It is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us.

The aspect of Nature is devout. Like the figure of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest man is the one who learns from nature the lesson of worship.

Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, he that thinks most, will say least. We can foresee God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant phenomena of matter; but when we try to define and describe himself, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages. That essence refuses to be recorded in propositions, but when man has worshipped him intellectually, the noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God….

Therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power.

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“You might step on a stone and it would be a more pious act.”
―Meister Eckhart in Classics of Western Spirituality