Can the center hold

Give us a person with common sense, who is "always happy at the center," like John Muir. Muir calls for moderation when as he writes: "Kill as few of your fellow beings as possible and pursue some branch of natural history at least far enough to see Nature’s harmony." Ever the optimist, Muir preached preserving wildness because it creates mental stimulation learning the ways of nature which is necessary and useful. "There is love of nature in everybody," Muir believed. "In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh,, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness." His was a long life lived, according to his 2008 biographer, Donald Worster, to "bag a few more bracing, aurora-filled nights." Worster also tells us that Muir exhorted each person to "bend with the trees in the wild. Plunge into whitewater rapids like the cheerful little ouzel. Observe the chattering confidence of squirrels that they will survive." On this gusty, bitter cold December day, my sympathies lie with the trees straining, the birds swooping to feed on seeds and my resident squirrels taking advantage of free meals.

Wackiness did not become Muir. He avoided the current curses of isms - atheism, vegetarianism, socialism, liberalism, materialism, progressivism, fundamentalism, hedonism, consumerism and environmentalism. Yet he skirts Transendentalism when he writes profoudly:

A multitude of still, small voices may be heard directing you to look through all this transient, shifting show of things called "substantial" into the truly substantial, spiritual world whose forms flesh and wood, rock and water, air and sunshine, only veil and conceal, and to learn that here is heaven and the dwelling-place of the angels.

Yes a little dab of Muir would do nicely nowadays to help the center hold.