‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks are…fountains of life.

Briskly venturing and roaming… sauntering in rosiny pinewoods or in gentian meadows, brushing through chaparral, bending down and parting sweet, flowery sprays; tracing rivers to their sources…This is fine and natural and full of promise.’

1901, John Muir
Our National Parks, Chapter 1

Front cover of John Muir’s 1901 book, ‘Our National Parks’, written to entice ‘…*the people to come and enjoy them, and get them into their hearts, that so at length their preservation and right use might be made sure*.’

Returning to nature, be it the rivers, forests, mountains, or the seas, has always been something important, if not essential, for my mental health.

This Easter holiday, my wife and I went to the back-country, up near the headwaters of the Snowy River (one of Australia’s iconic rivers). There was limited phone reception. There was no ‘signal’ for internet.

We had nothing to distract us, except our minds, and the ever present call of nature. We woke with the sun, relaxed to the sound of bird and deer, water and wind. We read. We wrote. We watched the stars, took photos, and talked, and swam, and hiked, and connected.

Sunrise, Easter Sunday, 2024
Looking over the Snowy River Valley

The pace of the life we live in cities is often artificially pressured, fast, and like Muir surmised in 1901, that pace leaves us (or me at least) ‘…tired, and nerve-shaken’.

The start of 2024, like the start of so many years, seemed to go by in an instant. And before I realised it, I’ve found the approach of the end of the financial year upon me, creating more opportunity for stress, and myself getting lost in the administrative needs of an entrepreneurial life, while trying to balance all I want to do for family, and personal growth.

Like so many others, I feel the need to connect closely with something greater than that. I yearn to rise again and experience the cycle of the sun and moon without alarms or obligations to wake me. I need the soothing effect of clean air and subtle breath of nature to fill my lungs with an equanimity. I needed to immerse myself, both metaphorically and literally, in the regenerative elements of nature.

‘…one has to climb to see the tallest of trees…’
Snowy River country
30 March, 2024

Swimming near the headwaters of the Snowy River was an experience that did just that. My skin felt ALIVE, and I felt refreshed. The cold mountain water was so clear we could see trout swimming by, and I yearned to follow the current’s course, those many miles it would travel to the sea.

Henry David Thoreau, another of my wilderness heroes, once said that ‘…he who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly dispair’. And I have to agree. Regardless of the stress in my life, when I return to the water, be it on the bank, or in a canoe, or plunging into its cold current, I can feel hope return. Rivers are made to flow. They continue onward, ever onward, like life. And while they may eddy and linger in the depth of the swimming holes, they continue and do not tarry long.

There is something humbling, and powerful about learning to feel that message directly.

“A brumby’s corral”
Snowy River Country
31 March 2024

The long weekend went by all too fast, and already I feel the pull of the chores, stresses, and obligations take me from the calm I felt in the mountain. If I’m not careful, I will let myself slip beneath the tasks of an ‘over-civilised’ life, and forget that I am not ‘domesticated’, but rather belong in connection with the grounding pace of life. That like the wild horses, the ‘brumbies’ of the Snowy River country, I have a wild freedom within me.

If I am skilful enough, I hope to help those in my life, and in my work, connect with their inner self too. I know that, like me, it will help them to thrive. It will, hopefully, help them to connect with the larger values for which makes life worth living. And while those, like Muir, and Thoreau, have gone before me, theirs is not my path. Their paths were full of insight, but like the track of the wild river trout, it leaves an impression for but a moment. To find your own path, you have to dive in. You have feel the pull yourself.

Only when you feel this current inside of you, and feel the fountains of life carry you forward… only then will you know the bravery to travel into the next stage of your development. Only then will you truly feel this thriving take hold.

Only then will you walk your own insightful path.

Fountains of life

How to hear what you need to hear

Form follows function