Temple of All Nature

When the first staggering impacts of the Grand Canyon have been tempered with understanding it will no longer be devil or angel. The personal point of view offers no yardstick by which to measure it. You can't criticize it or change it. The balance of nature is there. The history of the earth is there; plant, animal, and mineral evolution are there, and nothing can be done about it. All you can do is take it in and try to understand it.... So let the Grand Canyon speak to you; listen with an open mind, long and attentively. Apart from what it yields of history, geology, ethnology, archaeology, paleontology, anthropology, and any and all other divisions of the classified knowledge of man, the Grand Canyon has something to say to you. —Edwin Corle from The Story of the Grand Canyon Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York

That one finds... will be what one takes the trouble to look for-the brilliant little flower springing improbably out of the bare, packed sand, the lizard scuttling with incredible speed from cactus clump to spiny bush, the sudden flash of a bright-colored bird. This dry world, all of which seems so strange to you, is normal to them. It is their paradise, their universe as-it-ought-to-be.... -Joseph Wood Krutch from Grand Canyon H. Wolff, New York

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all.... On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen...and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it a vast pulsing harmony-its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

By an unconquerable compulsion, given with life itself, we believe in the reality of the trees we see, the ground we walk upon.... We count upon enduring realities and are not usually put to shame. No matter how refined our skepticism grows, how far into infinity we pursue the constituent elements of our objects, how ethereal to the mind's eye the natural world becomes, we rely upon the enduring stuff of our environment, and we continue to be nourished and to be borne up.