Kim Heacox > Quotes

“We are not here to exist; we are here to live, to face death and stare it down. We are here to trust in God and to embrace this world in all its quiet and violent beauty, to break down the walls of our own prejudices and believe in something greater than ourselves. We are here to paddle into our worst fears and come out the other side to discover glaciers, to meet them face-to-face, and to celebrate a sense of wonder and God's plan that we find only in Nature.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How A Visionary And The Glaciers Of Alaska Changed America

“The last frontier is not Alaska, outer space, the oceans, or the wonders of technology. It’s open-mindedness. Honor the land and its first nation peoples, and their ability to acquire wisdom, sustenance, and happiness from the wild plants and animals around them. Learn through story. Sleep on the ground. Listen. Travel by kayak and canoe.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

“Keb would never forget how Gracie turned to the wall and trembled, how he felt nailed to the chair, thinking: we build a perfect picture of what we want our children to be. And when that picture falls and shatters, what do we do? His sister Dot once told him: we get on our hands and knees and put the pieces back together, and call it parenting.”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“Nature wasn't for us to rise above. It was for us to sink into; to sleep upon and go bootless, and in silent protest to walk the finest rugs and fanciest tile and leave our naked, muddy footprints as the signatures of new beginnings.”
― Kim Heacox

“Wilderness areas are places to explore deeply yet lightly; to exercise freedom but also restraint, to manage but also leave alone, to bring us face-to-face with a dilemma in our democracy. How do we convince people to save something they may never see, touch, or hear? A starving man can’t eat his illusions, let alone his principles.”
― Kim Heacox, Only Kayak: A Journey into the Heart of Alaska

“Among those who could read, books were prized possessions. Words on paper were powerful magic, seductive as music, sharp as a knife at times, or gentle as a kiss. Friendships and love affairs blossomed as men and women read to each other in summer meadows and winter kitchens. Pages were ambrosia in their hands. A new novel or collection of poems was something everybody talked about. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Bronte, Austen, Dickens, Keats, Emerson, Cooper, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Twain. To read these authors was to go on a grand adventure and see things as you never had before, see yourself as you never had before.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How A Visionary And The Glaciers Of Alaska Changed America

“The more we are removed from nature, the more we are denied our birthright to play in forests, climb mountains, follow streams, and fall in love with meadows, to become creative, self-actualized, deeply intuitive.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

“For Muir, Emerson and Thoreau were insufficiently wild; they thought from the head down, not feet up.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How A Visionary And The Glaciers Of Alaska Changed America

“In the wilderness you learn what’s authentic and what is not. To “boot up” means to put on your boots not turn on your computer. A mouse is still a mouse. Software is warm socks. The hard drive is your kayak. You sleep on the ground until you’re uncomfortable in a bed. You breath fresh air until you suffocate indoors. You laugh from your toes and fly in your dreams. You find that you can sing the high notes; that true wealth isn’t a matter of adding to your possessions but of subtracting from the sum of your desires.”
― Kim Heacox, The Only Kayak: A Journey Into The Heart Of Alaska

“You have to suffer and come out the other side, find compassion in the emptiness. Respond by not filling it up. It's no easy thing. It's not what we build, Uncle Austin used to say. It's what we leave alone that makes us who we are. Look around. We cannot improve this place. We can only honor it by receiving its bounty with wisdom and thanks.”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“Where was our language of reverence? Of sacredness? Every year in America we add hundreds of words to our dictionaries that describe our infatuation with pop culture and technology, but none that describe a deepening regard for the natural world.”
― Kim Heacox, Only Kayak: A Journey Into The Heart Of Alaska

“busy, as if hearing the command ‘Increase and multiply and replenish the earth.’” In so writing, Muir turned Genesis on its head, according to biographer Stephen Fox, “for in the Bible it ordered man to multiply and then ‘subdue’ the world to his own purposes, to establish ‘dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’” In Muir’s version, all natural organisms were to reproduce for their own purposes, not to serve man alone. “In his pantheism,” Fox wrote, Muir “sensed a corresponding affinity with their [Tlingit] religious ideas. Freed of Christianity’s human conceits, they prayed to nature gods and allowed nonhuman creatures—like Stickeen—into their heaven.”
― Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

“He'd visit his grandson and tell him Raven doesn't care about fame or fortune. Raven doesn't care about diplomas or degrees. Raven looks for scars, the signs of suffering that give a man his depth. Add this wound to the others no strangers see. Add it and move on because it's the only thing to do. There are two tragedies in life: Not getting what you want, and getting it. That's what he would tell his gifted, tormented grandson. After that, Old Keb Wisting would return to Alaska and walk into the woods and lie down and die.”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“Do you work a job that slowly kills you so you can afford health coverage to pay medical expenses? Or do you live right with the earth and make your own way, keep things simple, and take care of yourself?”
― Kim Heacox, Only Kayak: A Journey into the Heart of Alaska

“What would it have been like to live back then, when stories colored the world and even the sky listened?”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“Travel this country and you move through more than geography; you move through time.”
― Kim Heacox, The Only Kayak: A Journey Into The Heart Of Alaska

“Pull yourself together and land on your feet because it’s better than landing on your head.”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“Death is the general condition. Life is the exception: a beautiful, love-filled exception.”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“He had a lean and hungry look,”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“The greatest gift we can leave this world is the forest and the sea the way we found it, separate and the same, the oldest home of all, older and more beautiful than all the things industrious people pride themselves in building.”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“It takes a while to understand that there is something out there bigger than you, something greater than what you’ve designed for yourself.”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“The best thing Dr. Folsom taught me (though I didn’t realize it at the time) was not how to see nature but how to get along with people who see it differently. It is better to touch a heart than it is to teach a fact.”
― Kim Heacox, The Only Kayak: A Journey Into The Heart Of Alaska

“There are two tragedies in life: Not getting what you want, and getting”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“Live now. Every day with a friend is a gift. Nothing lasts forever. Even mountains wash to the sea. She”
― Kim Heacox, The Only Kayak: A Journey Into The Heart Of Alaska

“Long ago, travel was full of risk and hard work. The English noun travel was born from the word travail, which came (by way of France) from the Latin tripalium, meaning a three-staked instrument of torture. To travel was to struggle against steep odds and have no guarantees of success. It required a lot of planning and expense and great physical endurance. By the mid-1800s people began to travel for pleasure. They took tours and came to be known as “tourists.”
― Kim Heacox, The Only Kayak: A Journey Into The Heart Of Alaska

“God must have had a sense of humor to create us.”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“He kept thinking about Uncle Austin, how he taught him to build a fire in the rain, to sharpen a knife, to regard ten cords of wood as money in the bank, to read the wind and tides with intention, to catch a fish, to build a snare, to live off the land and sea and not just survive, but thrive; to know a thousand things with animal senses—to be smart, strong, sensual, alive, more alive than you’ll ever be indoors.”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“Maybe it’s not what we have that makes us who we are, it’s what we’re missing. A chromosome, a kidney, a sister, a feather, a bay.”
― Kim Heacox, Jimmy Bluefeather

“Every year in America we add hundreds of words to our dictionaries that describe our infatuation with pop culture and technology, but none that describe a deepening regard for the natural world.”
― Kim Heacox, The Only Kayak: A Journey Into The Heart Of Alaska

“Alaska’s governor Walter Hickel, a champion of development, builder of shopping malls, and proponent of wolf control, told NBC News, “You just can’t let nature run wild.”
― Kim Heacox, The Only Kayak: A Journey Into The Heart Of Alaska