"These poems spring from moments awake to that Life, comprising a partial testament to decades spent in love with wildness. The poems hint at a way of perceiving the world born of felt connection that many mountaineers discover, in which the senses awaken a more essential knowing, the keenly perceived blessings of creatures, elements, original presences, and something indefinably sacred that flows through it all.
Our old ancestors lived in intimate connection with the wild, and children have an old instinctive, insatiable curiosity, a wonder for animals, a delight in water, and not long ago grew up roaming woods and streams, or wild tracts. Even after leaving the land and the farms, many people still tended flower and vegetable gardens. Our world these days is increasingly cramped, digital, media-driven, virtual, unrelentingly stimulating and stressful for young and old alike. We forget about nature as a part of ourselves and we lose something essential to our humanity.
Garth Gilchrist grew up roaming the woods and mountains of western Washington and California's Sierra, increasingly amazed by the beauty of wildness. His undergraduate work at Lewis and Clark College included study with American poet William Stafford, and continued at The Evergreen State College with studies in oral tradition and conservation writing. At Holy Names College he took a masters in Culture and Spirituality.
Garth toured the country and the world as an environmental educator, performing storyteller, poet, writer and conference presenter for decades. His message is nature's power to wake us up to a deeper, more vital experience of life around us and within us, and to the healing experience of the sacred. He worked closely with visionary nature educator Joseph Cornell for many years.
His storytelling repertoire spans folk, literary, personal adventure and original tales and is represented in several award-winning collections of recorded stories. He is best known for his moving portrayals of John Muir, the Scottish American naturalist. "