Enlightenment comes from looking at the wilderness, the creation, with eyes of awe. It is a change in perspective. Wilderness is not an enemy to be conquered, but a gift to be loved. Art [Moffatt] understood enlightenment as a “gestalt shift” in which the World is viewed differently.

What I learned from Art is that God, if there is a God, is not an object so much as a relationship — the reconciliation of all things to all things. When I feel reconciled to God, I feel awe for the gift of creation, I feel love for my fellow creatures, and I feel peace within myself. This is the gift Art shared with us.

We are very reasonable creatures, but to feel the grace of God, one must forget about reason and go on a pilgrimage to a place where we no longer “see as through a glass darkly,” to a place where we are able to see the death of a caribou or a chicken with eyes of gratitude, rather than with eyes of conquest. Art had taken us on a pilgrimage to that holy place, the Garden of Eden which resides within our souls.

Jesus had spent forty days in the Wilderness, Saint Anthony a lifetime; but for us, seeing the world from a different perspective had taken about three months. It had not been until our second forty days that we had begun to feel grateful instead of angry.

Gratitude came first in the form of appreciation for small favors, small favors which we now understood to be not so small: the gift of rain, the gift of the sun, the gift of the life of a caribou which had died for us. . . . With the growing sense of gratitude came a growing sense of love:
love for the creation, love for one another, and love for the grace of God which made us feel so peaceful.

- George Grinnell from Death on the Barrens 

In 1955, George Grinnell and four other young men embarked on a three-month canoe trip in Canada’s Barrens led by Art Moffatt, through territory that was then largely unmapped. They ran out of food, got caught in cold weather, and Moffatt died of hypothermia when the group inadvertently went over a waterfall. 

Back in the days when Heron Dance published the work of other authors, we published George’s wonderful book. It is still in print and offered on Amazon. Twenty or so years ago, George gave a presentation at the Wilderness Canoe Symposium in Toronto, Canada and held the audience spellbound as he recounted the transformation of his life and that of the other young men lives by their journey in the Canadian Arctic as winter approached.

. . .

I’m working on an updated edition of our top-selling book, now sold out, The Heron Dance Book Of Love And Gratitude. The excerpt above was in the earlier edition and will be in the new, the tentative title of which is:

Meditations on Gratitude:
The Beauty And Mystery of Life