Ever heard of the poet Robinson Jeffers?  If you grew up in California, you may have. Otherwise, probably not.  Jeffers spent the best years of his life living in a house set on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean near Big Sur, a singularly spectacular and culturally evocative piece of wilderness a couple of hours south of San Francisco.  As Jeffers contemplated the might and power and wonder of the ocean constantly crashing on the rocks below his home, he wrote poetry.  He wrote about love, he wrote about nature.  He wrote about solitude, and he wrote about what we ought to see.
     What, according to Jeffers, ought we to see most clearly?  That we should love the natural world, the beauty and allure of wild places and not, as he said in one of his most memorable phrases, "man apart."  We should not love our fellow human being only.  We should love the universe as well.
     Elsewhere in his poetry, Robinson seemed almost to reject the worth of humanity, to say that he would rather not live among human beings, but with the impersonal joy of the wilderness.  Although I love being alone in the wilderness, too, I don't know that I could love it only.  And I do not say this just because I like being with people.  I also say it because if wilderness is impersonal, I don't know what I, as a personal being, could really find in it, except that there exists an unbridgeable gap between me and the reality in which I move and live each day.  And then what would I do?
     The wilderness speaks to us because it is personal, made by a personal God for us, personal beings in a personal universe.
     The world is on our side.