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This story about John Muir can be found in many sources, but my favorite is the one as told by Lee Stetson in his Evening with John Muir one-man stage production that I first saw in Yosemite Valley when I was 12 years old.

Carlos Castaneda, for those who don't know, was a cult-leader who passed off a fictional account of an apprenticeship with a "sorcerer" as fact. Originally published as a master's thesis at UCLA (ha!), The Teachings of Don Juan centered on peyote-induced hallucinations and captured the imaginations of the 1960s counterculture. But I still love this quote. Just goes to show that even charlatans can get it right sometimes … even if just by accident.