On my eighth birthday my social worker, Joellen, picked me up, and we walked a wooded Seattle path along the shore of the Salish Sea, and she told me how lucky I am to carry the honor of this name: Muir, a Scottish naturalist, father of our national parks, a guy who slept outside nearly all his life. We sat beside the water, and I unwrapped her gift to me: not a toy or the glitter hair barrettes I’d secretly hoped for.

The Wilderness World of John Muir. A weighty, hardback anthology of Muir’s best writing about nature, curated by another naturalist, Edwin Way Teale, who arranged the essays in a way that makes them also a biography of Muir’s life.

I mean…birthday dream of eight-year-old girls everywhere.

The transcendental nature and half the vocabulary of the book were beyond me, of course, because third grade, but Joellen has, all my life, been more about what I need than what I think I want. I skipped rocks, and she told me Muir’s story like it was mine, his days a timeline of my own.

“Muir’s whole life was about protecting the natural world because nature is vulnerable; it can’t defend itself against people. ‘Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away.’ ”

I nodded.

She read a passage to me, and marked it so I could find it again:

Standing alone on the mountain-top it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make—leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone—we all dwell in a house of one room—the world with the firmament for its roof—and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.

“All living things, we are one family,” she said, “together in one home, sleeping beneath the same stars.”

With my pinkie finger I petted the illustrated black bears hiding in the forest trees on the cover. I did not know then what first edition meant. Joellen put her hand on my head and made me look up at her.

“Muiriel. Do you understand?”

Not that day. But Joellen planted the seed of Muir’s wisdom that grew into the truth that comforts me now: he lived nearly all his life more at home outside than in, and I understand why. Every house I live in smells different; the rules and beds and people are never the same. But one walk outside and I am always home, beneath the same sky. Alone is not lonely. Nothing to miss, nothing and no one to wish or search for. John Muir set me free.