John Moriarty, was lecturer I encountered briefly, in 1967-68 at the University of Manitoba where he taught English literature and I was a humble but eager freshman student trying to soak up as much knowledge as I could.  It was an incredible experience being lifted from a small town to what I thought was the intellectual centre of the universe.

I have posted about him once in the past so this post is a bit repetitive because it has taken me a long time to meander back to it. That is how meandering works. Slowly.

After that year I never saw him again. I lost complete track of him. I didn’t know what he had done after that year. Did he return to Ireland? Did he get to teach at another Canadian or American university? I did not know.

Moriarty had been a beloved Professor by many students, even those, like me, who never took an actual course or class with him, but just heard him lecture a few times.

Since then, thanks to the Internet I have learned that Professor Moriarty died in 2007. Thankfully, some fans recorded a lecture he gave a couple of years before he died, and posted with it one photograph on YouTube. Listening to the talk brought me back to 1967. This was a remarkable experience.

I was astonished when I listened to it, that the good Professor had been absorbed with some of the same issues that have been tugging at me for years now, mainly around the subject of the necessity for a new attitude to nature and what indigenous people of North America can teach us about that. That was precisely his search. He said, at the end, it was a search for the Navajo Cradle.

I want to blog about some of the things he talked about in his lecture and add my own comments to them for what those comments are worth.

For me this has been an experience of delight. He called his lecture, learning to walk seeking to walk beautifully on the earth. What a great idea.

That epitomizes what I have beeb talking about more prosaically as  new attitude to nature.