Posted on by Kurt Bodling

no books in the woods

“If one takes anything to the woods to read, he seldom reads it; it does not taste good with such primitive air.”

Burroughs, John. “A Bed of Boughs” in “Locusts and Wild Honey” Volume 4 of The Writings of John Burroughs. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1907, p. 176.

Comment: I’ve read of new hikers taking along a weight of books and not reading them. One thinks one will have all the time in the world to read, but doesn’t reckon on being weary at the end of the day and still needing to collect water, prepare a meal, and so on. Burroughs, I think, was reaching back to something even more basic: that the idea of books clashes with the raw vibrancy of the woods. Maybe it was the idea of paper – the remnants of dead trees – up against the throbbing life of still standing trees.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

dosing with nature

“I need fire and earth and wind and waves as much as I need food. I’d go mad living in this wired-up, bricked-up, fenced-in concrete street if I didn’t dose myself with fire and weather and earth and sea. My soul would get pale and thin. I don’t want a pale, thin soul.”

Wilcock, Penelope. The Wounds of God. in The Hawk and the Dove Trilogy, Wheaton: Crossway, 2000, chapter 2, p. 174.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

primal urge to pilgrimage

“The ‘sacred journey’ has origins in prehistoric religious cultures and myths. Man instinctively regards himself as a wanderer and wayfarer, and it is second nature for him to go on pilgrimage in search of a privileged and holy place, a center and source of indefectible life. This hope is built into his psychology, and whether he acts it out or simply dreams it, his heart seeks to return to a mythical source, a place of ‘origin,’ the ‘home’ where the ancestors came from, the mountain where the ancient fathers were in direct communication with heaven, the place of the creation of the world, paradise itself, with its sacred tree of life.”

Merton, Thomas. “From Pilgrimage to Crusade.” (1964) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, p. 186.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

the non-walking world

“In a world so full of not-walking, it feels almost subversive to set out on foot. But the mind seems most keen and able to think its realest thoughts while walking, as though the two acts were tied up in some ancient, well-worn, unspoken routine. And even then it is possible to notice a difference in the texture of one’s thoughts depending on whether you are walking with our against the flow of nearby water, a phenomenon that can likely be replicated in crowded streets of people.”

Sanders, Ella Frances. “Vázzit” in her column ‘Root Catalog’ in Orion, vol 42, no. 1 (Spring 2023), p. 96.

Comment: some people think best while walking. Some people pray best while walking. And in our world, few people walk voluntarily, it seems.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

hold on for now

“You cannot imagine a new space fully until you have been taken there. I make this point strongly to help you understand why almost all spiritual teachers tell you to ‘believe’ or ‘trust’ or ‘hold on.’ They are not just telling you to believe silly or irrational things. They are telling you to hold on until you can go on the further journey for yourself, and they are telling you that the whole spiritual journey is, in fact, for real–which you cannot possibly know yet.”

Rohr, Richard. Falling Upward: a Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), page xxvii.

There were so, so many places along the Appalachian Trail which I’d read about for decades and had very clear pictures of in my mind that turned out–when I finally got there–to be nothing at all like I’d pictured them. The inner journey of the spiritual life has been surprising me like that. Heaven will no doubt turn out the same way.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

persisting in a community of contemplation

"Once a man has set foot on this way, there is no excuse for abandoning it, for to be actually on the way is to recognize without doubt or hesitation that only the way is fully real and that everything else is deception, except insofar as it may in some secret and hidden manner be connected with ‘the way.’

“Thus, far from wishing to abandon this way, the contemplative seeks only to travel farther and farther along it. This journey without maps leads him into rugged mountainous country where there are often mists and storms and where he is more and more alone. Yet at the same time, ascending the slopes in darkness, feeling more and more keenly his own emptiness, and with the winter wind blowing cruelly through his now tattered garments, he meets at times other travelers on the way, poor pilgrims as he is, and as solitary as he, belonging perhaps to other lands and other traditions. There are of course great differences between them, and yet they have much in common. Indeed, the Western contemplative can say that he feels himself much closer to the Zen monks of ancient Japan than to the busy and impatient men of the West, of his own country, who think in terms of money, power, publicity, machines, business, political advantage, military strategy–who seek, in a word, the triumphant affirmation of their own will, their own power, considered as the end for which they exist. Is not this perhaps the most foolish of all dreams, the most tenacious and damaging of illusions?”

Merton, Thomas. “The Contemplative Life in the Modern World.” (1965) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, p. 228.

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adjusting to silence and solitude

Note:
It can take some time to adjust to being in solitude and silence, just as this writer describes the adjustment period a backpacker or camper needs to break away from the tyranny of the hectic city life. This adjustment period really could argue against taking short silent retreats, only a weekend long or so. It will probably take that long just to settle down and start to empty all the accumulated noise out of your head.

Quote:
“The thoughts that run in people’s heads about being late for work and what to have for dinner and what’s on TV that night, those go away in about four days to two weeks of being in the wilderness,” Douglas said. “Then you develop a more intuitive and emotional communication in your head. You eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, and you’re mindful of weather changes.”

Source: The Bangor Daily News, 10 April 2013, an article titled “‘Hermit’ burglar compound littered with batteries, ‘tons and tons’ of propane tanks.” I no longer have the author’s name, but the person quoted here was Michael Douglas, adult programs director at Maine Primitive Skills School based in Augusta, Maine.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

From hope deferred to a tree of life

I am here to confirm the truth of Proverbs 13:12 “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”

Just 5 months ago I was on my way home from Mount Katahdin, Maine, a place I had wanted to be for more than 50 years. Climbing Katahdin was the goal of a long-deferred hope of mine: to hike the Appalachian Trail. I felt that my time this past summer, my months on the Trail, was a personally holy time; that the hike was a pilgrimage taking me to “a tree of life.”

A pilgrimage is usually a long trek to a religious or spiritual shrine of some sort. Katahdin, if it is that for some (it is held sacred by the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot nations), is not a Christian shrine in the usual sense. It commemorates no saint or martyr, has no church or monument, witnessed no miracle or event in the life of the Church.

For me, this pilgrimage was first of all just a part of my ‘pilgrimage through life’ on my eventual way to heaven. But it was also a pilgrimage within. I spent a lot of time in prayer, reading Scripture, and re-reading the Christian spiritual classics “The Imitation of Christ” and “The Practice of the Presence of God.”

So maybe my time was more of a walking retreat? It doesn’t matter.

Near the end of my time on the Trail another hiker excitedly asked me “So, what’s next?” He had in mind other treks, trips, and experiences, and was happy to share with me where he was headed after he finished the Appalachian Trail. What I replied was something like, “Well, I want to do some reading.”

And my last 5 months have included a lot of reading. A variety of things. Short stories by Flannery O’Connor, and by Leo Tolstoy; silliness by Jasper Fforde and by Douglas Adams; more of the Eastern Orthodox collection of spiritual texts called the ‘Philokalia’; some of Evelyn Underhill’s classic ‘Mysticism’; a Charles Dickens; some William Faulkner; and more. All tied together only by the fact that I had never read those works before. And if that is my selection criterion, I have a long way to go.

This leads by a winding path to something I’ve been thinking about since I got back from Katahdin: There are already way too many words floating around out here.

There are already words in books, words in articles, words in blog posts, words in conversations, words in arguments, words on the Internet, words on paper, words in broadcasts and podcasts, and more. Some days it seems that everybody is either talking or typing, and that almost everybody is publishing in some form or another. All of greatly varying quality.

And now I have just added more and published more. Mea culpa.

I actually feel like there is nothing I can say or write that is either new or interesting or of great quality.

So this blog, for now, will just let people peer into my commonplace book. I’ve already been doing that sporadically. Now I want to be more regular about it, to copy out notes from things I have been reading, and to offer my brief comments (so, yes, sorry, I will be adding yet more words to the world).

If there’s one thing I learned during my career in libraries, it is that there really are “too many books, too little time” because “of the making of books there is no end” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). At best, these notes will lead you to find and read the full texts from which the snippets come. Do read some of those old texts. They’re better anyway.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

Spring[er] Fever

From a modern English translation of lines 1-14 of the General Prologue of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)-
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.

An Appalachian Trail hike isn’t a pilgrimage, not in the sense Chaucer was waiting about, and not in the sense of the Camino . But it can be a spiritual experience. There’s lots of time for prayer, silence, and solitude. There’s time and opportunity for growth.

And a lot of people start their hikes in April. I started on 30 March, and there were already over 2,115 people who has started before me. That’s more than twice as many who has started by this time last year.

I’m trying to be ready for engagement as well as solitude.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

Privilege of Pandemic Hiking

An article by Grayson Haver Currin that showed up yesterday on the “Outside” magazine web site talks about the important topic of the privilege of pandemic hiking. And, although I only uploaded my previous hiking post at the beginning of the week, I wanted to toss this out there for you to see.

Currin writes about the first two people known to have finished thru-hikes on the Appalachian Trail this year. Like so many other things during this pandemic year, the count of hikers will take a hit in 2020. These two hikers, though, will be part of the final tally.

So far, no big deal. Someone has to be first each year. But the author makes very clear that these hikers pushed through to the end illegally. They walked through parks and forests that the authorities had closed. They did not follow stay-at-home orders in the states they walked through. And they intentionally avoided or disregarded law enforcement officers along the way. These two hikers happen to be young white males. Therein lies the privilege.

Currin tells us that “the pandemic and concurrent protests over racial injustice are timely reminders of entrenched patterns in the thru-hiking community—it remains, overwhelmingly, the domain of educated white men.”

These hikers’ “decision to press on along the Appalachian Trail highlights questions of privilege and pride that have long plagued the outdoor industry. “By hiking now, you have created a narrative that says, ‘My personal needs and desires outweigh a greater societal mission. At the end of the day, what’s really important is what I want,’” says Sandi Marra, the ATC’s president and CEO.”

So, yeah, these two guys spent 4 months walking the 2,000+ miles in 14 states that constitute the Trail. But even out in the woods some things are exactly like they are in the city.

Here’s the article: “The Thru-Hikers Who Finished the AT During the Pandemic“