Backpacking with the Saints
Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the
world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary
spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest.
For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross,
Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he
walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he
encounters?Bell Mountain Wilderness with Søren Kierkegaard, Moonshine
Hollow with Thich Nhat Hanh?demonstrating how being alone in the wild
opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints'
writings reveal the divine in nature.
The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a
spiritual journey. Just as the trail offered revelations to the early
Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying
attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder.
Lane engages the practice not only with a wide range of spiritual
writings?Celtic, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi
Muslim?but with the fascination of other lovers of the backcountry, from
John Muir and Ed Abbey to Bill Plotkin and Cheryl Strayed. In this
intimate and down-to-earth narrative, backpacking is shown to be a
spiritual practice that allows the discovery of God amidst the beauty
and unexpected terrors of nature. Adoration, Lane suggests, is the most
appropriate human response to what we cannot explain, but have
nonetheless learned to love.
Backpacking with the Saints is an enchanting exploration of how
solitude, simplicity, and mindfulness are illuminated and encouraged by
the discipline of backcountry wandering, and of how the wilderness
itself becomes a way of knowing?an ecology of the soul.
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