Spiritual aspects of wilderness

[Keith Fultz]

As a Christian and a minister I go to the mountains for two primary reasons.

First, I love the whole experience of backpacking. It restores my soul. The trees, the water, the hiking, the weather (good or bad) the views, the isolation and the socialization all nurture my heart and soul and help me to be aware more of the closeness of God for me.

Second, although I love to go solo, I also love taking young people to the mountains/wilderness to experience themselves, God and each other in a different way.

I have read Ashley Denton's CHRISTIAN OUTDOOR LEADERSHIP. I have found it most helpful from a theological and practical perspective. I am wondering what thoughts and resources other folks here might suggest.

for instance; What, how and why did you have a spiritual experience backpacking?
What kind of encounter or experience are you seeking or expecting?
How important do you find this spiritual experience in your life?
What kinds of disciplines do you practice on the trail?

I take a Kindle and read both scripture and A. W. Tozer.
I try to memorize a small portion of scripture and pray through it for myself and others.
I silently sing worship songs that aid my hiking. "Every breath I take, I take in you Jesus, Every step I take I take in you," seems to pop up involuntarily.

Just wondering about you?

[BlackHatGuy]

Not sure if by spiritual songs you mean only hymns, but songs to sing silently that I think could fit well with hiking are some by Keith Green, especially Rushing Wind, Make My Life a Prayer to You, Create In Me a Clean Heart, Oh Lord, You're Beautiful and There is a Redeemer. All are fairly 'slow' songs, almost hymn-like. I'll Never Let Go of Your Hand by Don Francisco would work well too.

[Katherine .]

In terms of how I spend my time, backpacking has mostly supplanted what I would otherwise be doing to engage on a spiritual level (meditation retreats).

random thoughts:

in the vastness of nature, i feel small in a good way. my ego is not so paramount.

the largeness and beauty and quite time to observe makes me feel more connected…to something

the more adverse parts challenge my strengths and whatever supports that.

the act of walking/hiking is in itself meditative

lightweight packing jibes with a "just enough" mind frame

I feel like I'm truly alive and doing one of the things I want to do with my life when I'm hiking or backpacking.

[Keith Fultz]

lightweight packing jibes with a "just enough" mind frame

That is one of the main things that I value also.
Learning to live and thrive with as minimal as possible.
Well, I could go with less weight, but at 65, the pillow has value to me.
but it makes it all the more appreciated.

Thanks for reminding me of that thought

[Diane “Piper” Soini]

I really got started with backpacking mostly through my church youth groups as a kid. Backpacking was pretty popular back in the 70s. We'd usually have at least one guitar and sing some popular songs. I think we had a Christian version of Take it Easy or something.

We had this one youth group leader who always got us lost. Our hike to Piedra Blanca took the entire day but should have been only about 3 miles. I have no idea to this day where he went wrong with that one. He got us lost on Donahue Pass (no snow) and we had to pick our way over scary creaking boulders for hours until we found the trail again. Having gone back later I wonder how on earth you can get lost at all on Donahue Pass. Even so, it was a highlight trip of my young life.

On that trip over Donahue Pass, on our first night we got out our Bibles at Shadow Lake to do Bible study after dinner. We sat there on the shore. The water looked so inviting. We closed those Bibles, went skinny dipping and never once opened them again. We hiked into Yosemite Valley and were approached by drug dealers in the valley. "Do you get high?" We answered, "Yes! 11,056 feet!"

[Todd T]

It's really hard to put it all into words, but I find it easy to pray as I hike, especially solo. The beauty, complexity, largeness, etc., put me and everything else in perspective. I have to believe there's something of God's nature in Nature. As Paul put it, we see both his power and divine nature.

[Gordon Gray]

Although I am not religious in anyway, I am spiritual and agree with your first 2 paragraphs, Keith (quoted below).

"First, I love the whole experience of backpacking. It restores my soul. The trees, the water, the hiking, the weather (good or bad) the views, the isolation and the socialization all nurture my heart and soul and help me to be aware more of the closeness of God for me.

Second, although I love to go solo, I also love taking young people to the mountains/wilderness to experience themselves, God and each other in a different way."

[Matt Dirksen]

"What, how and why did you have a spiritual experience backpacking?
What kind of encounter or experience are you seeking or expecting?
How important do you find this spiritual experience in your life?
What kinds of disciplines do you practice on the trail?"

Thank you for asking, friend.

As far back as I can remember, I always felt a strong resonance with being outside, as if I were being gifted the opportunity for a "Sacred re-alignment" with what my life was actually about. An golden opportunity to "seek out my original instructions", as some might say.

For a long time in my youth, backpacking was a means to an end, a way to get to a destination – far off in my imagination. It took years and about 1000 miles before I realized it was never truly about the destination, but about the Way I took. Ultimately, the destination was always within myself, and had been with me all along.

For the past 20+ years, I have meandered along a deeply meaningful and spiritual path, which I refrain from specifically writing about it here and now. I will say that my "OS" (aka spiritual belief system) is deeply woven with the natural world around us humans, so being in the presence of all my relatives out there in the woods is a very good thing for my soul.

As far as disciplines on the trail? I dunno, I usually ask the rocks and trees first. Don't want to do stuff without their permission first.

[Marko Botsaris]

It is very interesting the variety of spiritual lesson people take depending on the context they bring with them. The spiritual experience I take from longish solo trips is something sort of like what K was saying. It is diminishment of the self, and diminishment of other categories, including the ones from organized religion – or the experience of being a small connected part of a much larger whole. So much of conventional religion (let alone society) feels to me like the part of humankind seeking/needing to deny this. OK, so that is basically the whole human condition since we stopped being nomadic hunters, but is is nice to take a (partial) trip back toward that sort of mindset devoid of categories and their associations.

I don't know how many other people will relate to this, but I find the older I get the closer I relate to Spinoza's conclusion that while we may love God/It, and even have an ethical duty to do so, God/It can neither love nor hate us back. It is way too big for that, and sometime I feel like for short times out there I can let go of those categories without any existential angst – not an easy trick. Solo backpacking away from people is where I can sometimes experience this "Truth" the most directly. My favorite quote about this feeling is the famous one from Ed Abbey: "I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which he naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives intact, individual, separate."

After all these years that feeling still come back after enough time out there, alone, and it is the main reason I go – a crutch for someone who has difficulty latching onto that experience back in civilization. I often enjoy the easy refreshment, restoration and aesthetic pleasure (more categories), but the "hard and brutal mysticism" has more value, insofar as I can occasional catch a brief glimpse of it.

[Tipi Walter]

It's no wonder we like to be outdoors as we lived permanently outdoors for most of our 3 million year primate history. Now when I go out backpacking I just call it Getting Back to my Neanderthal roots. It's in all of us.

And for those of us who spend a lot of time outside on the North American continent, we can't help but relate to the native American spirituality which fed this land for 20,000 years. How did they relate to the land? What ceremonies were important to the pertinent tribes in our locale? What can the remaining traditional elders teach us?

Matthew King, a Lakota Sioux elder and close friend to holy man Frank Fools Crow, once said: God is Nature, Nature is God. Sums it up for me.

Man's creations are a dim reflection of Nature—and yet we surround ourselves with man and his clever trinkets until we grow so bored and jaded that we need Reality—the reality of wilderness.

[Richard May]

"Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees.”

― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

The full text can be read and downloaded for free:

http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html

and in various ereader formats here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1022

For me it's to touch upon this Wildness Thoreau writes about. Not Wildness as in "go nuts and be wild" but Wildness as in a free state that is both open to possibility and unbound by regimens of society―a condition where new ideas are seeded and creativity starts. In that regard it is to get in touch with the Creation itself that is part of us and expressed in each act of beauty and kindness we are part of.

[Anonymous]

Fairly similar to the sentiments that Matt D. expressed earlier. Have always enjoyed and benefited from being in nature, and as a child spent a lot of time out in relative nature. Felt a lot more peaceful and connected then.

Basically, i get a kind of combo recharge and re-centering effect from being out in nature.

I don't crave/need it as much as when i was a child, as i've found that a combo of deep meditation and prayer has a similar effect on me, and sometimes much more deeply/intensely so than the former. But i still very much enjoy and benefit from it when i can get out there.

[Author]

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