Nature can heal

“Nature can heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul.” John Muir

When one walks the Camino de Santiago, it takes roughly 5 weeks to walk the 500 miles across Spain. You walk through mountains (the first day is a steep and long climb over the Pyrenees mountains), forests, pastures, vineyards, agricultural lands and deserts. It is a deep and long immersion into the nature.

As I have mentioned before, people walk the Camino for a variety of reasons. I suspect that those that walk it, find they have been healed, and cheered and given strength in their body and soul, as John Muir so perfected stated.

Last week I went hiking with a new hiking group that went to Glacier Basin on the Sunrise side of Mt Rainier. It was an absolutely perfect summer day for a hike! Mt Rainier was absolutely breathtaking. It was just the medicine I needed at this time. You see, Terri and I have had some stress on our life the last month as we have been caring for a friend who is homeless. He stayed at our house for a few weeks and now is on the streets again. It has put a lot of stress on both of us and stretched our hearts and resources to help him the best we can. That is  why last weeks Mt Rainier hike was so helpful to me. It was the perfect medicine.

We are now at the height of summer, when many of us have vacation time to spend with family and some time together in nature. My hope is you also find some healing and cheer and strengthening of your body and soul.

Blessings and all good,

John

Photograph of the Week

Source of White River – Emmons Glacier

The White River on the east side of Mt Rainier comes from the Emmons Glacier, the largest glacier in the contiguous United States. This image captures the raw power and size of this great glacier.

Hiking Like A Two Year Old

When Terri and I were in the planning stage for walking the Camino de Santiago, we did an assessment on about how far we felt we could walk each day. We planned to go about 12 to 14 mile/day. We had a few days in there for some rest but we pretty much needed to stay on this pace of walking in order to get to the city of Santiago de Compostela and our airplane ride home on time. To maintain this pace of walking, we had to be headed out walking when the sun was coming up, then we tried to be settled in where we were going to spend the night by mid afternoon. The focus each day was really about getting your miles in and then getting refreshed in the afternoon/evening so we could begin again the next day.

I had a different kind of hiking experience recently. I call it “hiking like a two year old”. I was in Colorado for a conference and came in a day early so I could hike in Rocky Mountain National Park. I took off on this hike very early in the morning (similar to the Camino) but instead of focusing on getting the miles in, I channeled my “inner two year old”. Like a two year old, I hiked very slowly and my attention was totally immersed in the “inner beauty” of Rocky Mountain National Park. I ended up taking almost 8 hours to hike about 5 miles with many wonderful “off trail side trips” to a beautiful river that ran near the main trail. It was one of my favorite all time hikes.

Some of you might be familiar with the Bible story of the sisters, Martha and Mary, good friends of Jesus. When Mary is found sitting at Jesus’ feet and Martha is busy working making preparations for his stay at their house, Martha complains to Jesus that her sister has left her to do all the work and she wants Jesus to tell her to help.

I saw a parallel to how one hikes a trail. If one is walking slowly taking in the “inner beauty” of nature then we are most like Mary, sitting at Jesus’ feet listening intently to him. This is the type of hiking I find I love to do these days. I have spent a lot of years being a “Martha type hiker”, where it is all about getting in the miles and these day I am finding that my joy now is being the “Mary type hiker”! Hiking like a two year old!

Blessings and all good,

John

Photograph of the Week

Rocky Mountain National Park Inner Beauty

This image is two photographs merged together into one. I loved the wildflowers of the park and the wonderful boulder and rocks with their awesome textures and colors. For me, this is the inner beauty of Rocky Mountain National Park.