Why wander the forest or the ridge when you can just-as-easily venture down the sidewalk or head to a city park in your neighborhood? Why spend the energy of the prep for backpacking, when you can just drive to a pull-off on the Blue Ridge Parkway or stare downward from dizzying heights at an overlook into the Grand Canyon?
I think it was somewhere atop a spiny ridge in New Zealand, post-epic divorce, while solo backpacking Kepler that I asked myself this very question, why this? Why all the work to hike this loop in my birthday Month, under the blood red moon? Why all the effort to get to a foreign country to see this particular landscape, my only accompaniment my Osprey Arial pack and my Lowa Renegade boots?
And while there are perhaps a hundred reasons as to why, here, I’ll share but a few.
The head-clearing alone, made the trek worthy. In my case, the change in trajectory of my life, brought about by my divorce triggered a lot of anxious, head-spinning. During my divorce, I existed for a couple of years in a perpetual, chaotic state of fight or flight. And so to find myself greeted each day by the hypnotic sound of my traipsing feet along a Kiwi path induced a meditative state in me.
And then there were the clouds mimicking the ocean’s tide, distracting me from my woes, while they seemed to dance playfully with me along the ridge’s spine.
There is a simplicity to life while backpacking, where everything you need for a few days is strapped to you—no need to be bothered with what to wear, nor what to eat, nor where to sleep, nor whether or not to answer that unreachable cell phone. The ease of your daily cares being reduced to placing one foot in front of the other, each rhythmic step after the other, and just following the path has a way of calming the soul. And with a quieter head, your heart also begtins to untether itself from worry and you begin to listen to the language of the landscape.
And in this space of listening, the landscape begins to do its work on you. The trees begin to lean in and whisper healing. The birds begin to exert their sense of humor. The wind begins to conjure melodies as if playing the leaves like the keys of a piano. And perhaps there where the sounds of men have slipped far from your mind, you might encounter, the peace of wild things:
The Peace of Wild Things
by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
-Jenn