If you read the contents of this space last week, you’ll remember my students and I were heading to the Rocky Mountains to learn about history, Indian mythology, themselves, and how to survive on the land.
Our mission was to live off the land in a primitive world that would hone our wits, where the forces of nature would trim us of emotional and physical fat. It would be a chance for self-discovery; my students would learn who they were — and who they were not.
Wilderness is a place; so we took our first steps into the wild. The spirituality of the mountains is made richer by the knowledge that the landscape has a human history going back 10,000 years. Ancient people traveled along the same paths. Human history gives the magic to the landscape. Time stops in these mountains and as we forage beneath the canopy of ancient cedar, our point of reference is the same for us as it was for the Anasazi, the ancient ones. I told my students, “Understand that, and you touch the enchantment in enchantment.”
