Koans for your Weekend Hike

This week I revisited one of my favorite sources for deep meditations for walking, Gary Snyder, and discovered these thoughts in his book of prose essays, The Practice of the Wild.

There’s no rush about calling things sacred. I think we should be patient, and give the land a lot of time to tell us or the people of the future. The cry of a Flicker, the funny urgent chatter of a Gray Squirrel, the acorn whack on a barn roof — are signs enough.

The wilderness pilgrim’s step-by-step breath-by-breath walk up a trail, into those snowfields, carrying all on the back, is so ancient a set of gestures as to bring a profound sense of body-mind joy.

Walk in a place of respite this week, whether its your own backyard, a city park, or the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and remember that (and here I have to quote Snyder again), “The best purpose of such studies and hikes is to be able to come back to the lowlands and see all the land about us, agricultural, suburban, urban, as part of the same territory — never totally ruined, never completely unnatural.”