I returned from a barefoot hike in Harriman State Park with the distinct impression that a black leopard was following me.
I shared this thought with Arif and Sabeen at a recent birthday party. Swirling the ice cubes in her limeade drink, Sabeen reminded me that her spirit animal is the chipmunk, while Arif’s is the sea otter, although she added he is very partial to their house cat. Continue reading “Black Leopard Padding through Tall Grass”
Nearly naked, I placed one foot onto the smooth rubber mat, my mind ringing with Edward Abbey’s war-cry, obey little, resist much! Abbey was the bestselling author who advocated for protecting wilderness from commercial exploitation, if necessary by sabotage (he called it “monkey-wrenching”).
Instantly the automatic door swept aside, and I entered the supermarket, the tiles slick and cool underfoot. I noticed the specials (two pints of blueberries for $5) and the surprise on the faces of some of my fellow-shoppers – evident in a subtle downward flicker of the eyes — as they confirmed that I’d violated an unwritten moral code. Honestly, people are mostly cool with it. But not always. Continue reading “Supermarket Hippie”
The 19th-century English art critic John Ruskin saw in mountains a story of endurance and destruction. All we can know about a mountain is that “it was once greater than it is now, and it only gathers vastness, and still gathers, as it fades into the abyss of the unknown.”
And so it is with people – we endure as long as we can, hoping to leave something behind.
This is my report on reaching 13,000 miles of barefoot walking, hiking, and running, after starting on this unexpected journey some ten years ago. Continue reading “13,000 Miles Barefoot”
I’ve set myself a daunting objective – bag 1,000 mountains barefoot — a task so large it will take many years to complete. It’s a crazy project — partly an effort to retreat from the digital environment, refresh, refuel, and rearm so I can reenter the fray — partly a chance to live more naturally, as a participator in nature instead of as a passive observer — partly a chance to explore and learn, and the funny thing is, the project keeps dragging in themes and thoughts about the rest of life, and snatches of history. Regardless, I’m not even at the half-way point, so better keep moving.
This summer I summited some big ones, including the Navajo’s sacred mountain of the west, Dooks’o’osliid AKA Humphrey Peak (12,633 feet) outside Flagstaff, Arizona, and Colorado’s Mt. Elbert (14,440 feet), the second-tallest peak in the continental US. It was slow work, though, with six summits eating up two weeks of precious vacation time, a rate of progress so slow I might well be 100 years old before I finish. Continue reading “Fourteen Peaks in the Taconics”
Guest post by Kate Shumeyko, who ran the SRT 70-miler in 25 hour 51 minutes, winning the women’s division, after two prior unsuccessful attempts. Of note, Kate is the only person to have won the coveted tomahawk first place award on three different occasions: in addition to this year’s 70-miler, she won the 30-miler division in 2019 and 2023.
Third time’s a charm- I finally finished the SRT 70 miler! I’m still wrapping my head around it, processing the success and also going over what I could still change for next time. I had 2 prior attempts – one DNF by choice in 2021 and one DNF by missing the cutoff time at checkpoint 4 in 2022- both at the 56 mile mark. I have also run the 30 miler twice. I’ve trained on the course and have run the whole distance in pieces but had yet to complete the full trail in one shot. I was nervous but also felt a sense of calm this round. I was excited and I was mentally ready. Continue reading “Kate Shumeyko’s 70-mile SRT Race Report”
In his noteworthy 2020 book, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, Scott Barry Kaufman builds upon the work of pioneering humanist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) to offer a 21st-century definition of “transcendence,” together with a review of scientific techniques for healing, growth, and self-actualization.
In a previous article,[i] I offered a quantitative definition of transcendence, yet one that was inspired by the 19th-century American Transcendentalist tradition, whose most famous authors include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and John Muir. Staring with a metaphor for transcendence, I suggested the act of climbing a mountain, crossing a range, reaching the other side. Although to be clear, “transcendence” is not a place you reach. It is not a target end-state. Better to think of it as a vector, consisting of a direction (“up”) and a distance (how far you can climb), except we’re interested in maximizing happiness, rather than elevation. The best way to maximize happiness, according to the American Transcendentalists, is to spend time in nature. This is because the Transcendentalists saw exposure to “wild” environments as necessary for developing spiritual power. Bear in mind the Transcendentalists were writing during the mid- to late-19th century, when America was rapidly industrializing and urbanizing, and the frontier was already starting to close. Continue reading “Transcend What?”
2 weeks out west. In search of connections. And peaks to bag, since I have a long way to go to reach my lifetime goal — 1,000 mountains barefoot. Continue reading “Peak-bagging in AZ and CO”
This piece is not typical of my blog — it was submitted as an entry at www.writersread.org
Out the window the sky looked like lead, and I thought we ought to hurry. So we wrapped up the meeting, excused ourselves, and dashed down the street, sprinting from the shelter of one awning to the next, harried by wind and sheets of water. At the restaurant, finally, we stripped off dripping coats, greeted colleagues, strolled past a display of fish sitting on banks of ice, flown in fresh from around the world, bright lights shining on open mouths and sightless eyes.
Once seated, the talk turned to business. Someone ordered a bottle, and before I could wave a hand, the waiter filled my glass.
Continue reading “Finding Truth in Wine (“In Vino Veritas”)”
A blue heron looked up from the slimy water and gave me a sly sideways look, just as the digits 11,999 started to roll. This was during a 1.6-mile barefoot stroll along the paved trails of Andrew Brown Park, Coppell, Texas. I’m kidding – I don’t actually carry an odometer. Rather I measure distances using a GPS watch and track my training (walking, hiking, running) in an excel spreadsheet with 16 tabs stored in the cloud. It’s only in the spreadsheet that I see the world in digits.
From Andrew Brown Park it was off to DFW and then there was the long flight back to New York and a dark drive home in the rain. The next morning, I emerged from boreal gloom onto the open summit of Wittenberg Mountain, where the southern view unfolds before your eyes as you step toward the edge of a flat sandstone ledge – nearly 100 miles of rolling green ridges, spring forests, hazy clouds — and it occurred to me that this, too, will end. Instead of counting up past 12,000, maybe I should be counting down from (X-12,000) to zero, where X is my total lifetime mileage. Only, I don’t know X. Not yet. But with each year it’s drawing closer. I can sense it, just like when parachuting at night, how the invisible horizon rises to greet you – that’s when you flex your knees and get ready to roll. Continue reading “12,000 Miles Barefoot”
How to Allocate Your Time, Avoid Burn-out, Boost Your Spiritual Power, and (Possibly) Make it to the Other Side
The word “transcend” is derived from the Latin “trans” (across) and “scandere” (to climb). In a sense, the word means to cross a mountain range. Like the scout William Lewis Manly, who found a route across the Panamint Mountains bordering Death Valley, made it to coastal California, and returned with food to save his comrades who were starving. This was in 1849.[1] Go back further in time, and it’s not hard to imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors staring at a mountain wall, wondering what they would discover on the other side. If they could find a route across.
Today we use the term, “self-transcendence,” in a more general sense, wondering if we could become tomorrow, in some way, better, stronger, happier, and more productive than we are today.
American Transcendentalism was a 19th century philosophical movement which included authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, John Burroughs, and John Muir, among others.
The central premise of Transcendentalist philosophy was that people could achieve self-transcendence by drawing spiritual power from nature. In this regard, the Transcendentalists were reacting to problems they perceived in 19th century America, where industrialization and urbanization were spreading rapidly, and the frontier was shrinking and would soon close. Among the clerks, mechanics, priests, professionals, and others who spent their days indoors, Thoreau remarked on what he perceived as “lives of quiet desperation.” Emerson railed against the conformity, timidity, anxiety, and toxic egotism he associated with conventional society. Whitman was blunt – writing under the pen name Mose Velsor, he warned that a sedentary indoors lifestyle devoted purely to mental work was “death.”
Fast forward to today. The Transcendentalists are still remembered, but the popular narrative has shifted. The new philosophy is Transhumanism – the hope that we will transcend our limitations through technology. Transhumanism culminates in the “Singularity” – the point at which humans and machines merge.
Exhibit 1: Search Trends Show Transhumanism Eclipsing Transcendentalism
Source: Google Trends
Continue reading “Transcend This! A Quantitative Interpretation of American Transcendentalism”
The Long Brown Path 