At the end of a day of intensive outdoor training in the foothills of the Angeles National Forest, someone once asked, “Don’t you ever go to the mountains just for fun?” I had to stop and think for a moment.
“Perhaps my difficulty is with the word ‘fun,’” I finally responded. “To me, fun implies frivolity and something not to be taken seriously, so I rarely go to the mountains for that kind of fun. I enjoy studying nature, expanding my ability to see the unseen and developing new skills. These serious pursuits are my idea of fun, since they help me to stretch my limits and find meaning in a world that sometimes seems to have none. So when I go to the mountains it’s for spiritual nourishment.” She nodded and we said our goodbyes, but her question has stuck with me.
People spend billions of dollars talking to psychologists, attending self-improvement seminars and seeking out various “masters” who suggest they know “the way.” The reason for our occasionally desperate search for answers is that our consumer culture is removed from raw nature. As a result, we have lost touch with our inherent spiritual nature.
Living in houses and apartments connected by concrete, we have lost a healing and a grounding that people closer to the earth take for granted.
Some prophets of the wilderness suggest that if we all went back to the wilderness, the world would be a better place, but I don’t believe closer contact with nature automatically imparts a greater spiritual wakefulness. People who are lazy, sloppy, wasteful and unaware in their urban environment will practice those same bad habits in the wilderness.
The real unexplored wilderness we need to investigate is within our own minds, and in general, two things are required in order to find and explore that inner wilderness. One is a guide—someone (usually a person who has already traveled the path) or something to point the way. The other is to get away from human patterns and paradigms so you can rediscover your own natural rhythm and listen, see and think in your own unique way.
The mountains have the ability to re-awaken and revitalize our inner spiritual essence that is usually assaulted non-stop in the urban wilderness. The mountains serve as a silent “master.”
Thinking back 45 to 50 years when I began my treks to the mountains, sometimes I did go just for fun, for something to do or for exercise. My buddies and I walked into the hills and explored many trails, caves and old abandoned cabins and resorts.
Not long after, I began to think about life’s “big questions” and intuitively knew that all answers are within. But in the adult world of jobs and bills and resumes and rent and mortgages and repairs and insurance and taxes and worldly success and failure, not to mention politics and climate change, it’s easy to allow the external “self” to become the master, and forget the inner self.
So I go to the mountains to look, in order that I may see. I see, in order that I may remember. I remember, in order that I might learn. And my goal is to learn one new thing each time I visit the hills, whether from my own thought, observation and memory, or from another person.
And as a result of having been born right here at the base of these mountains, these mountains are not only my home, they have been my spiritual training ground. It’s certainly possible to have a more traditional kind of fun in the mountains, but their higher purpose is as a sacred place where we can escape the stress of urban demands and reconnect with our true selves.
Christopher Nyerges, author of How to Survive Anywhere and Guide to Wild Foods and Useful Plants, has been leading field trips into Los Angeles-area mountains since 1974.
