Today, 8/19, I am going to be backpacking the Rhode Island North-South Trail. For 5 days, 80 miles, I will be walking, and thinking, and cursing the flies and other insects, and enjoying the wilderness. I'm going to try to leave updates via my phone as long as the battery doesn't die.
I haven't done a hike like this for almost 15 years and I have to say I am excited and a little anxious. There is something about carrying everything you need on your back for five days and not having a rapid form of transport to get from point A to point B. It makes you slow down, it makes you think differently.
Such an approach is an obvious nod to the mystical traditions, the folks who would put their bodies through a ridiculous ordeal and/or eat something a little funky and a little moldy, and then have profound visions and revelations from God. Very much like hiking. I'm not going with any burning question or profound through that I want to work through, but am open to any ways in which God might speak to me. Time alone, time in isolation can bring about the unexpected.
On this trek I have decided to not read Canterbury Tales - there just isn't enough time to try to work through such a work. Instead, for kicks, I'm going to read Freud's Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis. Whee!
So if you see me wandering through the vast wilderness of western RI with a crazed look in my eye be kind, offer me a bit of food and maybe a ride to a coffee establishment of some kind, and tell me about your mother.
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