Colin Fletcher-The Thousand Mile Summer
Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 9:58 pm
Upon completing his 6 month trek from Mexico to the Oregon border along the east side of the Sierra:
"But I had known all along that discovering America was only a defensive "reason", only a hook on which to hang something even more worthwhile. I had thought that at the end I would see the real reasons clearly. But it had not happened that way.
I sometimes seemed to be coming closer to a valid answer when I remembered ill-defined thoughts that floated through my mind as I squatted in front of a campfire, gazing into its pulsating caverns- "dreaming the fire," as they say in Swahili. Living the way I was, I existed, very consciously, as an atom among the forces of nature, among the huge forces that shape the earth's crust, that regulate the ebb and flow of seasons, that weave and hold in balance all the delicate and interlocking strands that constitute the web of life- the flowers and the rattlesnakes and the coyotes and the men.
And as I squatted and "dreamed the fire" I would feel a truth that we usually have to stop and tell ourselves intelectually. I would accept, in a new and fuller sense, that we are, in everything we do, an integral part of this planet's complexity.
And such acceptance is something you can lose when you live,always, in a city."
Colin Fletcher- The Thousand Mile Summer
"But I had known all along that discovering America was only a defensive "reason", only a hook on which to hang something even more worthwhile. I had thought that at the end I would see the real reasons clearly. But it had not happened that way.
I sometimes seemed to be coming closer to a valid answer when I remembered ill-defined thoughts that floated through my mind as I squatted in front of a campfire, gazing into its pulsating caverns- "dreaming the fire," as they say in Swahili. Living the way I was, I existed, very consciously, as an atom among the forces of nature, among the huge forces that shape the earth's crust, that regulate the ebb and flow of seasons, that weave and hold in balance all the delicate and interlocking strands that constitute the web of life- the flowers and the rattlesnakes and the coyotes and the men.
And as I squatted and "dreamed the fire" I would feel a truth that we usually have to stop and tell ourselves intelectually. I would accept, in a new and fuller sense, that we are, in everything we do, an integral part of this planet's complexity.
And such acceptance is something you can lose when you live,always, in a city."
Colin Fletcher- The Thousand Mile Summer