Contemplative Hiking

Last week I received an e-mail from the Continental Divide Trail Alliance, the nonprofit formed in 1995 to construct the Continental Divide trail, with the sad announcement that they are ceasing operations. Their Board of Directors had to make this difficult decision due to “increasing pressures from development in the West, rising land costs, and [...]

By Carolyn Baker, PhD. Original article can be found on Carolyn Baker’s website at CarolynBaker.net. NOTE TO READER: Carolyn and I will be co-facilitating two workshops in Denver, CO on the 3 Keys to Resilience in Uncertain Times. If you’d like to meet others and discuss your thoughts and anxieties about what’s happening with the [...]

For all of human history we have possessed limited knowledge about how our minds and our emotions actually work. We’ve been at the whim of primitive instincts, often at the most crucial moments in our lives. Even today, we often find it difficult to understand how we think and what we feel and why we [...]

While there have been certain social milestones made in the last two centuries when it comes to human social progress, other forms of economic or technological progress hasn’t all been good.

A funny 6-minute cartoon. Sally tries to explain to her neighbor Frank why she’s keeping chickens and converting her suburban backyard to food production.

I don’t think that people are born disliking nature. Children are drawn to animals and are natural “tree-huggers” (as well as tree-climbers!) If they dislike or fear nature, it’s because of a traumatic experience or because they’ve been sheltered from it because of growing up in an urban, human-centered environment.

If stars evolved into humans in order to be self-aware, what is our purpose as human beings in the Universe?

The beauty of this place is in its unbroken, green landscape and sense of expansiveness. The sky here is as wide as the ground, and invites you to imagine a time when there were no houses, no power lines, no cows and no cars—only grass, bison and small clusters of tee-pees where Plains Indians went about their lives.

The problem is not that there are too many people using the trails. The industrial growth paradigm that creates this need in people is the problem. It stems from how we treat or value natural areas that already exist near the city.

This year, we have even more serious and global challenges in the form of climate change, peak oil and mass extinction of species. Although no one of us can solve the world’s problems all by ourselves, we can set aside the day to be mindful of our role on Earth, to think about how we may contribute to the healing of our planet, and to take small but important steps lesson our personal impact on the environment.