"Security is mostly superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing."

-- Helen Keller (1880-1968)

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“It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves -- in finding themselves.”

-- André Gide (1869-1951)

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"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the things you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore. Dream. Discover."

-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

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Who wants to live an adventurous life? Not everyone, of course, and those who give security top priority probably won’t invite much adventure into their lives.

Young people are often known for courting adventure. For a smaller number it becomes a life-long preoccupation, or at least a vacation (or weekend) pursuit.

If you have to work, it’s not easy to integrate much adventure into a work week. Unless you’re one of the lucky ones, work days can be somewhat predictable.

But the potential sources of adventure are almost limitless. Hiking can provide small doses (and occasionally bigger ones), which can come in the form of meeting wild animals up close, being surprised by extreme weather events, etc.

Other kinds of adventure can accompany activities closer to home, or at work, or anywhere else. Doing anything creative -- writing, composing, making art, acting, dancing, etc. -- will often involve adventurous elements.

In almost any realm of life, sensible (not reckless, one hopes) risk-taking can add a measure of adventure to anyone who’s willing to step a bit outside of their comfort zone.

Some of us who hike regularly love the fact that every hike is distinctively or surprisingly different each time we do it. Exactly what we’ll see and how the day will unfold are never totally predictable. And that’s part of what can make it fun!

-- Charlie Cook

Here is poet Gary Snyder’s version of a traditional Mohawk prayer of Thanksgiving:


“Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day --
     and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
                  in our minds so be it
 
Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing light-changing leaf
     and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind
     and rain; their dance is in the flowing spiral grain
                  in our minds so be it
 
Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and the silent
     Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
     clear spirit breeze
                  in our minds so be it
 
Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
     freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
     self-complete, brave and aware
                  in our minds so be it
 
Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
     holding or releasing; streaming through all
     our bodies salty seas
                  in our minds so be it
 
Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
     trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
     bears and snakes sleep -- he who wakes us --
                  in our minds so be it
 
Gratitude to the Great Sky
     who holds billions of stars -- and yet goes beyond that --
     beyond all powers, and thoughts
     and yet is within us --
     Grandfather Space.
     The Mind is his Wife.
 
                  so be it”
 
-- Gary Snyder, from The Earth Speaks (Institute for Earth Education, 1983).

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For some people, Thanksgiving week provides an annual opportunity to share a special meal and congenial conversation with friends or relatives.

But whether we’re able to -- or choose to -- get together with others this week or not, it’s also a good time to pause and consider what we may be thankful for.

Life is short, needless to say, and even if we’ve had to weather some major challenges and difficulties, most of us have plenty of things to be grateful for.

In our sometimes cynical and jaded world, feeling and expressing gratitude aren’t fashionable in some circles. Which shouldn’t keep us from doing it.

Expressing gratitude is healthy and just plain feels good. And when others have been generous toward us, it’s thoughtful to let them know we appreciate it.

Aside from the acts of other people, there’s a great deal else in our world that we may be thankful for. For those of us who are hikers, there’s the natural world!

Those of us who live in the NY/NJ/CT area (not to mention elsewhere) are unbelievably fortunate to have literally hundreds of parks to take advantage of.

New York alone has the extraordinary 6,000,000-acre Adirondack Park, largest park in the US outside of Alaska, where most of our camping trips take place.

Additionally we have the 700,000-acre Catskill Park, plus over 150 more NY state parks to enjoy that feature literally thousands of miles of hiking trails.

The western states receive far more publicity because of their higher mountains and famous national parks. But the northeastern US is actually a hiking paradise!

And that’s only the beginning of a potentially long list that many of us could compile of what enriches our lives and that we may be grateful for.

Happy Thanksgiving!

-- Charlie Cook

​“Who wants to see the living world destroyed? Who wants an end to birdsong, bees and coral reefs, the falcon’s stoop, the salmon’s leap? Who wants to see the soil stripped from the land, the sea rimed with rubbish?

No one. And yet it happens. Seven billion of us allow fossil fuel companies to push shut the narrow atmospheric door through which humanity stepped. We permit industrial farming to tear away the soil, banish trees from the hills, engineer another silent spring… We watch mutely as a small fleet of monster fishing ships trashes the oceans.

Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect.

Why are the defenders of the living world so ineffective? It is partly, of course, that everyone is complicit; we have all been swept off our feet by the tide of hyper-consumption, our natural greed excited, corporate propaganda chiming with a will to believe that there is no cost. But perhaps environmentalism is also afflicted by a deeper failure: arising possibly from embarrassment or fear, a failure of emotional honesty.

I have asked meetings of green-minded people to raise their hands if they became defenders of nature because they were worried about the state of their bank accounts. Never has one hand appeared. Yet I see the same people base their appeal to others on the argument that they will lose money if we don’t protect the natural world.

Such claims are factual, but they are also dishonest: we pretend that this is what animates us, when in most cases it does not. The reality is that we care because we love. Nature appealed to our hearts, when we were children, long before it appealed to our heads, let alone our pockets. Yet we seem to believe we can persuade people to change their lives through the cold, mechanical power of reason, supported by statistics.

…In his beautiful book The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy suggests that a capacity to love the natural world, rather than merely to exist within it, might be a uniquely human trait. When we are close to nature, we sometimes find ourselves… surprised by joy: “A happiness with an overtone of something more, which we might term an elevated or, indeed, a spiritual quality.”

He believes we are wired to develop a rich emotional relationship with nature. A large body of research suggests that contact with the living world is essential to our psychological and physiological well-being…

This does not mean that all people love nature; what it means, McCarthy proposes, is that there is a universal propensity to love it, which may be drowned out by the noise that assails our minds. As I’ve found while volunteering with the outdoor education charity Wide Horizons, this love can be provoked almost immediately, even among children who have never visited the countryside before. Nature, McCarthy argues, remains our home, “the true haven for our psyches”, and retains an astonishing capacity to bring peace to troubled minds.”

-- George Monbiot, “Why We Fight for the Living World: It's About Love, and It's Time We Said So,” the Guardian (UK), June 16, 2015

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For a long time we’ve been subjected to a seemingly endless succession of “bad news stories” about threats to the environment, to nature, to Mother Earth.

It’s always tempting to look away and avoid reading or hearing about the latest crisis that endangers living things or degrades the ecosystems that life depends on.

Thankfully there’s also significant good news in our world, although the media aren’t in the habit of reporting on it regularly (bad news is clearly more profitable).

Personally I find it especially encouraging that there are now reported to be record numbers of individuals and organizations in this country and worldwide who are dedicating their lives or large amounts of energy to “defending the natural world.”

Which doesn’t mean that we’re home free by a long shot. But it’s clear that in spite of the almost total absence of nature-aware political leadership in this country now, tens of millions of citizens do care greatly about the wellbeing of the natural world.

If large numbers of us can find ways to act more effectively to protect the earth’s life support systems -- and somehow inspire a new wave of responsible leadership in the US -- we might actually have grounds to be cautiously hopeful for the future.

-- Charlie Cook

 
“Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.

Even more astounding is our statistical improbability in physical terms. The normal, predictable state of matter throughout the universe is randomness, a relaxed sort of equilibrium, with atoms and their particles scattered around in an amorphous muddle. We, in brilliant contrast, are completely organized structures, squirming with information at every covalent bond. We make our living by catching electrons at the moment of their excitement by solar photons, swiping the energy released at the instant of each jump and storing it up in intricate loops for ourselves. We violate probability, by our nature. To be able to do this systematically, and in such wild varieties of form, from viruses to whales, is extremely unlikely; to have sustained the effort successfully for the several billion years of our existence, without drifting back into randomness, was nearly a mathematical impossibility.”

-- Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (The Viking Press, 1974)

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The end of Daylight Savings Time over the weekend is another reminder that the hours of daylight are shrinking each week. The sun now sets a little after 5 pm!

Many of us aren’t exactly thrilled with the shortening hours of sunlight, which requires a psychological adjustment. But it comes with the territory of living on Planet Earth.

Daylight will continue to dwindle, of course, for another 6 1/2 weeks till the winter solstice on December 21. Then the days will start to slowly lengthen once again.

Is there a good therapy for the sometimes mood-lowering effects of diminishing daylight? The obvious answer is to get outside as much as possible during the day.

Which is pretty difficult to do if you work indoors on weekdays, except perhaps for taking a lunchtime walk and/or having a sandwich on a bench in a nearby park.

But on weekends… unless you have to work, setting aside Saturdays or Sundays for hiking can make a big difference, as many of our regular hikers will testify.

Periodically I try to remind people of the important health benefits of spending time in full-spectrum light (which we receive even when hiking in shady forests).

This is true at all times of year, but it’s never more important than during the months when the sunlight is at its most indirect and daylight hours are the shortest.

Getting out for several hours or more -- preferably in the natural world, where the air is cleanest and the scenery loveliest – can boost your spirits like nothing else!

-- Charlie Cook