Your Daily Walk: 365 Daily Devotions to Read Through the Bible in a Year
When you read while you wander, your destination may be a surprise.
In the desert Westward, beliefs that might elsewhere be considered inexplicable, idiosyncratic, and even indefensible is tolerated—sometimes even encouraged. But as my ten-twelvemonth-old girl, Hannah, becomes more concerned virtually what is normal and more worried about whether our family qualifies for that distinction, she barrages me with unanswerable questions.
Why do I correct baseball radio announcers who can't hear me and tell craven-crossing-the-route jokes to our hens? Why do I utilise fishing poles to fly kites? Why have I nicknamed my chain saw (Landshark) and my Weedwacker (Cujo)? And why, of course, do I so often wear no pants? Sometimes I wish my child would ask about something simple, like mortality, God, or where babies come from.
Recently, Hannah asked, "Dad, why do you read while y'all walk?"
Every year, I hike virtually one,300 miles around these desert wilds outside Reno, and I probably read my manner through 800 of them. I became a bibliopedestrian and so long ago that I've forgotten why I do information technology. But in search of an honest answer for Hannah, I've been excavating those reasons.
For starters, walking and reading are similar in many means. Both are forms of practise, one working out the body; the other, the listen. Both are excellent when pursued in solitude. Each gets us from one place to some other, and yet the primary purpose is always the journey rather than the destination. They overstate our sense of the world, expanding the territory and helping us to place ourselves within it. A adept book, like a good hike, takes u.s.a. away from domicile and into a series of surprises that ultimately gives the concept of home its meaning.
Reading and walking have another thing in common: Although most of us know how to do both of them, we seldom seem to do either. As Mark Twain put it, "The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." Might we say the same about a person who has good for you legs but refuses to walk?
While Karl Marx made some perceptive pronouncements about the value of books, it was the wiser Marx, Groucho, who observed that "outside of a domestic dog, a book is a human'due south best friend. Inside of a domestic dog, it'due south too night to read." A volume, like a domestic dog, is good company, and I only don't cotton to heading out on a hike without taking both along with me. I also like the contrasts a carefully chosen volume tin can create with the mural through which I move. There's zippo similar being on the river with Twain or at sea with Melville or by the pond with Thoreau while I'm shuffling through the sagebrush and alkali grit. When it gets hot, I love Barry Lopez's Chill Dreams or Rick Bass'southward Winter. When it gets cold and windy, I become to the Hawaiian Islands in the poetry of W. S. Merwin.
Even John Muir, who is surely amidst the most celebrated of walkers, packed books on the trail. Muir was also familiar with the "volume of nature," a trope known to many cultures, both aboriginal and modern. Liber naturae, the book of nature, is the thought that the natural world is a grade of sacred text and that the revelation of its meaning depends upon our willingness to read it carefully. Seen in this light, the world of the volume and the volume of the earth are intimately related.
Of class, I'm no Muir, and I'chiliad more than Groucho than Karl. And this is a wide-open up desert with a thou hazards. It is true that I have on a number of occasions read myself into trouble while on the hoof—stepping onto harvester ant mounds or into basis squirrel tunnels or invading the infinite of Great Basin rattlers. Simply most of the surprises that come from simultaneous reading and hiking are good ones because looking from the world to the page and dorsum over again becomes a game of peekaboo: Now you lot don't run into information technology, at present you do. One afternoon, I looked up from a book to see a pronghorn buck chiseled against a rocky ridgeline above me. That evening, equally it became too dark to see the page, I lifted my head to witness the thinnest possible crescent moon, in shut conjunction with Venus, floating to a higher place the superlative ridge of my home mount.
When we read a travel guidebook while walking in a city, or a natural history field guide in a forest, we are considered normal. It is understood that we need the volume to recognize and name the things of this world and to prevent ourselves from becoming lost within information technology. As I explained to Hannah, good writing plays the same orienting role: It can help the states discover where nosotros are and reveal why our connections to each other and to the earth we walk through every 24-hour interval are so precious in the get-go place.
Though Hannah insists that I'm "totally not like other dads," she seemed convinced past my reasoning. "Yeah, Dad, I can see that," she said. "Now, what about that no-pants matter?"
Copyright © 2014 by Loftier Land News (December 9, 2013), hcn.org.
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Source: https://www.rd.com/article/reading-while-walking/
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