Joseph Meyer on Nostr: Hiking, Mental Health, and Resilience “It’s as if we don’t belong anywhere on ...
Hiking, Mental Health, and Resilience
“It’s as if we don’t belong anywhere on this earth” — Robyn Joy Leff in her short story, Burn Your Maps
I try to hike every day. I enjoy hiking with friends. But I generally prefer hiking alone, because it affords me an opportunity to move at my chosen pace, observing plant and animal life along the way. It is my quiet time and my therapy. I have an early childhood memory of staying at a small complex of roadside cabins on a trip west with my parents when I was a young adolescent. Piney woods adjacent to those cabins in New Mexico or Arizona attracted me and I took a walk in them the next morning, before we continued our journey to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I found a quiet spot in the woods, sat on a stump or log, and soaked in the stillness while feeling that I could have enjoyed sitting there for much longer, not missing human conversation, listening to birds and other sounds of nature, smelling the duff of decomposing pine needles on the forest floor. When I began college several years later, a young woman working the paper registration process asked me what she should write down for my major. I had not even thought about it. So she asked what I liked doing. I can’t remember my answer, but it must have been related to plants or animals. She said, “How about biology?” and I agreed. That was that, and I never looked back. (1/6)
“It’s as if we don’t belong anywhere on this earth” — Robyn Joy Leff in her short story, Burn Your Maps
I try to hike every day. I enjoy hiking with friends. But I generally prefer hiking alone, because it affords me an opportunity to move at my chosen pace, observing plant and animal life along the way. It is my quiet time and my therapy. I have an early childhood memory of staying at a small complex of roadside cabins on a trip west with my parents when I was a young adolescent. Piney woods adjacent to those cabins in New Mexico or Arizona attracted me and I took a walk in them the next morning, before we continued our journey to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I found a quiet spot in the woods, sat on a stump or log, and soaked in the stillness while feeling that I could have enjoyed sitting there for much longer, not missing human conversation, listening to birds and other sounds of nature, smelling the duff of decomposing pine needles on the forest floor. When I began college several years later, a young woman working the paper registration process asked me what she should write down for my major. I had not even thought about it. So she asked what I liked doing. I can’t remember my answer, but it must have been related to plants or animals. She said, “How about biology?” and I agreed. That was that, and I never looked back. (1/6)