Sacred Communication/Journey 2021

Landscapes of the Sacred, reflection from pages 1-38 This entry will be dedicated to the four axioms of a sacred place. These four guiding axioms are meant to help people understand the true character of sacred places, since they are so extraordinary & holy. The first axiom states that, a " sacred place is not chosen, it chooses ". In essence, this means that people cannot choose any old place & make it sacred; a sacred place can only become sacred through the presence of God, spirituality, and/or spiritual rituals over time. This also means that sacred places call certain people towards them, inviting those people into them as they are drawn there for a reason.  The second axiom states that, a " sacred place is [an] ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary ". The word 'ritually' can be in reference to long-lasting, spiritual rituals or practices that have been passed down for a multitude of generations, but it can also be in reference to ritual b...

Recovery as a Spiritual Journey My best friend from back home's name is Lucy. She & I have known one another since kindergarten, but became best friends in eighth grade & remained to be best friends up until this day. Around two months ago, she took a huge step in her life & admitted to herself (& her friends & family) that she has a problem & needs help addressing it. Shortly after coming to terms with this, she began rehab. I can already tell she has changed so much in these past few months... even something as small as the way she talks has changed significantly! She sounds so different to me. She sounds happier, more aware, & just more  there , if that makes sense... Okay, in no way shape or form am I trying to discredit all of the hard work she has put in to resist urges & change her habits, but I don't think that all of the differences in her is solely coming from her newfound sobriety. I think a huge part of the changes in her life are co...

Grounding / Earthing Grounding, which is also referred to as earthing, is an amazingly effective way to connect with the earth while simultaneously healing yourself in several different ways, both physically & mentally. It is most commonly done through direct connection to the earth.  This therapeutic technique has only recently begun receiving attention, so there is not extensive research on the subject yet. Despite this, there is more & more research on grounding being acquired each day. When I first began learning about grounding, which was most likely several months ago, I thought that the only grounding technique was going barefoot outside, onto grass, mud, or anything else natural. After just a little more digging, I learned that there is a multitude of different grounding techniques. Some of these include lying on the ground or submersing yourself in water. And, while I'm not totally convinced that they are legitimate, there is also equipment created in an attempt to...

How Spiritual Journeys in Nature Can Be Made Possible for People with Disabilities My final term paper is about veterans taking long distance hikes as a means for them to achieve transition & healing. Veterans hardly get the recognition they deserve, despite all of the traumatic events they endured just for the sake & survival of our country. Many veterans end up suffering from depression, anxiety, PTSD, & several other mental illnesses due to the hardships they faced during their service.          I thought of how helpful a spiritual journey through nature really could be for veterans with struggles such as these, so I wanted to learn more about it. My only concern with the idea of veterans taking long distance hikes is the fact that a significant portion of veterans have disabilities. So, depending on the disability, long distance hiking may not be a possibility for some... I may have never even had that thought if it wasn't for the fact that my bo...

  Over Thanksgiving break, during a slightly warmer day, my family went to Great Falls, which is a national park in Northern Virginia about 20 minutes from my house. We took our dog, Archie, who is an adventurous puppy that doesn’t realize how big he is. Of course, it was still chilly, so not many people were there as opposed to when we went in the summer and it was packed. Archie dragged my mom by his leash to the rock overlooking the water. He climbed up on his hind legs and rested his front paws on the rocks, much like a human would do. Honestly, I think he was having a more spiritual experience than any of us because he looked so peaceful. He took a bunch of deep breaths and started out at the water, and I could tell he absolutely loved it. My favorite seasons are fall and winter because I love taking huge breaths of the freezing cold air, it’s refreshing and it’s kind of like a detox for my lungs. We got away from the water because 1) it was cold and 2) Archie was got so excit...

 I really enjoyed being able to spend class outdoors. The classroom is a very cramped, overly formal, and monotone environment, where everything is grey and dull. This is in stark contrast to the outdoors, where vibrant colors, especially as we near the seasonal change, pop out and draw the eye. The water, and the sound of it lapping against the shore keeps us awake, and keeps us stimulated. When walking the trail I observed a lot, but something that particularly stuck out to me was the wild grapes that were pointed out at the start of our walk. The grapes were smaller and denser than store-bought grapes and had a much more sour and then bitter taste relative to the grapes we buy at the grocery store. They weren't bad, but they weren't tailor-made for our taste buds the way most products we buy in bulk are. They existed as they do in nature, and they really do indicate that nature was not made for us, but made to exist on its own. Nature will most likely outlast us and will con...

God, A Raceless, Genderless Spirit Recently, I was thinking about how some people like to view God as their own race or gender. This led me to wonder, does God have a race or gender? Perhaps some background information on my faith may be helpful... I grew up in a religious household. Not the typical church-every-Sunday religious, but my dad always instilled the true importance of our relationship with God in my brother & I. From him, we learned a lot about what it means to really know God & understand his word. But, back to my recent thoughts, I figured it would be quite the interesting question for me to ask my dad.               I asked him, "Dad, do you know if God has a race, or a gender?"              He said back to me, "God is a spirit. He is not a human, so he has to be without race or gender." That is not all he said, of course, but when he said that particular statement it allowed for...

Lucy & The Sunrock  Around a year ago, when I was a senior in high school, my best friend Lucy & I were relaxing outside during the school day. We had a great deal of free time, so, we decided to hang out together on this large, flat rock that lied right outside the back of the building. We loved this rock. We called it the sunrock, since it was always facing up towards the wide, open sky & could never escape the sun. Nicely enough, it would always be perfectly warm on a sunny day. We both could fit onto it, even when we were both laying on our backs. We got comfortable (somehow, this rock really was comfortable) & began looking up into the cloudless, deep blue sky. We were vibing off of some blue meanies, & the sky began to form these thin, barely noticeable grid lines, far, far in the distance, all around the whole sky, wherever you looked. If you've ever played Halo, it looked just like that. It seriously looked like we could see a dome around the earth, hol...

 Over Thanksgiving break, I had some time to go outside and enjoy nature. There is a small walking and bike path in the woods near my house, so I decided to go explore it. I normally don't like going into the woods, but for some reason, I felt that I should. I am glad that I did because I had a great experience. For one thing, it was peaceful being alone in nature. When you are alone and are able to give things your undivided attention, you are more likely to be aware of your surroundings. It was nice to have a break from school, the pandemic and other stressful things. I can understand why some people decide to take a break from everyday life and go long-distance hiking. I spent one hour out there in the woods, which I enjoyed every minute of. I hope that I can go back to the woods during the Winter break.

 I thought that this section of the book was interesting. In it, the relationship between religion and history is explained and discussed. One reason that the author gives for religion and history being connected, is that in order to practice or understand a religion, a person must first know a little bit about the history of that religion. "In accord with these ideas, Dilthey maintains that the only way to understand religious phenomena properly is to trace them back to the inwardness of psychic life." (Benson and Wirzba 2005). Even though I am not a religious person, I can understand the logic behind this idea. It makes sense that you should know the history, beliefs, and sometimes even the people behind something before you involve yourself with it. I think that this can be applied to both religious and secular things in life. After all, it would be bad to be associated or involved with something that goes against what you believe in.

 A few weeks ago, my mother returned from a missions trip of sorts. She traveled to an orphanage in the mountains of Jamaica to help a good friend and learn about the life they live. Upon her return, she shared with me how it felt to travel that far and see the difference of living. She kept saying she felt changed, that she had figured something out about herself, and I told her she completed a spiritual journey. She has heard me talk about this class and understands the idea of a spiritual journey as she is quite the spiritual person herself. She did not experience any sort of physical strain or discipline but she did have all of the luxuries of her home life stripped away, leaving her freed from the village or marketplace. In her travels through the jungle, she feared for her life, which I think replaces the physical strain of a journey like a through hike. She said as she traveled she was reminded of what I had said about this course and even found herself wanting to ask the pr...

 As we learn and hear more about the Appalachian Trail in class, I find myself drawn to the call of a Sacred Journey. I have always been interested in thru-hiking and things like the AT but always told I was incapable due to physical and mental limitations. But the call of the wild has grown stronger than other people's doubts and so my sister and I have begun to devise a plan for summer 2024 to hike as much of the trail as we possibly can. I feel like I need that soul searching and connection to nature before I go out on my own and move to a large city to pursue my career. This pull or call for a sacred journey really shows me first hand why all of these people go out year after year to do stuff like this. I think just as hikers say, I will not understand fully until I have done it myself, but I am starting to get the smallest inkling of the magic that lives within this trail and other pilgrimages. 

 Being outside is very normal for me. The outdoors is one of my comfort places, where I go when I'm stressed or just bored. Since it is so ordinary for me, I find it hard to write a journal about environmental interaction because I interact with the environment quite often. Recently, I went out on the Noland Trail again with a friend. We were there to record some nature and walking sounds but I made sure to tune into the nature around me while we were out there. Since we were there to record sounds, I found myself particularly focused on all of the noises going on around me. We often heard dogs barking, children yelling, others' footsteps on the gravel path. But there were also moments of quiet that made the music of nature stick out. The whistles of wind against leaves sounded like an instrument too perfect for humans to have made. Animals brought the woods to life as they scurried across dried leaves in search of food and companionship amongst the other animals. Birds sang an...

 After talking to my family about this course, my parents were reminded of a book they both read and enjoyed and recommended it to me. I've been glancing through and reading some of A Walk in The Woods by Bill Bryson. Although about someone's experience on the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in The Woods is very contrasting to our course material. Bryson finds little to no profound meaning or soul searching but instead finds comedy in hardship. He finds himself wondering why he's on the trail, but doesn't stop to figure it out. I think many people on the trail or other journeys are more like Bryson than the others we read in this course. It makes me wonder what brings them there, why they stay, and what they take away in the end. Hopefully continuing this reading helps me answer those questions as I'd like to address these types of journeyers in my final paper. A Walk in The Woods is a sillier read but still makes me want to go out there and hike the Appalachian Trail mys...

 Pilgrimage has been around since the Medieval Ages. In some countries and cultures, it was used as a form of punishment. Criminals would be sent on pilgrimages to sacred places or shrines to pay for their crimes and sins. "When this system became authoritatively and legally structured, pilgrimages were themselves regarded as adequate punishment for certain crimes (thus the four murderers of St. Thomas a Becket, according to tradition, made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to atone for their crimes.)" (Turner: Page 193). The goal of these types of pilgrimages was that the criminal would punish themselves by thinking and praying about what they had done. When they returned home, they would be forgiven by the Church, regular people and religious figures, such as God. This type of punishment appeared to be effective, and the Church continued using this method for many years. This practice was stopped around the time of King Henry the 8th and has never been done again.

  I’ve never been one to enjoy being outdoors very often, especially on hot days with so many people talking at once. The times I do enjoy being outside in nature happen when it’s cool and quiet and usually by myself. So, when we had class on the Nolan trail, it was difficult to enjoy it. I was sweating, I was carrying my heavy backpack, and everyone was talking all around me. While I did enjoy talking to people from class that I hadn’t talked to or met before, I got off that trail as soon as I could.       I’ve lived in Virginia for my entire life, but I grew up in NOVA. While I have seen the various outdoor spots up there, it is very different than anything I’ve seen in the Newport News area. There is a trail by my house that runs parallel to a creek, and it’s where my family and so many other families in the area walk our dogs. However, I’ve always hated that trail because so much is flooded. In the heat, the trail has are swarms of gnats that fly into my nos...

Environmental Interaction Our class trip to the Nolan Trail impacted me in a way than I wouldn't have ever expected.  My friend Audrey, who is in our class, drove us. When we first hopped out of the car, the sun was beating down on us, heavily. As we began to heat up, we stood together & waited for our professor to appear from (what I thought would be) the wilderness (heheh). In the span of only around ten minutes, our class became united as a whole with our professor, adjacent to the bridge.  Okay, as a completely unrelated side note, I had an entirely different mental image of the second half of professor Redick's face. I'm not exactly sure why.. Anyhow, we began walking around, stopping occasionally to look into the water, at a large symbolic statue, magnolia fruits, & other numerous interesting & notable things around Lion's Bridge & on the trail. For some reason, that day, my mindset was extremely clouded. My muddled perception became unusually hyp...

 These past two weeks, we have been watching documentaries in class. The documentaries were about the journeys of long-distance hikers. I learned more about the Appalachian Trail, The Hayduke Trail and the El Camino de Santiago. It was interesting getting to see the experiences that these people have while on their journeys. I noticed that while not everyone goes on the same journey, they will have similar thoughts, feelings and experiences. This is probably because going on a long-distance hike can be a life-changing experience. People make new friends, explore new places, and are physically and mentally challenged on these types of hikes. I am more interested in long-distance hiking after watching these films. I probably will not long-distance hike myself, instead, I will research these types of long-distance hikes and journeys.

 (I wrote this earlier in my notebook and forgot to post/publish it.) After reading this section of the book, I have a better understanding of what a pilgrimage is and why people do them. I did not know that there were different types of pilgrimages. Different cultures have pilgrimages and traditions that are unique and meaningful to them. For example, the religion of Islam makes a pilgrimage to Mecca each year. Some pilgrimages have been made by humans for hundreds or even thousands of years! One example of this is the city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem has been considered a sacred place by the Jewish since about the 10th century. Even today people travel there for religious reasons. So far, this book is interesting and I am ready to read and learn more about these cultures and traditions. 

 It was interesting getting to read trail journals for the second paper that we had to write for this class. I read about many unique, and sometimes strange experiences that people had while hiking these trails. I noticed that some people like to write and post something every day, while others rarely write. Reading these trail journals allows people to catch a glimpse of what long-distance hiking is like. While it is not the same as hiking, you can understand why these hikers, and the wilderness they hike in, deserve lots of respect. I will probably never go on a long-distance hike, but now I have a better understanding of why people decide to do it.

 The day of class that we went to the Lion's Bridge was very interesting to me for many reasons. I have lived in Virginia all my life however, I live in the northern part and very rarely did I ever visit southern Virginia so a lot of the places most people talk about around CNU I have never been to. That was my first time visiting Lion's Bridge and honestly at first I was not impressed. I used to enjoy hiking quite a bit and I have been on some pretty impressive trails in many different states such as Arizona, Utah and Pennsylvania so the Nolan trail did not seem very interesting to me at a glance. About a year ago though I stopped going on hikes, or stopped enjoying them at least, because of a surgery I had on my leg that made walking long distances difficult and along with losing my passion for hiking, I lost interest in nature a bit too. Before going on the Nolan trail I had not really walked any kind of distance in a long time, expecting it to hurt, however having class out...