Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice

Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C.

Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest.

For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters, demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature.

The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey.