Belden C. Lane > Quotes

“Intimacy in all human relationships—especially with God—can occur only as vulnerability and inadequacy are owned.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“To love someone is to grant him or her the gift of one’s pure and undivided attention, without preconceived expectations of what the other person needs, what we imagine to be best in the situation, what particular results we want to engineer.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, all embarrassment into laughter. In biblical faith, brokenness is never celebrated as an end in itself.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“Simone Weil was surely right when she asked, “Isn’t it the greatest possible disaster, when you are wrestling with God, not to be beaten?” God’s invitation to the spiritual life is a call to the high-risk venture of being loved more fiercely than we ever might have dreamed.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“People who pay attention to what matters most in their lives, and who learn to ignore everything else, assume a freedom that is highly creative as well as potentially dangerous in contemporary society. Having abandoned everything of insignificance, they have nothing to lose. Apart from being faithful to their God, they no longer care what happens to them.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“God can only be met in emptiness, by those who come in love, abandoning all effort to control, every need to astound.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“Attentiveness is hard to sustain, however. That’s why backpacking remains an essential practice for me. It requires a consistent mindfulness and self-presence. It demands my keeping an eye on the trail, attending to variations in the terrain and weather patterns, noticing changes in my body as weariness rises or blisters start to form. It necessitates a reading of the entire landscape, learning to dance and flow with the interconnectedness of its details.”
― Belden C Lane, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice

“The spiritual life involves risk. There’s no way around it. The paradox of biblical religion is that God cannot be understood, much less managed. Coming to terms with ultimate mystery is always dangerous. But to our amazement, encountering the Holy can also mean being strangely and unaccountably loved.”
― Belden C. Lane, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice

“Our conditioning as members of a consumer society prevents us from abandoning hope that, with sufficient planning, we might yet be able to see and do everything. To move slowly and deliberately through the world, attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive, even un-American. We cringe from the idea of relinquishing, in any moment, all but one of the infinite possibilities offered us by our culture. Plagued by a highly diffused attention, we give ourselves to everything lightly. That is our poverty. In saying yes to everything, we attend to nothing. One only can love what one stops to observe. “Nothing is more essential to prayer,” said Evagrius, “than attentiveness.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“Exposure to the harsh realities and fierce beauties of a world not aimed at my comfort has a way of cutting through the self-absorption of my life. The uncontrolled mystery of nature puts the ego in check and invites the soul back (in more than one way) to the ground of its being. It elicits the soul’s deepest desire, enforces a rigorous discipline, and demands a life marked by activism and resistance. It reminds me, in short, that spiritual practice—far from being anything ethereal—is a highly tactile, embodied, and visceral affair.”
― Belden C. Lane, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice

“We’re surrounded by a world that talks, but we don’t listen. We’re part of a community engaged in a vast conversation, but we deny our role in it. We haven’t the courage to acknowledge our deep need for what we can’t explain. The soul feeds on what takes us to the edge, but we don’t go there willingly. Our longing is an echo of the Earth’s.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“…wilderness backpacking can be a form of spiritual practice…Exposure to the harsh realities and fierce beauties of a world not aimed at my comfort has a way of cutting through the self-absorption of my life. The uncontrolled mystery of nature puts the ego in check and invites the soul back (in more than one way) to the ground of its being. It elicits the soul’s deepest desire, enforces a rigorous discipline, and demands a life marked by activism and resistance. It reminds me, in short, that spiritual practice – far from being anything ethereal – is a highly tactile, embodied, and visceral affair. (p 4)”
― Belden C. Lane, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice

“One's self is ever a tenuous thing, discovered only in relinquishment.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“Wind varies in its emotional effect on humans depending on ions in the atmosphere. A hot, dry, dusty wind-generates positive ions that cause increased tension and irritability…on the other hand, waterfalls, pounding surf, and the aftermath of a thunderstorm release negative ions that clear airborne particles, relieve stress, and boost energy.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that human perception is deeply invested in a full-bodied exchange with the rest of the world. Sitting near his home on the seacoast near Bordeaux, he writes: “As I contemplate the blue of the sky…I abandon myself to it, and plunge into this mystery, it “thinks itself within me.” I am the sky itself as it is drawn together and unified…my consciousness is saturated with this limitless blue.” The lines blur between his act of perceiving and the stunning character of what he perceives. The sky “thinks itself” within him.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“The high desert landscape of New Mexico is a sparse terrain, bearing the trace of stories long forgotten. It’s a good place to study the parlance of wind and flowing water, to ponder ravens on the wing and the play of shadows among the rocks. The land here cuts through you like a knife, enticing you to relinquish one trusted language for another- or for none at all.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“The threat to natural wilderness forces us into the inner wilderness of the human psyche where wonder, grief, and longing are storming within us as well. Every experience in the natural world invites us to a corresponding work of the soul.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Something similar (to bird migrations) draws human beings on pilgrimages as well… Pilgrimage is a spiritual as well as biological impulse, cutting across species. It’s even a cosmic mystery. The Earth itself follows a 584-million-mile path around the sun each year. We’re all defined by movement.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Backpacking as a spiritual discipline is both rewarding and unsettling. Few experiences in my life are as total—or as demanding.”
― Belden C Lane, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice

“A huge shift in consciousness is underway in our time. A sea change from the “I and it” marketplace conception of the world to an “I and thou” sense of communal identity. Joanna Macy describes it as a “Great Turning” an ecological revolution widening our awareness of the intricate web that connects us. Teilhard de Chardin called it an evolution of consciousness, an emergence of the “planetization” of humankind. We have to think now like a planet, not like separate individuals. We need a “psyche the size of the earth,” James Hillman says, “the greater part of the souls lies outside the body.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me.” Hildegard of Bingen”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“I shoulder my pack and hit the trail, realizing I’m being called to a memory deeper than my own, to a language my body has known all along. The desert speaks- out of lifetimes of patience and pain-with a subtle but insistent voice. My role in the Great Conversation isn’t finally to understand, only to listen and love.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“The splendor of light was a central metaphor (in the mystic) Hildegard of Bingen’s thought, a divine luminescence filling the earth…She heard God say, “I, the highest and fiery power, have kindled every spark of light…I flame above the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars… for all life lights up out of me.” The same idea was also emerging in Jewish mystical thought (Kabbalistic)…the vessels containing God’s Shekinah glory were said to have shattered at creation, dispersing divine sparks that lie hidden within all things. The healing of the world (tikkun olam) requires the recovery of these shards of light.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“For most people passing through the urban park across from my house, the cottonwood is past its prime- scarred by fire…soon to be marked with a large red X by the crew… For me, he’s a presence in my life that’s hard to describe. Martin Buber, in I and Thou, spoke of two different ways of relating to a tree. On the one hand, he said, “I can assign it to a species and observe it as an…object. But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I’m drawn into a relationship, and the tree ceases to be an It.” Buber and his tree were able to enter into a mystery of reciprocity.”
― Belden C. Lane

“A saccharine, easy grace is no grace at all.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“Mountains cover 24 percent of the Earth’s surface, accommodating 12 percent of the world’s population in 120 different countries. They tend to be hotspots of cultural diversity. In the Hindu Kush of the Himalayas alone people speak more than a thousand different languages and dialects.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Over the years, I’ve attached myself to teachers in my own commitment to wilderness backpacking as a spiritual practice. Submitting to these spiritual guides in a penetratingly physical way is a life-changing experience. In wilderness (wherever you find it), there’s always a risk, but the physical challenge is the least part of it. Out on the trail, I find myself longing for an unsettling beauty, for a power I cannot control, for a wonder beyond my grasp. I can’t begin to name the mystery that sings in the corners of an Ozark night. But I can be crazy in love with it, scribbling, in turn, whatever I’m able to mumble about the experience.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“We seem to have an insatiable thirst for places that don’t exist, for griffins and wondrous dragons prowling the antipodes of a world we hardly recognize. They symbolize states of growth we haven’t yet achieved.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

“The tallest mountains generally get the most attention. Fourteen of the world’s peaks are more than 26,247 feet high. The region about 25,000 feet is known as a mountain’s “death zone,” an altitude the human body can only endure for a few days…when Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, he reverenced the mountain as Chomolungma, the “Mother Goddess of the World.” By contrast, after finished the ascent, Edmund Hillary wisecracked to a member of the team, “well, we’ve knocked the bastard off.” Some folks seem tone-deaf to mystery.”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul

“Poet W.S. Merwin once mused that in order to adequately describe the forests of eastern Pennsylvania where he grew up, he’d “have to speak in a forgotten language.” He was aware that a shift in consciousness is necessary for certain forms of communication and that it’s easy to lose ancient languages we’ve long ceased to practice. How, then, do we speak of the languages that we may need in renewing the Great Conversation?”
― Belden C. Lane, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul