Dodd Drake

“…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

“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

“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

“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