What Hiking the Narrows Taught Me About My Body and Fitness

Last month my family went on vacation to Zion National Park, and my father, my boyfriend, and I spent a day hiking the Virgin River Narrows. The experience was an eye-opening one for me.

I should say first that I’m not usually the sort of person who “lives in my body.” That is, I don’t spend very much time thinking about physical things, and instead I tend to focus on “heady” subjects–my thoughts, ideas, and emotions. Much to my detriment I’m sure, when I’m working on an interesting research project or wrapped up in a stimulating conversation, I often forgo eating and sleeping. Moreover, motivating myself to exercise is difficult because physical challenges don’t excite me, and the mindless repetitiveness of exercises like jogging and swimming and lifting weights bores me.

But the experience of hiking the Narrows made it next to impossible for me either to be bored with exercise or to ignore my body. The Narrows was truly like nothing I had experienced before. The complete “top-down” hike, which we did, is a 16-mile trek, along–and sometimes in–the Virgin River. True to its name, the Narrows is a narrow slot canyon, and, on either side of you as you walk, carved red sandstone cliffs jut up into the sky, sometimes as much as 2000 feet. In places the canyon is wide enough for small banks to form on the edges of the river, but in its narrowest points it is only 20 or 30 feet wide and the water reaches from one canyon wall to the other.

As I hiked, I found myself constantly bombarded with physical stimuli, stimuli that forced me to pay attention to my senses as I usually don’t: the cold of the water and the force of the current on my feet, the scratch of undergrowth on my legs, the magnified roar of the water and our voices as they echoed on the canyon walls, the striking contrast of the red sandstone against the blue of the sky above. The glut of beauty around me made me exhilaratingly aware of my senses and of my body.

To be fair, though, I should also admit that the hike made me uncomfortably aware of my physical limitations. I have bad knees, and after 12 or so miles of hiking, bending them became quite painful. I even started to look for patches of deeper water that would cushion the movement of my legs and, because the water was cold, numb my pain. Maybe because of dehydration or just physical strain, I also developed an irritating nosebleed–never serious enough to really warrant Kleenex but just bothersome enough to make me notice it. And of course, I was simply tired. Since I don’t exercise much, 16 miles was a considerable trek for me. Accompanying the euphoric feeling of my senses in full alert, then, came a disconcerting cognizance of my physical “unfitness.”

Unfitness really is the word I want here. It expresses, of course, that I wasn’t fit in the sense of being out of shape. But, more than that, it also captures a deeper epiphany I had about my body as I rode the shuttle back to our campsite after our hike: that is, that my body was disappointingly unfit for or unworthy of nature, its natural habitat. What do I mean by this strange statement? I mean that on the one hand, my body’s responses to the hike’s sensual pleasures made me realize that natural landscapes like the Narrows are my natural habitat, my home. But on the other hand, the pain and discomfort I experienced on the hike made me face my own feebleness and my inability to function in my newfound home.

I suppose for the Christian, I’m merely restating the old teaching that humans were created to be perfect beings and to live in a perfect world, Eden (or Zion!), but that they fell and are now too sinful to live in paradise. Under such a paradigm, my unfitness is an inevitable state which I must pray to change. For the pessimists I hear on NPR, I suppose my struggle to hike the Narrows is just another example of the descent of American culture and its disinterest in the natural world and physical health. From their point of view, my unfitness is something about which to dialogue, worry, and write books.

While I think both of these approaches have their merits, I have chosen to deal with my unfitness in another way–a strikingly physical and unintellectual way. I do enough praying and dialoging, worrying and writing, and, for me at least, the problem of unfitness requires a more hands-on solution. Namely, something rather unoriginal and anticlimactic: exercise. For the past month, I’ve been trying to spend more time “out of my mind” (!) and “in my body” which usually amounts to spending a few minutes 3-4 times a week on the treadmills or elliptical machines in my apartment complex. I’ll admit, running in a fitness room isn’t nearly as exciting as hiking the Narrows, but, in light of what I learned on my hike about sensual stimulation, I’ve been trying to pay more attention to my senses as I exercise in order to make it more interesting. I ask myself: what does my breathing sound like? how does my sweat feel? how–I ask myself, embarrassed–does it smell? how does my body look as it exercises? I am, after all, a bit of nature, and if I can’t enjoy the beauty of a stunning canyon or breathtaking vista, I can at least enjoy whatever small curiosities I can find in myself. I feel more motivated to exercise too if I think of it as preparation for returning to the wild, for returning home. I try to think of my exercise as “fitting” myself to the beauty I encountered on my hike, beauty I hope to encounter again. In the end, I suppose my solution isn’t very original or earth-shattering, but for me at least it’s a start and it’s what I can do.

Jane Goodall’s Reason for Hope: Why Evolution Can Be a Beautiful Idea

I’ve decided to break up my series on tensions in religion and literature with some other writings. I plan to return to it every once in a while in the future as the spirit moves.

Even though I grew up hearing a lot about the science and religion wars (as I mentioned in another post), until last month, I really hadn’t given much thought to the debate between evolution and creation. I’m a literary critic, not a scientist, so I tend to care less about what actually happened at the dawn of time than about the stories we tell ourselves about it and how they affect the way we live. If pressed, I suppose I would have said evolution was more scientifically convincing than creation, but I would have also stressed that I find the story of creation far more artistically and ethically appealing. I would have said that Genesis 1-2 is a breathtaking storytelling feat and that I like what it teaches: that creativity is worthwhile since God himself is a creator, that humans are valuable because they are made in God’s image, and that the world is (or at least was) “good” and that we should take care of it. In contrast, I would have said, the story of evolution is never as beautifully told as the story of creation, and, at least in its extremist forms, it teaches troubling messages: that life is an accident, that success comes only with violent competition, that art and religion and human relationships are, like everything else, only survival devices.

That was what I thought of the story of evolution a month ago, before I read Jane Goodall’s Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. Goodall’s book is a remarkable spiritual autobiography about a life-long study of chimpanzees, and it opened my eyes to the beauty in the story of evolution and helped me see its potential for inspiring ethical living. While I still think the story of evolution has its artistic and ethical problems, I now think it has undeniable strengths as well.

From the start, Goodall puts the debate between evolution and creation into perspective, a move I find appealing. She describes herself as an evolutionist, but, like me, she seems to care less about whether evolution actually happened than about how it influences how we live. She explains this philosophy to a curious bellhop one day:

I ended by telling him that it honestly didn’t matter how we humans got to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to go on destroying God’s creation, fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of His planet? Or were we going to find ways to live in greater harmony with each other and with the natural world? That, I told him, was what was important.

However, while Goodall downplays the necessity of believing in evolution, she also does a good job of quietly demonstrating, in the example of her own life, that the story of evolution has the potential to make a profoundly positive impact on one’s spiritual life and that it can make one a more responsible citizen of the earth. Indeed, for Goodall, the story of evolution is inextricably connected with a spiritual and moral existence because if, as evolution teaches, humans share a common ancestry with monkeys and alligators and mosquitoes and daffodils, each of them are part of our extended family and must be treated with care. Moreover, if every living thing is included in our vast family tree, each can tell us something about ourselves and our place in the world.

Indeed, Goodall’s belief in the story of evolution seems to propel her toward an intimacy with nature that I find deeply moving. For example, she describes giving personal names not only to the chimpanzees she is studying, an unusual enough practice in scientific research, but also to inanimate natural phenomena–a nearby mountain, a stream, the wind. In fact, she describes having an “intuitive” connection with the trees she encounters in the forest:

I became intensely aware of the being-ness of trees. The feel of rough sun-warmed bark of an ancient forest giant, or the cool, smooth skin of a young and eager sapling, gave me a strange, intuitive sense of the sap as it was sucked up by unseen roots and drawn up to the very tips of the branches, high overhead. Why, I used to wonder, did our human ancestors not take to the trees, like the other apes?

Ultimately, Goodall’s connection with the natural world–and in particular, with the chimpanzees– stimulates her ethical development as well. Goodall talks at length about how the chimpanzees taught her, not only scientifically, but also personally–about how to mother, how to resolve conflict, and how to cope with death. Furthermore, it is Goodall’s belief in the interconnection of all life that prompts her to become a leading advocate of environmental preservation and animal rights.

I suppose Goodall’s appreciation for the natural world would have been equally possible from a creationist worldview. Genesis teaches humans to be stewards of nature, and Goodall says herself that she knows many environmentally-aware and admirably moral creationists. In the end, then, Goodall seems to be right in saying that it doesn’t much matter what one believes about what happened in the beginning; what matters is how one acts now. And, I would say, Goodall offers an admirable example of how one should be acting now, convincing me that the story of evolution can be beautiful and that it can produce at least one extremely beautiful life.

How Seventh-day Adventism Taught Me to Appreciate the Natural World

I’ve recently discovered that I like reading nature writing, particularly spiritual nature writing, and, as my reading log betrays, during the last month I’ve gone on a bit of a spiritual nature writing binge. I’ve enjoyed Terry Tempest Williams’ An Unspoken Hunger, Jane Goodall’s Reason for Hope, Stanley Kunitz’ The Wild Braid, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, and on my “to read next” list are Diane Ackerman’s Deep Play and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.

All of this reading about the relationship of spiritual things and the natural world has prompted me to think about the relationship of the spiritual and the natural in my own experience. In particular, it has made me think about Seventh-day Adventism’s relationship to the natural world and about what Seventh-day Adventism has taught me about nature. Though I’ve only had limited experience with other faiths, I’m beginning to think that the SDA faith has made me appreciate nature more than other faiths might have.

Seventh-day Adventism stresses the relationship of spirituality and nature in important, if not immediately obvious, ways. For instance, in her writings, the SDA prophetess Ellen White heavily emphasizes the role of nature in one’s spiritual journey. I’ll always remember her famous line from the opening chapter of Steps to Christ–“‘God is love’ is written upon every opening bud, upon every spire of springing grass”–because the quote hung in needlepoint at the entrance to my Seventh-day Adventist grandparents’ home.

The SDA belief about the nature of man may also contribute to its interest in nature. Many Christian denominations believe that a person’s body and soul can be separated and, in fact, are separated at death. SDAs, however, lean on the Hebrew term nephesh–meaning a living being composed of an inseparable body and soul–which is used to describe the human person in Genesis 2:7, and they argue that a person’s flesh and spirit are thus inseparable. The consequences of this doctrine are far-reaching. If the human person is composed of both a body and a spirit together, the natural and the spiritual realms are inextricably linked. Moreover, if a human is created to be as much flesh as he is soul, his flesh–and by extension the fleshly or natural world–is esteemed more than it might be in faiths that shun fleshly things. For an SDA, the natural becomes something to be prized.

Finally, I think the SDA emphasis on the Sabbath contributes to the value it places on nature. The classic Sabbath afternoon activity–one with which I grew up–is the trek into nature. Whether a mountain hike, a trip to the beach, a visit to the local nature museum, or just a walk around the neighborhood, SDAs frequently spend the hours after their hearty Sabbath lunches enjoying the out-of-doors. In fact, for some traditional SDAs, one of the only acceptable excuses, outside of sickness, for missing church is spending Sabbath morning in nature.

I am extremely thankful for what my SDA upbringing has taught me about the connection between the natural and the spiritual realms. Whether or not I buy all of the theology behind the SDA esteem of nature, I think the idea that nature and spirit are inseparable is beautiful and powerful. In fact, it’s an idea that I think SDAs could take even farther than they do. Particularly after my reading of nature writing, I am even more convinced that as human beings we need to be more careful about how we treat our environment, and I think SDAs, if they would go a few steps further in their thinking, could make a significant contribution to the effort to preserve our world.