In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard wrote: “I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and sea – and to temper my spirit on their edges.” While rambling through the Green Mountains, I graze the forest for whatever morsels of insight come my way. Forest ecology is a straightforward study; casual observations of animal behavior rarely illuminate; the linear trail underfoot offers few profound realizations. But every once in a while something happens, something appears out of the corner of the eye, providing an opportunity to see through the mundane. It’s nothing less than a glimpse of undiluted reality, a flash of the divine. At such times, I pay careful attention. I try to grasp the full significance of the encounter but that’s extremely difficult to do. More often than not, the divine eludes me.

To study hard things – concepts as hard as granite. To study nature – the quasi-mystical relationship between all things animate and inanimate. To study concepts like God, humanity, the world and all those other vague, half-baked notions that surface whenever one is alone in deep woods. Two conscientious hikers might chatter emotionally about saving the earth as they pound a trail together but rarely do they dig deeper. In solitude, harder things emerge – things that resist definition; things that platitudes always miss; things that propagandists and advertisers cleverly avoid; the very things lost in translation whenever philosophy and religion become institutionalized, fossilized, hopelessly political.

Life itself, that ethereal subject, is the absolute hardest thing of all – a vexing cosmological ambiguity forged by the most mysterious forces of the universe. A great deal of effort is necessary to secure any truth concerning it. Such truths, buried deep in the earth, are as rare and as difficult to extract as diamonds. By contrast, half-truths are as easy to come by as acorns in autumn. In fact, it is nearly impossible to keep from stepping on them.
-       Walt McLaughlin, Forest Under My Fingernails, a beautifully written book about hiking Vermont’s Long Trail.