On the Slopes of Mt. Meru

Guru Nanak and Ps.-Dionysios on Infinities Divine and Cosmic

Every day this year I have made the effort to try and walk at least five miles. From some angles walking this far and this often is a lifelong praxis for me, echoing a childhood practice of hiking for hours around local parks after school and on weekends, and from others, it is an intentional way of keeping myself healthy when teaching and parenthood otherwise drain my mental and physical resources too much to keep up some kind of more formal, structured exercise. From the trees, the birds, the open sky, and the warming sun I tend to draw my spirit.

Walking has also been good for my intellectual world this year, though, because it’s given me a chance to get out of the mens intrinsic to my day job as a Latin grammarian and to read while on my hike. Robert Louis Wilken’s The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Symposium, Vergil’s Eclogues, Homer’s Iliad, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Henri Frankfort’s Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature, Geraldine Pinch’s Egyptian Mythology, James Fadiman and Robert Frager’s Essential Sufism, and more have all kept me company this year as I’ve traversed the hills, dells, brooklets, forested and prairied paths, deep woods, and cross-country tracks of my current institution. Plenty of times, of course, I’ve taken nothing with me, preferring to simply take it all in, but two works in particular have been experientially fruitful on these daily treks that I wanted to share here.