Wandern

Despite my great affinity for Transcendentalism and the occasional Gerard Manley Hopkins, I am not exactly much of a nature person. In theory I like it a great deal. Practice though? Urgh. It takes great self-sacrifice for me to agree to go on a hike or anything athletically-inclined outside, save sledding or sitting. I do enjoy sitting outside. That one of my first adventures with Andrew was a hike says a lot. I think part of this is because the only time my family would go camping would be on the way to Florida in July. Gross. Very gross. In my self-sacrifice I've perfected the let-me-pause-to-take-a-picture-because-I'm-so-out-of-shape-I-can't-breathe-but-I-can't-let-you-know-that.  I'm sure, though, that most people have caught on.

So, imagine my own surprise when I found myself venturing out into the mountains behind my house on Sunday. It was very cold and very foggy and very wonderful. I could stop for as many pictures as I wanted and needed because I was gasping for breath. I think I came across three people for the majority of the walk. I've no idea how far I went, but it took about three and a half hours.

Freiburg is very, very beautiful.

 

As I came around a curve, I came unto this unbelievable clearing with beams of light shooting everywhere. Simultaneously all the church bells in the valley began ringing and I may or may not have gotten a little emotional at the majesty. 

Sometimes it makes me feel like a jackass that it's Heidegger who first comes to mind when I encounter these things, as if no one, myself included, had encountered nature otherwise. But this time, I think he's right on:

That which is can only be, as a being, if it stands within and stands out within what is lighted in this clearing. Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are. Thanks to this clearing, beings are unconcealed in certain changing degrees. And yet a being can be concealed, too, only within the sphere of what is lighted. Each being we encounter and which encounters us keeps to this curious opposition of presence in that it withholds itself at the same time in a concealedness. The clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time concealment. (Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York: First Perennial Classics, 2001], 51-2).

It was enough just about to make my heart burst. 

Nature and I might just be okay.