I believe we need a transformative spiritual and anti-materialistic revolution in our thinking in order to survive as a species on this holy planet. This metaphysical change has to occur before the much-needed political revolutions can break out. In my writings, I’ve called this place where the “Jade Prince” resides, or any sanctuary, the third temple.
Today, we’re beginning to recognize our need for that eternal return to the third temple, a space and a place where the believer recovers their Einhausung. This is an attitude that the German term expresses precisely: It’s the individual feeling of being “at home in the world.” That is how Henry James has a Frenchman describe his confident, unschooled, entirely comfortable protagonist Christopher Newman in his 1877 novel, “The American”:
You strike me, somehow, as a man who stands at
his ease, who looks at things from a height …
It’s a sort of air [you Americans] have of being
thoroughly at home in the world.
Newman is traveling in Europe, and most agree that walking the Earth and journeying to new locations is a helpful human ritual. Even a rite of passage, perhaps? We may have the hiking and traveling bug in order to assure ourselves of the friendliness of our maternal Earth.
Bavarian filmmaker Werner Herzog’s peregrinations as a very young man after World War II are extensive, and he even heads solo into Africa and other lands unknown to him (4.1.1.). My partner and I have managed almost six years out of country ourselves, mostly in Europe, and we do feel more comfortable out in the world than some of the more insular Americans. It’s a method to go beyond hyper-nationalism and to relax inside.
The term Einhausung can mean simply “enclosure” in German, but there’s also been an Einhausung philosophical movement that arose in response to the increasing impersonality of scientific objectivity (e.g. in Virginia Woolf’s novels).
The actual sense of feeling-at-home-in-the-world wherever we are has been especially elusive for German and Russian travelers and is now becoming an elusive feeling even for American travelers abroad.
No, no, Einhausung feelings for Americans have sunk especially low today since we’re viewed negatively as Amerikan tribunes of empire out inspecting our dominions, like that 51st state to our north. Canadians in turn have lost their Einhausung feelings for us and tour the USA less frequently. Our former NATO friends from Denmark also don’t want to spend their tourist dollars here: They’ve lost their desire to visit “Amerika” since they aren’t “at home” here anymore.
These On the Trail columns define “trail” as widely as possible, as readers may attest. Every trail is also a kind of border, memory-device (Apache), route to a divine place (e.g. Uluru and Mount Zion), or topographic geo-cut in the land. Several of the hiking trails I’ve described also double as boundaries. For example, the Manzana Creek Trail (or, river trail) out by Nira Camp makes up a portion of the federal legal boundary by touching one side of the pristine San Rafael Wilderness (see 4.1.1. Conant map).
Trails act as metaphors for moving on, paths forward and, obviously, for just walking upon the Earth Herself. Most of my On the Trail columns stress the simple act of locomotion itself — hiking and walking across the landscape — the motion itself is half the value. I continue to repeat that walking stimulates mental energy and can recharge spiritual enthusiasm. In today’s distracted and over-connected world, isn’t this energy and enthusiasm desperately needed?
I’m sure that 98% of my almost 300 columns focus on the hiking and the trails themselves. My own life trails merged into Santa Barbara backcountry through backpacking treks and long hikes, often along the Sisquoc or Manzana, sometimes with student groups or friends.
When our son graduated from UC San Diego in 2004, we flew with him to visit dear German friends in Munich, and in the event he remained there to study music at their main university (LMU). My partner and I have therefore flown to Germany at least 15 times since then, and I’ve found great walking trails in Bavaria. As a school teacher, I had longer summer vacations than most, so we often stayed in Munich and Europe for as long as eight weeks.
The immediate walk from Munich’s Schwabing district was only about 10 minutes of concrete sidewalk before we would reach the absolutely green 900-acre English Gardens for long hikes in well-manicured nature. These hikes in the city’s huge green inner core along the Isar River kept me sane against the typical white noise of any large western city: subways, trains, buses, ambulance sirens and loud motorcycles.
My partner and I also would drive with kind German friends to hike in the Bavarian Forest (680,000 acres) and also in the Steinwald Nature Park (Stone Forest — 61,000 acres), and later to hike in the unspoiled Sarntal region of the Italian Alps near Merano. In the Sarntal, my son and I climbed the 9,000-foot Jakobs Spitze peak together one summer.
In a much earlier two-year sojourn in Bavaria, my partner and I hiked along a densely forested wilderness trail demarcating the official national boundary between the then-West Germany and the Russian satellite state of Czechoslovakia (officially the Czech Soviet Socialist Republic). This was in 1972 when the so-called Cold War was intense in Europe. The path ran directly along the shared border between NATO’s West Germany (which we occupied) and the USSR-controlled Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic).
My German school teacher friend Rainer had made this winter trek before, and he assured me it was legal and fully OK to walk right on the obvious trail that did embody the infamous Iron Curtain that Winston Churchill decried in the 1950s. Rainer teased us by saying that if we met any East German Vopo border guards, be certain to step onto the West GERMAN side of this line, not over to the Communist side! (I only later realized it would be Czech border guards, not East German Vopos; we did encounter armed guards there.)
Scribbling outdoor columns since 2011, I sometimes run out of synonyms and good terms for walking. I enjoy deploying words such as roaming, searching, exploring, strolling, striding, treading and ambling. The idea here is that with more of a slow-travel approach, roaming or moderate strolls, then the hiker eases into the living landscape — and acquires more relaxed and regenerative Einhausung feelings and emotions.
My friend and legendary hiker Mr. C would oftentimes simply lie down right beside the trail in a green patch, place his hat across his face and fall asleep on the dirt. Einhausung, for sure! One hour of this deep sleep is worth 10 back in town.
Locomotion, of course, just means moving about, and for almost all of our species’ natural history we have walked. I write these On the Trail columns to cajole, harass, challenge and (hopefully with the photographs) attract some readers to rush out-of-doors and go to the hills.
Get out there, start walking!
Haul your kids along. Dr. McCaslin recommends copious daily dosages of vitamin N. Allow nature and the winding trail to heal your soul, invigorate your spirit and animate your imagination.
Let the endorphins rule as you relax into the land (Einhausung) and absorb a wider outlook.
4.1.1.
My unpublished novel, “The Third Temple”; Werner Herzog, “Every Man for Himself and God Against All, A Memoir,” translated by Michael Hoffman (2024), see pages 116-128 for his outlandish early travels.
On Einhausung, which can simply mean “enclosure” in German, click here.
The best San Rafael Wilderness map is Bryan Conant’s “San Rafael Wilderness Backcountry Trail Guide and Map” (2015).
