As our society loses more and more privacy and available interior space, seizing time to head outside to hike in nature becomes ever more crucial. Obviously, physical health is a first result of vigorous day-hiking, but the mental and spiritual realms gain much-needed new energy as well. It may be challenging to find the connection between privacy and hiking time in nature, so read on.
The Stone Age individual had to acknowledge the reality of the inner spiritual worlds, and via social evolution deployed rites and symbols to show her respect and fear of … the nature spirits, the kami (Shinto), the goddesses, visible creation and the lunar mysteries celebrating the Mother, and the various cultures used various names for this attitude.
In our western tradition, activities such as prayer, congregational chanting, studying sacred texts (referring to other worlds: gods dwell there), and birth/death rituals all hint at the existence of other realms.
What in Christian times was termed the power of prayer and grace today is best imagined as a space and time set aside for meditation/recollection/mindfulness/privacy. It might be solitary, yet it also can come in group (tribal) scenarios, but certainly for the individual a private setting is needed, often out in nature or near nature. In the great outdoors, one realizes it is indeed another world suffused with hidden spirits.
There are many books and studies about our loss of privacy and freedom today, and of course it’s linked to the Internet, social media abuse and the death algorithm.
The New York Times devoted its entire April 14 Sunday Review section to “The Privacy Project” with learned contributions from 11 thinkers. This is long-form journalism at its finest and has provided hours of great reading for me in the frontcountry.
There is no right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution, but I agree with Times editor James Bennet that “privacy sustains space for free thought and expression, for the [personal] growth that comes from mistakes without public shame. It’s a bulwark against the power of the state and the society and the workplace … .”
I was a teacher for 36 years at a local school and fully appreciate how hard it can be to find time to head for the hills seeking a bit of privacy and hard exercise walking uphill. Tremendous ignition power is needed to willfully remove oneself from the urban grind where your family resides, where you make your money, enjoy sports and artistic creation.
You must hop up from the couch or work desk, disengage from the digital dominance and constant surveillance, and push frantically to go into local wildlands.
Perhaps you can walk or bike to your private spot. For my own nature maintenance/privacy bouts, it was the Rattlesnake Canyon Wilderness Area because I could stop off there on my drive home after teaching and by 4 p.m. start hiking up from the Stanwood Bridge. (That is a practice I started in 1982.)
In hiking, both kinds of privacy are generally available from the outset. Mental privacy comes from the relative absence of other people (and my own taciturn demeanor). Spiritual privacy arrives when you can accept the animism permeating the entire canyon. Tune in to these otherworldly vibrations and turn off the rebellious urban mind. In Hindusim, they call this the “monkey mind.”
Along the trail you smell abundant and flowering white and blue ceanothus giving off a lovely lilac fragrance; blue dicks and other colorful flora line the trail, and graceful arching canyon oaks shade much of the path.
At the end of April, Rattlesnake Creek still flows strong and steady, with many pools like the one shown in the photograph. The gushing sound makes melodious water-music, moving the hiker into yet another world, and this audio arena amplifies and quiets down according to how close the trail comes to the stream.
Access to the private world of your inner self is enhanced by the audio, the nasal, and the colorful plant realms into which you wander.
We know that the digital dominance of the Big 5 tech giants, especially Facebook, has shackled our freedom and privacy through their commodification of personal information as well as astonishing algorithms. In our scary new culture of surveillance capitalism, we need to redefine what “mass privacy” might mean.
Tim Wu suggests that “mass privacy is the freedom to act without being watched” (The New York Times), and one certainly finds that privacy while hiking in the hills away from town!
All of my columns focus on hiking outside into nature or near-nature, and sometimes I explain how to regularly locate that ignition-spot to begin: jumping off the sofa or computer table to go outside the apartment or home, and then bike/drive/walk to a green area, to start walking — this is not as easy as it sounds.
Getting beyond the city gate has become a core California lifestyle value, yet very difficult to pull off regularly. While I’m not against using the gym for fitness, that healthy indoor experience feels separate from nature and doesn’t foster the privacy we’re thinking about.
Our culture today has become increasingly sedentary — it’s even happening to our supposedly more rugged outdoorsy Canadian neighbors to the north. The huge amount of time spent staring at screens large and tiny, handing personal data to Big Tech, at our jobs and online shopping is a barrier to venturing outside to walk.
As additional surveillance comes with improvements in facial recognition technology, how cool that out in nature walking you won’t have to worry about that intrusion into your identity.
Philosopher Alan Watts wrote a pathbreaking 1966 study titled “The Book — The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are,” a sort of adaptation of Hindu Vedanta philosophy. The commodification of your personal data causes a loss of “privacy” and the personal time needed to figure yourself out in obscurity; the imperialism of metadata strengthens that taboo against learning who you really are.
My advice: Flee to the hills for regular meditative journeys outside, but also delving within.
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» The New York Times, April 14, Sunday Review section; Jaron Lanier, 10 Reasons for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018); Roberto Simanowski, The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas (MIT Press, 2018).
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Eternal Backcountry Return, has been published by Sisquoc River Press and is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in the Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
