Walking as Celebration, Prayer, Act of Love

From Deep Wild Journal contributor Emmy Savage comes an extraordinary book, Walking the Stations in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains: Journal of Meditations on Living, Landscape, Forgiveness, and Faith. Composed with grace and clarity, and informed by the Christian meditative tradition, Emmy’s book is a vibrant record of her spiritual quest during her nine-year sojourn in Crestone, Colorado. The very first paragraph welcomed me home:

“I once lived where jagged-edged mountains rose out of the earth. I came to live there because I needed a landscape that wouldn’t lie to me, a landscape where I could grieve and begin to heal. I wanted to walk in a place where I could notice the scent of piñon pines and juniper and cottonwood after a rain, a place where God was present in the chiming whir of the broad-tailed hummingbird, the raucous conversations among Clark’s nutcrackers, the alpine blue of columbine and sky-pilots, the living and dying Engelmann spruce. Noticing birds on the trail, a singing thrush or a scolding kinglet, breathing the scent of the pine resin, and hearing the sound of wind and water became a kind of spiritual practice. In this exquisite and fragile landscape of South Central Colorado, walking became a celebration, a prayer of devotion, and an act of love.”

Walking the Stations is available at Bookshop.org and on Amazon. Also, an excerpt from it can be read in Deep Wild 2022, forthcoming later this month. deepwildjournal.com