To the Desert and Back
- James Mixon
- Jan 9
- 20 min read
Updated: Sep 6
Three Paradoxes of Wilderness Experience
I. Departure
The clouds rarely parted in Patagonia. Never before or since have I experienced a landscape so cloistered—our daily dramas bounded by the damp narrow band between brooding sky and boggy land. I was twenty years old, on expedition, and very nearly ready to abandon my compatriots to the swamp.
On a cold afternoon three weeks into our three month journey, I trudged begrudgingly over to our instructor Steve, who sat waiting for me in a clearing of moss a short distance from camp. I knelt on a bushel of grass in view of the gloomy fjord we'd paddled the day before and proceeded to pontificate on the frustrations of being so very confident and competent amongst a company of slackers.
As my angst unraveled into the chill, Steve said nothing until we sat in a pregnant silence. He reached down and dug his hand into the peat. Pulling up a small clod of tangled matter and fingering it gently, he finally said: "Do you know—there are more living things in this square inch of soil than we could possibly count?"
We both looked out to the gray horizon, and I had no answer.
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The horizon of our age is darkening—silence is anathema, our community atomized, our attention anemic. Economic and environmental upheaval seem to march arm-in-arm towards a blind drop. Our capacity to trust one another, resolve conflict, and cooperate across difference is exhausted. In a moment that requires a vaster compassion than ever before, we seem to have forgotten how to commit to one another.
In such seasons, the wise have often retreated away from civilization—to gain, for an instant or a lifetime, the space to re-examine the root of our values. From the time of the prophet Elijah or before, "if anyone asked what a man of God should do, one answer would be that he should wear very little, be able to move about freely, and spend a good deal of time in the desert." [1] In the wilderness, alone or with others, one can come face to face with the rudiments of reality. In the wilderness, we can re-connect.
The wilderness summons us into a knot of paradox. First, we must confront the desires that compelled us to depart in the first place. Second, we discover what is on the other side of our own disappearance. Finally, we find that the wilderness will always send us back, transformed. In joining perhaps the most ancient tradition of humankind, we take up the path of pilgrims of renewal. In our age of social alienation and strident urgency, to pursue such a mission can seem at best a trivial escape, and at worst a dereliction of ethical duty.
Why, then, does the desert call to us so insistently? How might we undertake such a quest today?
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Amidst the pulsing chaos of the late Roman Empire, men and women following the path of Elijah fled the city and built an entire culture of contemplation and community in the Egyptian desert. Their experimentation led to the first formations of Christian monastic orders, and laid the ground for the Rules of Benedict and others. They were "pioneers in the art of Christian living, called to resurrect the New Testament's most radical vision of human community." [2] These movements became islands of coherence in the following centuries of imperial decline and political turbulence. A Mediterranean intellectual
visiting the Desert Father Arsenius in the early fifth century asked, "How is it that we, with all our education and our wide knowledge get nowhere, while these Egyptian peasants acquire so many virtues?" [3]
Nearly two millennia later, a German Jewish educator named Kurt Hahn established his first school in a castle that once housed a Cistercian monastery. [4] As Nazism arose around them, the Salem Schule cultivated a curriculum for the re-discovery of virtue in a fractious and sickly society. Hahn asserted, "It is the foremost task of education to ensure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial, and above all, compassion." [5]
After Hahn distributed a letter in 1933 demanding German citizens break with Hitler, he was secreted away from the country by British friends. He later established the first Outward Bound school.
In distant historical moments, these figures make the same counter-cultural claim: as chaos and vitriol compound around us, we don't rise up and fight it in kind. Rather, we go back to the basics—which might necessitate a temporary withdrawal, a retreat. "The times are urgent, we must slow down," [6] says the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe. Perhaps, for a moment, we must even depart.
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Often, when we first depart, we are unaware that we are living into a tradition. This was true for me. A religious education in the mission field left me with more questions than answers, and by my late teens I would skip church for a weekend wandering the bush with my buddies. "Nature is my church," I began to say, and when I explicitly apostatized in college, I signed up for a semester-length expedition through the southerly hinterlands of Chile to escape the Evangelical echo chamber. Something in me knew I needed it, but mostly I wanted to see mountains.
To be more precise, I wanted to conquer them. As an inner anomie arises within the social life, our culture whispers that perhaps that thing we long for is out there. "Go west, young man." Each may finally mark his own, permanent, summit. So it seems. But are we truly content with seeing the summit, or do we want to be seen there? Was it not from the peak of a mountain that Jesus was tempted with all the kingdoms of the world? [7]
This is the first paradox of the wilderness: the parts of us that are called to pilgrimage may not survive the journey. Something about the wilderness haunts the dissatisfaction in our souls. We believe there is something pure about it, or something chaotic but free. If we can assert our own freedom there, our self-reliance, our independence, perhaps we can find relief. When I arrived in Patagonia, it was the first time I introduced myself to a group as anything other than a Christian. I even changed my name—dropping my childhood nickname to become grown-man James. There was a spaciousness to the distance, the far journey, that allowed me to re-imagine. Yet the deeper we delved into the wilds, the less the names seemed to matter at all.
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The critique frequently leveled at contemporary expeditionists would not be unfamiliar to the Desert Fathers. In early Christian literature, "the concept of 'wilderness' was increasingly synonymous either with the space possessed by demons and evil forces, or with the privileged, clean space in which the divine epiphanies were revealed." [8] Both hands of this dualism are deceptive.
This framework breeds two inseparable tendencies that have been disastrously enacted by subsequent generations of Christians: the wilderness as either a place to be conquered, exorcised, and subjugated, or as a place of exotic purity. This is to say, while the monk and the mountaineer seem to abdicate social responsibility in pursuit of the ascetic sublime, their brethren (Crusader or cowboy) run roughshod over the "barbaric" frontier.
The modern explorer Barry Lopez quotes a more discerning Christian regarding this history: "In The Wisdom of the Desert, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, considering the moral obtuseness of the conquistadores, writes, 'In subjugating primitive worlds they only imposed upon on them, with the force of cannons, their own confusion and alienation.'" [9] Alternately, sects in the tradition of the Gnostics or Manichaeans perpetuated the separation by rendering the wilderness as "the pure mind archetype, emptied of passions." [10] In either case—conquest or transcendence—the point has been missed and the quest is incomplete.
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I have worked for numerous wilderness education outfits including Outward Bound, before and since Patagonia, but what at first seemed a self-evidently noble pursuit slowly began to unravel. Each time I returned to the "frontcountry," the shadows of our society seemed longer, darker. The inequity in the access to space, to nature, became more visible. The associations between expeditionary culture and imperial militarism grew more overt. The idea of "adventuring" within easy earshot of suffering began to seem trivial, if not repugnant. The concept of "wilderness" itself comes into dispute. It wasn't clear to me then the role of the wilderness quest itself in bringing about this loss of innocence.
The whole project seemed to become an exercise in privilege. The idea that we were cultivating anything other than our egos dried up. Neither conquest nor transcendence could be more than salt on our tongues: we thirst insatiably for more. Any identity I had pursued as a self-reliant mountain man now appeared absurd. "Modern man is able to go into the wilderness or up to the moon and be comfortable as long as he takes enough of his world with him, but he remains an outsider." [11]
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Which is it then? Is the quest to the wilderness the beginning of wisdom or the end of it? Is the wild world potent enough to provoke our reflection and prevail over our pretensions? What really happens in the desert?
II. Disappearance
After stowing our kayaks and venturing inland, we found ourselves in a high valley beneath the glaciated shoulders of Monte Burney—a stratovolcano hiding beneath a blanket of clouds on a peninsula of the fractured Chilean coastline. Its summit was our objective. It had already taken several weeks of sloshing through bogs to set up a base camp, and there we waited for days as the infamous Patagonian wind chased us repeatedly off the summit ridge. Discontent began to brew, but the team was glassy-eyed for victory.
After nearly a week in place, I rounded up a few other students and proposed venturing off elsewhere—rather than huddling in camp—to see what we could of this remarkable, remote place. We knew we may have been risking our slim chance of "success," but something suggested the mountain wanted us to surrender. The instructors agreed, and our small team wandered aimlessly into unknown terrain.
After scrambling through brambles down several bluffs, we found ourselves standing on a buried glacier, walls of ice like stormy waves rearing out of black gravel. We spent several days seemingly out of time in this haunting landscape. Once we turned and descended towards the coast, we walked through fields of broken boulders only to find small trees growing out of soil that had compacted over countless years atop the bare ice. A tremendous river of glacial meltwater thundered out into the daylight from a dark tunnel beneath the moraine. It was an anonymous, unmapped place of breathtaking singularity.
We crossed the river with no small effort—I rashly pressured my team across a chain of half-submerged boulders slick from the spray—and found ourselves at twilight in a foreboding forest, lost and exhausted. I wondered, for a harrowing hour, if my errantry had done us in. Only at last light did we emerge into a small clearing, where we gathered berries and collapsed into our tent together.
I later wrote these lines in my journal about the adventure: Have I a lover well within / that is the forest clearing in the dusk / in the dead of night the embers / and at noontime all the world alive? / Is that You, too?
The following day, we rendezvoused with the rest of the team. They never did summit.
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"The immensity of the desert overwhelms both the power and weakness of men," writes the theologian Ivan Illich in his foreword to the remarkable memoir of a French monk living in the Algerian desert, Brother Carlo Carreto. "The emptiness of the desert," says Illich, "makes it possible to learn the almost impossible: the joyful acceptance of our uselessness." [12]
Brother Carlo's stories from the Sahara reveal the second paradox of the wilderness: that only in losing ourselves can we wholly encounter the wild divine. "Halfway between God and the world there is a confusion of aspirations, contradictions, and compromises," he writes of the uncommitted life, "and so, under a strange sky, the poor life of our soul goes on, in the light of unreal faith and sentimentalism."
Thus, he continues, "Don't try to reach God with your understanding; that is impossible. Reach Him in love; that is possible…Only God is, only God knows, only God can do anything." Incapable of expressing just what it was he found in the desert—everything—he turns to the apophatic: "And the nearer this everything comes to nothing, the more the unknowing becomes unlimited…Seen in this way, heaven is that place where everyone must be so mature in love as to offer his life for all others. It is love which is universal, and lies at the heart of all things." [13]
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The modern American mystic Jim Corbett wandered the arid landscapes of the American Southwest with a herd of goats and wrote of something he called "gospel errantry." Recognizing the unsustainable trajectory of a de-sacralizing industrial society, he says, "The ecosystem won't work for an animal that rises up as conqueror and tries to take possession—unless dominion itself continues to evolve, beyond dominion." One could say Corbett's errantry is the committed practice of wandering aimlessly beyond dominion and back into devotion.
"Rather than seeing a flawed Creation that needs fixing, errantry sees adventures," he writes. "By the time he founded the rule, [Saint] Francis had seen that the church is built through errantry—that, whatever else it may be, it must be a pilgrim community formed by those who walk the Way." In other words—what must begin as errantry becomes pilgrimage. We are called into the wilderness by our demons, tilting at windmills, until our visions of victory vanish under a brilliant sun.
To see those rudiments of reality beneath our anxieties and ambitions "depends in the first place upon stripping away the mask of fantasies and projections about ourselves," writes the monastic scholar Columba Stewart. "We find that the masks we place on ourselves and the masks we see on the face of God are, in the end, the same, and are of our own making." [14]
The biographies of the first Desert Fathers themselves are often tales "of high adventure…set within an exotic landscape," of men and women who were rogues and refugees fleeing their many sins. Camel raiders, political dissidents, indentured servants, all seeking solace only to find their fears all the more present and distinct in the harsh desert light. [15] Going out is what forces us to go in.
Another statement of the paradox is this: those who chase the horizon, be their purposes nefarious or noble, must eventually recognize that it will recede infinitely before them. There is no there there. To deny this is to dig deeper into a dangerous delusion which can never be satisfied. To accept it is to finally find your place amongst all created things.
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The Outward Bound experience mirrors the monastic in many ways, but perhaps most of all in its commitment to these paradoxes. In eliminating the proliferating distractions of our society, in binding a small group of humans together in intimate interdependence, and in facilitating solitude and silence, participants are confronted with a true reflection of themselves.
The "solo," a formal retreat of fasting and silence that is a foundational pillar of the pedagogy, marks the deep center of transformation. Like a monastic retreat, "the aspects of the solo that participants valued—such as solitude, unstructured time, and reflection—were also some of the most difficult aspects," notes a study of the outdoor adventure education (OAE) model. [16] The degree to which these experiences are seen as spiritual depends largely upon the framing or the religious backgrounds of the students, but most remember it as revelatory.
"I would encourage everybody to go back and sit and touch and look at and be in earth, with earth, and open themselves up to just how that feels," said one student. Another elaborated, "Spirituality is...getting down to the basic, essential needs. And looking for what's common...I'll call it looking for the life force which is common to every thing—plant, animal, rock, bird. A definition for me would be connecting—feeling literally and intellectually a connection with that life force." [17]
This sense of disappearance into the greater whole happens time and again regardless of framing. Wilderness experience shares many such characteristics with religious or mystical experience; however, like many epiphanies, its staying power is unclear. I would agree with the authors of one study who contend that "even in the field of experiential education, there has been too little effort made to allow the sacred to be reconciled with the physical [and, I would add, social] reality of our experience." [18]
Hahn also acknowledged this limitation. "To put it bluntly, the Outward Bound experience by itself does not go deep enough," he said in 1960. "It is the beginning of a great promise—but this promise will not be fulfilled unless the follow-up problem is solved. It is not solved today." [19]
III. Return
Reconnecting with the rest of the expedition after our walkabout, we conjoined into an exhausted platoon for our final days of swamp-stomping to the beachhead, where we'd be met by a boat to begin the long journey home. By this time, I'd become practiced in darting from bushel to bushel in the peat bog, keeping my feet a bit drier than my less nimble companions. Like when crossing the glacial river, I simply expected the team to keep up.
As we neared camp, we came to another small stream winding gently through the marshland. Though it was less than two meters wide, those in front stepped glumly into the frigid water. But it was so simple: I prepared for a minor leap, rucksack and mountain boots and all, and found myself staring down our instructor Emi across the stream. "If you break your leg way out here, it's like we've all broken a leg," they said. "You've got to think about your team."
They might as well have said, like Abba Poemen, "If you see a young man climbing up to heaven by his own will, catch him by the foot and pull him down to earth: it is not good for him." [20]
I fumed with sodden socks all the way to camp. In the evening, the omnipresent clouds luminous in the backlit dusk, we prepared dinner on a dry, stony islet where our once raging river had flattened out far downstream. Suddenly from behind their tarp burst Emi and Isa in fabulous, furry, onesie regalia, bearing a backcountry-baked cupcake with a flaming candle. "Happy twenty-first birthday, James!" [21]
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"You go to nature for an experience of the sacred," wrote a legendary Outward Bound instructor. "You go there to re-establish your contact with the core of things, where it's really at, in order to enable you to come back into the world of [wo/]man and operate more effectively…Seek ye first the kingdom of nature that the kingdom of [wo/]man might be realized." [22]
Here we encounter the third paradox of the wilderness: it is the departure from the world that reveals your total belonging to the world. Only in attending to a deep, quiet stillness within your private experience can you recognize your inalienable continuity with, and responsibility towards, all living things. The desert that once seemed "the archetype of pure mind" reveals itself to be gritty and raucous with life. The lowly clod of soil contains multitudes.
Most importantly, the myth of the bootstrapping individualist melts away. In our fractured social paradigm, "we lose sight of that very sensible, crucial element of living, which is trusting other people and loving them, and tolerating their weaknesses, and maybe even getting disgusted with them, but still loving them," as another student wrote. "That was the spiritual awakening for me, you know, the friendship." [23]
"True community depends on the self-denial of each member," [24] and the expedition, like the monastery, reveals unfailingly that "communal commitment, not individualism, is a precondition for true individuality." [25]
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"Lest this association between monasticism, virtue formation, and expeditionary travel seem strained," writes the scholar and expeditionist Paul Stonehouse, "this association appears to go back at least to the 11th century Benedictine monks of Cluny who desired to educate the European laity. For instead of sermonically lecturing the public to bring about behavioral change, the monks took them on pilgrimage." [26]
Some still might bristle at my braiding of monastic tradition and the outdoor adventure education model. To treat a five-day romp in the woods like a long-term monastic commitment could easily be seen as reductive, or worse, sacreligious. On the other hand, the proponents of an Outward Bound-style psychosocial secular pedagogy might distrust adding religious overtones to a broadly accessible and inclusive rite of passage.
Although I believe consistency of language (be it religious or otherwise) may facilitate the transference and integration of one's experiences on expedition back into daily lived reality, the language used is not the key. Indeed, the apophatic qualities of awe and entanglement should make language a secondary concern. Still wilderness education provides an essential contemporary platform for the cultivation of moral and spiritual virtues that we have grown wary of in post-modernity: our capacity to trust one another, resolve conflict, and cooperate across difference. Compassion. "Sensible self-denial." Our capacity to love.
If an OAE program is afraid to use these words, to take up its inheritance in a storied tradition, it is a loss. It is possible to provide the spiritual tools for transformation and integration while transcending sectarian strictures. It is possible to practice expedition as pilgrimage, in which the point was never to arrive at all but to journey, together, into a deeper fellowship.
Indeed, Stonehouse reiterates that "the development of love, expressed through compassionate acts toward humankind, was the very reason Hahn cofounded Outward Bound and the expeditionary tradition." [27] Out of Hahn's life of contemplation, social engagement, and education emerged a poignant sense of interconnection and responsibility:
"If the Earth were your body, you would be able to feel the many areas where it is suffering. War, political and economic oppression, famine, and pollution wreak havoc in so many places. Every day, children are becoming blind from malnutrition…adults are dying slowly in prisons for trying to oppose violence. Rivers are dying, and the air is becoming more and more difficult to breathe." [28] He knew that to sustain such concern required re-entry, re-integration, re-connection with the whole—the wilderness quest is simply the pilgrimage of remembrance. "Outward Bound can ignite—that is all—it is for others to keep the flame alive." [29]
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Towards his vision of "gospel errantry" and "covenantal" community, Jim Corbett offers these "iconoclastic suggestions about our fundamental education needs: First, everyone should learn how to feed himself or herself. Second, everyone should live at least briefly as a member of a wildland band." [30] While Outward Bound-style programs may not yet have students foraging, herding, or farming, it is nevertheless an iteration of, and innovation upon, a profound tradition of ethical and spiritual formation.
"Leisure, solitude, dependence on uncontrolled natural rhythms, alert concentration on present events, long nights devoted to quiet watching—little wonder that so many religions originated" from communities of humans wandering the wilderness, writes Corbett. [31] It is a return to the source of a "primal religio…concerned with the 're-ligation' of human livelihood into full community." [32]
It is the unique paradox and gift of the wilderness that it so often facilitates this re-connection regardless of what we carry into it. When we relinquish what we carry, we find out who we really are. When we find out who we really are, we discover we are not alone.
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In light of this, the "traveling monastery" [33] is more needed with each passing year. Stonehouse quotes an ethicist who "observed how [medieval] Benedictine monasticism provided 'new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.'" [34] We desperately need such spaces today—to slow down, to go back to basics, and to come face to face with reality and one another.
There must and will be many such communities, but forms of expeditionary education present a particularly powerful possibility—especially when the return to responsibility is foundational. Fortunately, there is already an unorthodox order of modern mystics and monks, like Steve and Emi and many more, who are deeply committed to this Way. To find them, like the Desert Fathers, you may need to venture into the wilderness, the mountains, the swamp—wherever they are searching. It is a search which "is ultimately for that awe, that depth of reverence, encapsulated in the biblical phrase, 'fear of God.' This 'fear' is at the same time a 'knowledge.'" [35]
The Way is that of walking bravely towards our dark horizon without needing to reach it, knowing that in our soul we are already abundant, and whole.
In the words, once more, of Barry Lopez: "Anyone facing this frightening horizon might opt to turn away, decide instead to become lost in beauty, or choose to remain walled off from the world in electronic distraction, or select catatonic isolation within the fortress of the self. But one can choose, as well, to step into the treacherous void between oneself and the confounding world and there to be staggered by the breadth, the intricacy, the possibilities of that world, accepting its requirement for death but working still to lessen the degree of cruelty and to increase the reach of justice in every quarter." [36]
"For many years," he writes, "the need for this kind of heroic effort—essentially to learn to cooperate with strangers—has been calling to modern people."
Let us follow that call to the desert, and back.
IV. Postlude
On the stony coastline of the peninsula, where aeons of the great Pacific wind have pressed the cedars sideways, I would sometimes sit and wait for that infinite fleeting moment when the clouds would break and a poignant glow would paint the sea before me and gently touch my face. If I had been transformed, I didn't know it yet, but I sat with an unfamiliar patience—safely in the heart of the paradox. I wrote these youthful, searching, simple lines in my journal:
The great lesson I learned under infinite skies:
Nothing is waterproof; everything dries.
Where forests of legend grow out of their fathers
And travellers lost shall find no other wanderers,
My footprints shall disappear soon after I.
They soak in the smallness and sink down inside
Along with our shoes and our egos and more,
Arrogance scattered from summit to shore.
But there are horizons I haven't yet found,
The simplest changes with only a sound.
Watch for the sun breaking over your shoulder,
A lengthening stride and a heart that grows bolder.
The corridor widens to unfettered eyes:
Nothing is waterproof; everything dries.
References
Monk drawings from: Nomura, Yushi. 2001. Desert Wisdom : Sayings from the Desert Fathers. Naryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books.
[1] Patrick G. Henry and Donald K. Swearer, For the Sake of the World: The Spirit of Buddhist and Christian Monasticism (Minneapolis, Minn.; Collegeville, Minn.: Fortress Press; Liturgical Press, 1989), 92.
[2] William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism, 1st ed. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 116.
[3] Harmless, Desert Christians, 311.
[4] Paul Stonehouse, "Seeking Virtue in the Wilderness: Expeditions as Traveling Monasteries," Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership 8, no. 2 (2016), 175.
[5] Heather J. Stewart, "Outward Bound Journey: A Metaphor for Spirituality with Implications for Social Regeneration" (PhD diss., ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 1997), 15.
[6] Bayo Akomolafe, "Coming Down to Earth," Bayo Akomolafe, May 29, 2017, https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/coming-down-to-earth.
[7] Matthew 4:1-11
[8] Florin Stefan, "The Purpose of the Wilderness and the Cell in the Psychological Shaping of the Monk," Icoana Credinței (Online) 7, no. 13 (2021), 48.
[9] Barry Holstun Lopez, Horizon, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 45.
[10] Stefan, "Purpose of the Wilderness," 53.
[11] Jim Corbett, Goatwalking (New York: Viking, 1991), 7.
[12] Carlo Carretto, Letters from the Desert, Anniversary ed. (Maryknoll, N.Y.; London: Orbis Books; Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002), Foreword by Ivan Illich.
[13] Carretto, Letters from the Desert, various pages (copied into journal at SSJE).
[14] Harmless, Desert Christians, 230.
[15] Harmless, Desert Christians, 60.
[16] Kenneth R. Kalisch, Andrew J. Bobilya, and Brad Daniel, "The Outward Bound Solo: A Study of Participants' Perceptions," The Journal of Experiential Education 34, no. 1 (2011), 16.
[17] L. Allison Stringer and Leo H. McAvoy, "The Need for Something Different: Spirituality and Wilderness Adventure," The Journal of Experiential Education 15, no. 1 (1992), 20.
[18] Stringer and McAvoy, "The Need for Something Different," 1.
[19] Paul Stonehouse, "Character Through Outdoor Adventure Education? The (Delimiting) Hope of Modern Virtue Ethics," The Journal of Experiential Education 44, no. 3 (2021), 248.
[20] Harmless, Desert Christians, 242.
[21] The timeline of these episodes has been adjusted in the spirit of errantry.
[22] Stewart, "Outward Bound Journey," 27.
[23] Stringer and McAvoy, "The Need for Something Different," 18.
[24] Stonehouse, "Seeking Virtue in the Wilderness," 174.
[25] Henry and Swearer, For the Sake of the World, 218.
[26] Stonehouse, "Seeking Virtue in the Wilderness," 169.
[27] Stonehouse, "Seeking Virtue in the Wilderness," 175.
[28] Stewart, "Outward Bound Journey," 1.
[29] Kurt Hahn, Harrogate Address on Outward Bound, delivered at the Conference at Harrogate, May 9, 1965, available at KurtHahn.org.
[30] Corbett, Goatwalking, 72.
[31] Corbett, Goatwalking, ix.
[32] Corbett, Goatwalking, 43.
[33] Stonehouse, "Seeking Virtue in the Wilderness," 165–79.
[34] Stonehouse, "Seeking Virtue in the Wilderness," 175.
[35] Harmless, Desert Christians, 229.
[36] Lopez, Horizon, 47.
Bibliography
Brown, Jason M. 2019. "Charged Moments: Landscape and the Experience of the Sacred among Catholic Monks in North America." Religions (Basel, Switzerland) 10 (2): 86.
Carretto, Carlo. 2002. Letters from the Desert. Anniversary ed. Maryknoll, N.Y.; London: Orbis Books; Darton, Longman and Todd.
Corbett, Jim. 1991. Goatwalking. New York: Viking.
Hahn, Kurt. Harrogate Address on Outward Bound. Delivered at the Conference at Harrogate, May 9, 1965. Available at KurtHahn.org.
Harmless, William. 2004. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. 1st ed. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Henry, Patrick G., and Donald K. Swearer. 1989. For the Sake of the World: The Spirit of Buddhist and Christian Monasticism. Minneapolis, Minn.; Collegeville, Minn.: Fortress Press; Liturgical Press.
Kalisch, Kenneth R., Andrew J. Bobilya, and Brad Daniel. 2011. "The Outward Bound Solo: A Study of Participants' Perceptions." The Journal of Experiential Education 34 (1): 1–18.
Lopez, Barry Holstun. 2019. Horizon. First edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Merton, Thomas. 1964. Seeds of Destruction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Stefan, Florin. 2021. "The Purpose of the Wilderness and the Cell in the Psychological Shaping of the Monk." Icoana Credinței (Online) 7 (13): 48–60.
Stewart, Heather J. 1997. "Outward Bound Journey: A Metaphor for Spirituality with Implications for Social Regeneration." ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
Stonehouse, Paul. 2016. "Seeking Virtue in the Wilderness: Expeditions as Traveling Monasteries." Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership 8 (2): 165–79.
Stonehouse, Paul. 2021. "Character Through Outdoor Adventure Education? The (Delimiting) Hope of Modern Virtue Ethics." The Journal of Experiential Education 44 (3): 243–56.
Stringer, L. Allison, and Leo H. McAvoy. 1992. "The Need for Something Different: Spirituality and Wilderness Adventure." The Journal of Experiential Education 15 (1): 13–20.
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