Reginald Spittle's Blog: See my book blog, page 30
September 22, 2019
The Best Things Often Ain’t Easy
[image error]Ian joined Sue and me for part of our trek in England.
Sometimes, the best experiences push you to your limits. I am reminded of that thought as I walk the South West Coast Path in England. One particular day included stunning coastal views along a 15-mile walk with more than 9,000 feet of elevation change.
In the moment, it seemed like too much. My legs rebeled in pain as I neared my tenth hour on the trail. “Why do I do this?” I asked myself as I wondered if the sights were worth it.
A couple of days later, our English friend Ian surprised Sue and me on the South West Coast Path with a reunion. It brought back memories of our first distance trek, Spain’s Camino de Santiago, where we met Ian. I learned during a month on the Camino that working through hardships sometimes leads to rich rewards.
Ian’s friendship and many treasured memories came from those times on the Camino.
We have seven days and many more miles left on our journey from Minehead to Land’s End. Our fifth long-distance trek reminds me that time will guide me to realizing the rewards from taking on such a difficult challenge.
September 15, 2019
Finding Paths to Happiness
How do people who battle anxiety and/or depression find peace and happiness?
I have found answers to this question through reading the wisdom of some brilliant writers whose works I have featured here. (Click on “more books” in the menu to see them.)
But I have found some of my life’s most enjoyable times on the long-distant trails in Europe. My story about my first such journey became an adventure memoir, Camino Sunrise: Walking With My Shadows.
I am finding this happiness again in England on the South West Coast Path. Sue and I are about a third of the way through our 260-mile trek from Minehead to Land’s End. Here are a few scenes from England.
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September 13, 2019
The Salt Path: A Book Comes to Life in England
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The path plunges and rises with the valleys, over and over.
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, then walking the South West Coast Path is indescribable.
I am reading Raynor Winn’s best-selling book, The Salt Path, while walking in her footsteps on England’s South West Coast Path.
Except I am hardly following her lead.
Winn walked after she and her husband Moth lost their home in a business deal gone sour. Plus, he had just gotten news that he was dying from a neurological disease. They camped, mostly, and she wrote that they lived off 48 pounds a week. In two segments, they trekked almost all of the 630 miles.
Sue and I are fortunate that we are healthy and will return to our Oregon home. We have a shower, warm bed, and pub meals at the end of each day. We are carrying everything we need on our backs, sans the tent, sleeping bags and stove. Finally, should our script play out, we will hike “just” 260 miles from Minehead to Land’s End.
But, like Raynor and her husband and all who venture here, we are astounded by the glory of England’s southwest coast. The steep path challenges, but our senses bask in this experience.
September 7, 2019
An Adventurer Explores His Passion to be Way Out There
A warning: Read Way Out There and you may find yourself buying an old VW Beetle, driving to Alaska and discovering magic while camping in the wild. At 22, J. Robert Harris drove solo across Canada on his way to Alaska and as I read the opening chapter, his words delivered his unbridled sense of adventure.
Now 75, Harris writes about his favorite backpacking journeys that many would not consider, even with expert guides. The Arctic National Park and Preserve, Baffin Island, Tasmania, the northern reaches of Canada, Switzerland and Australia are among his destinations. One chapter takes readers for a gripping canoe adventure.
He packs impressive courage and finds a sense of peace miles from civilization, in the home territories of polar bears, grizzlies and wolves. He is often alone, but never lonely. Danger follows him, but it only succeeds in making his stories impossible to put aside.
Read Way Out There, if you dare.
September 3, 2019
Dalai Lama: Ethics and Life in a Big, Big World
He is the spiritual leader of the people of Tibet, living as a refugee in India for 60 years.
He was Lhamo Thondup at birth. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, he has traveled the world, speaking out on topics well beyond his passions of human rights and Buddhism.
The 14th Dalai Lama, now 84, has authored numerous works, including Beyond Religion, a book I have read and read, and then read again.
One of the most revered leaders in the world, he draws readers into thought about the purpose of life, ethics, and how to be a better and happier person. His appeal crosses nationalities, races, religions, and practically every distinction that can be used to divide.
He poses questions about justice, nonviolence, materialism, capitalism, economic justice and a mountain of other topics.
In Beyond Religion, the Dalai Lama is optimistic and practical. Eloquent and approachable. Spiritual and human.
In the final chapter, he is a teacher, guiding readers through methods of mental cultivation through meditation.
August 27, 2019
Siddhartha: A Search for Fulfillment
Siddhartha is a handsome young Brahman who is wealthy, exceptionally intelligent, and loved. He seems to have it all, but he feels unfulfilled.
With his loving friend Govinda, he leaves his family and the comforts of home in search of enlightenment. He meets Gautama, but even life with the original Buddha is not enough, so he moves on, leaving Govinda behind. He fasts, lives without possessions, eventually slips back into materialism and a life with a beautiful woman.
As an old man living alone and working as a ferryman at a river, he reconnects with Govinda in a poignant meeting. Is Siddhartha, alas, fulfilled?
Siddhartha is German author’s Hermann Hesse’s most famous book. Hesse, who died in 1962 at 85, so beautifully describes Siddhartha’s journey that many readers return to the book. The conversations with people he meets are compelling and the narrative, originally written in German, is deeply human.
Each time I read Siddhartha, I find myself reading passages over and over. It resonated with me as a youth in the 1960s and it touches me as a man now in my late 60s. Messages of hope and beauty emerge from the book’s shadows.
Siddhartha mirrors aspects of Hesse’s own life of discontent. The author suffered depression as a child, attended a seminary, where he rebelled and fled. He attempted suicide at 15.
I devoured all of Hesse’s novels while I was in college in the early 1970s. Siddhartha was my favorite, but I was also drawn to Narcissus and Goldmund and Peter Camenzind. Click on the book cover above to go to Amazon.
Is there a Siddhartha in all of us?
August 25, 2019
Mont Blanc: Camino Lessons Travel to the Alps
See that speck of a building below the glacier? It is Refugio Elisabetta, one of a collection of remote hostels on the 110-mile Tour du Mont Blanc.
I would never have stayed there if it had not been for my hiking adventure on the Camino de Santiago.
Perched on a spur in the Italian Alps, Refugio Elisabetta offered triple bunks in a crowded coed dorm and bright orange clogs for walking around an outdoor setting that left me gobsmacked. I showered in minimal privacy, shared a sink with other men, and waited to use the only toilet with a seat. We had lucked out with a private room with barely enough room for one set of bunks, but its tiny window opened to a view of the glacier. The dirty duvet made me wish I had packed my sleeping liner, but I was grateful for the bed after several exhausting days of climbs and descents.
Refugio Elisabetta was a highlight of our two-week trip around the Alps’ tallest mountain. The delicious communal dinner came with quick-binding friendships with trekkers who had traveled from throughout Europe. Some were sleeping in tents in the campground down the slope from the building.
In Camino Sunrise: Walking With My Shadows, I describe the restless night in my first albergue in Spain and how I had ruminated about the lack of privacy in coed dorms and bathrooms. Our first long-distance backpacking adventure eventually guided me to come to terms with ghosts that had haunted me since childhood.
And, oh, so thankfully, the Camino lessons led me to Refugio Elisabetta.
August 23, 2019
The Asian American Male: Who Is He?
What is it like to grow up in the United States as an Asian immigrant male who was born in Manila, Philippines?
For Alex Tizon (the photo above was on the inside book cover), it was a lifelong struggle to overcome the shame he felt as he faced popular stereotypes that portray Asian men as weak, short, and unsexy, among other characteristics. While growing up, he collected memories and files of evidence that he believed refuted those stereotypes.
The culmination of his effort was Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, a powerful, brilliantly illuminating and sometimes humorous story of his life and of Asian men in America.
A Pulitzer Prize winner and ground-breaking journalist at the Seattle Times, Tizon’s last career stop was the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.
When a book touches me, I write to the author to share my appreciation. But I was shocked and saddened when I looked for Alex Tizon’s contact information and discovered he had died, of natural causes, in 2017, at 57.
You can get his book by clicking here.
August 20, 2019
Mont Blanc: What a Sight
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Patience. Sue and I had learned during our pilgrimage across Spain that our perseverance would be rewarded, eventually. I chronicled our trials in Camino Sunrise: Walking With My Shadows.
Mont Blanc had stood tall, 15,771 feet, for the first several days of our 110-mile adventure around the Alps’ highest member. But it had hid from our view.
On the morning after the toughest climbing day of our lives, our patience was tested again as we inched up 3,100 feet toward Col de Seigne. The aches from day three worsened, making us wonder how much more we could take. We didn’t say it, but the Tour du Mont Blanc had made us question why we had attempted such a trek.
Then, at the mountain pass, Mont Blanc’s grand pose was the best pain killer I have ever felt. It graciously posed for photographs with us before we stepped from France into Italy, where we picnicked at nearly 8,300 feet in the crisp, blue air and gawked at one of Earth’s wonders.
Patience. Indeed.
August 19, 2019
Why I Trek
Why I Trek
Why I Trek
— Read on carryoncouple.com/2019/08/18/why-i-trek/
You have seen my wife Sue in photographs on this site. Readers of my book have seen her artwork and benefitted from her expert editing. She is the inspiration behind our backpacking trips around Europe. Why does she trek? It is quite a story; check it out by clicking on her blog post above.
