Anyways, the past few days since Kackie left have been new, interesting and I think worth sharing. 

Day 54. [944-964]

{I know this is a repeat day but there is more to say}

In addition to (“big”) Troy, I also hiked with “Cliffhanger” the Australian actor, entrepreneur, and filmmaker from Hollywood. He is writing a tv show about the trail (as I’m sure many think they are) and is quite confident in it. He gave a big speech about how people shouldn’t talk politics on the trail—-as he made his way into a long rant about his hate for Trump. —->I, as usual, agreed with more informed and equally passionate disapproval of him but from the position of one betrayed and not opposed. 

…anyways, he got too crazy so I ditched him and hiked past him. But there are a lot of people “in the film industry” on the trail and I thought I would share. 

Also, today, for the first time in the trail, it began to rain. This… was a new challenge. 

Day 55 [964-987]

Today, after my morning routines I skipped my normal podcast plan and began an old favorite of mine—The Fellowship of The Ring.  Unsuprisingly, I was still listening to it 11 hours later.  I have so many pages of voice memos and hope to find time to actually essay them.  

Today rained for the entire day, and with each (false) glimpse of sunlight behind dark clouds came new thunder and harder rain than before.  I was thoroughly soaked early and quickly it ceased to bother me.  

I didn’t reach camp until a very dark (from the clouds) 8:00.  I set up my tent and tried my best to do it fast enough to keep the inside dry.  For some reason, as I stood there at the end of a truly exhausting day, filthy and soaking I had a rush of adventurous joy.  I found myself yelling back at the thunder and laughing at it joyfully.  Then, seeing my tent site was near a small lake, I realized in a moment the only natural way to go about dinner…..

As I cooked my ramen beside the lake, I washed my socks and remembered that every night for the past month I had burnt my mouth by eating it too early.  So as it cooled I took off all my clothes and went for a swim, taking a small lap out into the lake and back to kick off all the mud and sweat.  Then coming back I knew my Ramen was ready I just ate it all right there and then—butt ass naked, alone in the mountains.

I was so content

In fact…

I think I’m growing to like this Treebeard fella…

But I still laugh imagining some Californian who for some reason was 40 miles into the wilderness in a thunderstorm who stumbled upon me having my supper.  [(I knew nobody could come from behind because I hadn’t passed anyone in 5 miles)]

Day 56 [987-1018]

Today I hit 1,000 miles! 

That’s so insane, but I promise to you I am actally far from it.

Today, as you can see, I was moving again.  It feels good to be going far and fast again.  (Except for my knee which is hurting very badly).

But my mind and pride feel as good as ever!

Today was also a goodbye to the “true Sierra Nevada” and an entry into “Northern California”

*See below*

I reached Kennedy Meadows North where I was able to ship my bear can home (lighter pack!!).  There I also got a 2 hot meals, new food for the trail, wifi (for you ❤️), and soft serve ice cream!

At the PCT campsite I met a bunch of people but one hiker Evan, lured me in with a free offering of leftover food and whiskey…..

Anyways, 5 hours later and we were still talking.  He is an ex infantry, great books Master degree from St. John, enlightenment humanist, leftist, defense attorney, who is hiking the PCT with his wife.  

Talking to someone ideologically opposed to me who has been traditionally educated was fascinating and nuanced and really fun.  Topics covered included Monarchism, Radical Islam, Normal Islam, Active Combat, the Judicial system, the constitution, the founding fathers, and the Christian literary tradition.  

Being in good spirits we essentially played the game of seeing how much we could agree on from our different ends.  He, having served on the streets of Afghanistan was forced to have the really unpopular liberal position of Sam Harris on Islam (which I recognized) and that was a starting point for our agreement.  

Making strange friends over immediately deep talk truly is, I think, the greatest thing a person can do to meet themselves and the world.  

Most importantly he too agrees with G.K Chesterton who said there is nothing for men to discuss BUT Religion and Politics, which is a sharp turn from the foolish rule of the trail and polite society to never discuss anything of substance or import.  

Then at 1:30 we ended our long discussion and went to bed. The heavens, from this view I judge, chose my side in the discussion…

One of the thoughts which is haunting me is the religious nature of “collectivism”.  To much outrage, Zohran Mamdami said earlier this year that we must replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism"

However, I too oppose individualism, which I suppose is very un-American of me.  More fervently, I require the warmth of collectivism.  

I have an essay cooking on the subject so stay tuned.  

Everyone go touch a tree and thank God for it, trees are good.  

Much Love,

treebeard

I have officially completed more than ⅓ of the trail, Kackie has officially finished her portion of the trail, and now my Mom and Dad have come to Mammoth to visit and watch me eat a lot of food.  

Kackie’s section ended up being around 240 miles, almost 50,000 ft of elevation gain and at least 7 passes over 10,000ft.  Yeah….pretty badass for Kackie (Goggles)

Day 47 [881-883] We ended up going about 5 miles back towards the trail, keeping things light to save Kackie’s knee and help her ease back into it.  Beautiful cowboy spot by the lake. It looks like her knee was getting steadily better.

Day 48 [880-892.4] We slowly took the day to do Silver pass and were moving pretty well.  I saw a beautiful rainbow cloud thing.  Then we eventually made it to the beautiful Lake Virginia. This is my second time camping at this lake and it is undeniable. After taking a swim and jumping off some rocks we decided to move to the other side of the lake to wake up in the sun… we both fell in walking over and in our night clothes. (Aghhhhh)

As I was watching this rainbow which I knew could not last, I could not decide to write about the things (I thought) it inspired in me, to take a long video of its change, or to simply watch it. As I have no poem for you and only a poor picture, you can guess that I tried and failed at each…

Day 49 [892-909] Woke up very wet next to Lake Virginia and we take our time gliding down the 16 miles to Red’s Meadow where hot food, new snacks, and showers awaited us.  

As I walked ahead of my sister remarking at how fast and good of a hiker I was, I saw a tree and turned my head to look at it.  —-—Some gnome or demon (tree root) tripped me and I totally ate it.  I had a face full of dirt, a skinned elbow, a bloody palm and a bleeding knee.  I felt like a 5 year old and it sucked.  Kackie (who I had thought myself so superior to) was only about 15 seconds behind me and saw me getting up.  Then I was the slow and injured one…

At Red’s I had 3 great phone calls, 3 good beers, and a 5 minute shower.  Life was good

Day 50 [909-931] We realized that with only 35 miles left we could be back to society and showers and hygiene (at least for Kackie) by the next night and so we made a big push to sleep on top of Donoahue pass.  This was a hard day, but in it we got to pass the fantastic thousand Isdland lake and Garnett lake.  They were absolutely stunning.  More importantly, there was a duck and some ducklings to watch in the lake as we snacked.

By the end of the day that knee was seriously hurting, as was Kackie’s and it was a slog.  A couple hours later, however, and we were rewarded with the best campsite ever.  Perfect sunset, perfect stars, perfect sunrise, and an all downhill day to civilization—pretty awesome.  With some seriously premier cuisine (beef flavored ramen) we enjoyed our last sunset—Kackie’s last on the trail, and mine with a friend. It was awesome

I mean look at the stars, the celestial spheres.

I can only wonder how much easier our world has been secularized by the smog which obscures the true night sky?

Day 51 [931-943]

Kackie and I woke up and watched the sunrise from our sleeping bags atop Donahue pass and it was beautiful.

-then we ate pop tarts, sat around for a bit and by 7:30 began our final stroll down the mountain, through the family and lovely Tuolomune meadows and then back to society.

-we got a cheeseburger at the bottom, hopped on the bus, and then met our parents in Mammoth to celebrate Kackie’s journey.

—I ate several dinners, took the longest(active) shower of my life to scrub myself clean, and slept in my first bed in at least a month. That was pretty special

Day 52 [zero day]

I took today to sleep in, rest, enjoy family (and a bed) and eat. It was really awesome to be around people who knew me again.

Day 53 [zero day 2]

A lazy day felt so good and so needed, and knowing it may be another 1700 miles before I see family or friends again I rested for another day!! More food!!!

—I didn’t realize how badly I had missed talking to dudes like me with even vaguely similar mannerisms, worldview or sense of humor. So having a couple beers and joking around with my Dad was really special.

Day 54 [944-964]

My family and I woke up and went to the only church service we could find—the english service of a very Charismatic Latino Catholic Church. Even my dad, who was very surprised and unused to such a service, appreciated the crowd and the devotion of the priest.

Then my mom drove me to the trail, gave me a hug and I was off on my own again….

Just a Koon alone in the woods (with a new shirt!!)

—and then I met my friend Troy (who Kackie calls Big Red), who is a Railman(builds railroads), a jokester, and who lost 150 lbs last year when he did the Appalachian Trail (he started over 400lbs)

Having Kackie broke me out of my rhythms and got me into new ones. She got most of my thoughts while she was with me and I don’t regret it.

In the coming weeks expect deep and strange thoughts from myself, alone once more.

Love

-Treebeard

I say this because as I have left the desert and entered the high sierra, I have also gained a companion—an 18 year old girl.  My sister Kackie has joined me for the famous John Muir Trail—going from mile 752-934 with the additions of Kearsarge pass, Mt. Whitney, and Lake Edison.

Hiking with someone else is different than hiking alone, routines change or are interrupted, tent sites must be big enough for more than 1, hitch hiking is now for 2 seats, and now someone hears all your conversations with the trees and gnomes and such.  

It is remarkable how quickly unsocialized you can become, not that I have been alone or antisocial but I have adjusted to being a solo entity, largely without regard for others. It’s like returning home from college to your familiar house when both you and your mother have forgotten how you fit into that same house cohesively.  Deciding when to stop, our what pace to go, which water to collect, which route to take or where to camp are no longer so simply whatever I want—I have to be part of a team/family/society again.  

Luckily Kackie is very patient with me as I am re-socialized and she is also very tough and flexible.  

Anyways, the past week has been unbelievably good in so many ways….

(Also, there are so many more pictures I want to include that I just can’t load in this one that will have to come later)

Day 37 [N/A] I took my first zero day of the trail and waited in Lone Pine for Kackie to arrive.  I spent more time in the library and then once she did we bought our food and did a tapas tour (went between the Mexican trucks, Hot Dog Stand, and Ice Cream Store).  -The Mexican was top tier.  -The hot dog guy is awesome and travels around the country doing pop up specialty hotdogs? Bacon wrapped, Brats, vegan, with homemade toppings (inc queso) @worldwideweiner

Day 38 [752-767.5] Me and Kackie got bagels, then took a shuttle with some British brothers I have befriended (I have dubbed them publicly Fish&Chips).  We pushed a long day of 20 miles to get to the campsite at the bottom of Mt.  Whitney.  I also took one of my favorite pictures of the trail.

Day 39 [Whitney] Our plan to wake up at 4:30 to beat any weather failed when we slept till 7:30 and then ate breakfast and coffee till 8:30.  Nonetheless once we got going we were flying up the trail, and because the summit was off the PCT, Kackie left her pack behind and I carried mine with only layers and snacks.  

-Many hikers were already coming down as we were ascending but it was fine because it was a blue sky day with no storms.  

At the top we saw Fish&Chips and I even gave them  “fags” to smoke with me in celebration.  

—> Up here I can say that I am higher up than any other person in Continental America standing on ground (14,505ft)

Day 40 [767-787] Today was a long and beautiful slog.  I say slog because there were 3 different river crossings were most people have to take their shoes off to wade across.  It was absolutely beautiful and we had a great time.  

After the river crossings we also had Forrester pass (13,200ft) the highest point on the PCT!

Coming down was some pretty sketchy ice but after some teaching Kackie’s ice sliding/hiking abilities improved exponentially.  By the end of the day we were exhausted and non-verbal.  We were happy and chatty again after eating some food.

^someone’s turned a bit treeish

Day 41 [787-789.6] Today we woke up early, hiked to the Kearsarge Pass junction and set up the tent where we left all of our stuff and Kackie’s pack.  Then we hiked 7.5 miles over Kearsarge pass which was (like everything here) beautiful.  We did this all so that we could do a 1 day resupply and not have to spend a night in town.  

—When we got to the trailhead from which we were going to hitch we saw the most beautiful sight a hiker can ever see—a tent with logos doing trail magic.  Durston, Zpacks, Mountain House Meals, and garage grown gear, amongst others had paid and given food and supplies to “Mac” to have at a tent where he gave it all away as “trail magic”.  For those who don’t know, Mac is like the president of the thru-hiking community, his blog/website www.halfwayanywhere.com is the #1 place for gear and trail info for the major thru hikes because he runs the hiker surveys.  So that was awesome!  At this trail magic we each got 3 mountain house meals ($15+ each) countless snacks, and more.  Kackie got a new titanium spoon, I got a new pair of gaiters.  

Then we got a biker to give us a hitch into town where we could top off our food resupply for the 5 day stretch where we hit the gas station for food and snacks and the mexican truck for some hot lunch.  

—As we were hiking back up moved the pass to where we left our stuff, some ominous clouds obscured the top of the mountain…uh oh.  That in addition to my vastly heavier pack on the way back up slowed us down.  But sometimes foolish confidence works well enough and we made it up and past the clouds without getting struck by lightning or rained on.  {it did snow/hail that night}

Day 42 [789-809] I woke up to a slushy but sunny morning and sat by the creek and read my bible and worked on my poem memorizing while Kackie slept in. Then we got going and did Glen pass.  We had a bit of trouble mid day and we realized that Kaxckie was dehydrated (Bad leadership @treebeard).   After getting Kackie hydrated we actually had a very good afternoon and made it to just below Pinchot pass.  At this point we learned what happens when too immature egos collide.  We probably should have stopped for the day but neither would admit they were tired, and despite supposedly being the more mature older brother I did not concede.  So with 35 minutes to sunset 1.1 miles to the top I bolted off at top speed.  (Definitely seeming like I had ditched my little sister in the dark, in the wilkderness) and made it up in 15 minutes where I dropped my pack before the summit, ran down and grabbed Kackie’s, and ran back up with it.  We both summited together just as the sun was setting, it was beautiful and we both apologized and enjoyed the sunsets.  

Day 43 [809.5-826] I cowboy camped and woke up well rested but covered in frost.  Then throughout the day I hiked through King’s canyon up to Mather pass.  It was beautiful walking.   It has been cool to watch Kackie as she gets much better at river crossings and drinking water and tent site selection and everything else which is cool to see.  We did have to descend the famous Golden Staircase, we icy is a long steep downhill and that cooked our knees.  Today we took a 2 or 3 hour break where we swam, washed our clothes and slowed down to enjoy the scenery.  It is hard to describe how bad I smelled before…

Day 44 [826-846] Today was mostly the long ascent to the famous Muir Pass.  This is an ascent that just keeps on going, but its hard to complain with views like these.   At the top of Muir pass is the famous Muir hut where we took our break.  Sadly, some dark clouds also made it up and we didn’t stay for long.  On the way down we were entranced by a beautiful lake and were “forced” to stay there for an hour or so while I swam.  Today I convinced Kackie to cowboy camp with me (no tent) and it was a great choice.  This was the most beautiful day on trail yet.  

Day 45 [8467-866] I woke up to a beautiful sunrise over the mountain valley and I didn’t even b have to leave my bag to watch it.  Now that I have essentially retired from tent life (except for storms) my mornings usually begin with Bible and poems and sunrise for the first hour where its too cold to get out of my bag.  An absolute joy.  By the end of the day we made it to the summit of Selden Pass where we camped!!! It was an even better view and coolest campsite ever.

Day 46 [866-881] As we woke up it felt like the swarm descended, bugs were in every breath and even on the summit there was no wind to blow them away.  We were fired up for cheeseburgers at VVR and were moving fast except for the 2 river crossings.  Somewhere along the way Kackie’s knee started hurting and only got worse.  By the end it was pretty bad and I was carrying her pack.  With the help of the trail we ended the day with good fresh food, ice cold beers, and Toby Keith.  It seemed only me, Kackie, and the Chef knew Courtesy of The Red White and Blue but that only made us sing it louder and more often (we had the aux).  That and some Keystone light and I was a happy camper.  

Day 47 [881-886?] I am writing this day’s entry at lunch so I don’t know how tonight will go.  I am eating a large burger, I had a big breakfast, I am very happy.  Kackie has been stretching and icing and seems to be doing better so we are going to do 5 slow miles for rehab tonight. 

I’m not sure how brother-sister relationships are supposed to work.  All the brothers that hang out with sisters seem to do so with older sisters and are usually efeminized/socialized by them.  Aside from threatening to beat up their boyfriends in high school and eventually being the cool uncle there’s not much of an example set.  Because little sisters are still girls, but they’re also your sister.  What topics or behaviors are normal for brothers to little sisters?

I have no idea… So Kackie has been hearing lots of advice and a lot of farts from her big brother, but I am so carry heavy things for her and make her coffee.  This is the best i have figured out…

Koon thought of the week: iIf demons are real and inside of people then surely they must feed on attention.  But then, how does one fight something without giving it attention? 

-My best thoughts in this case are that against such foes we can use neither sword nor spear and that we instead turn our shields inside out like Archimedes and through prayer reflect that devastating divine light.  To use a strength which is entirely not ours. 

Love

-Treebeard

Every year for the Fourth of July, I try to make some sort of video or essay to post our share. Usually I talk about American exceptionalism, freedom, or morality.  Being the patriot at the party has always been a natural role to me. What can I say… I look good wearing the stars and stripes, I have no trouble drinking American beers, and I love to be loud.  Those things about me are still true (I’m even wearing my signature bandana right now) but for some reason this year I’m not feeling the same wave of patriotism.

Maybe it’s the hiker culture, or that I’m too far from the south, and maybe I’ve just grown cynical lately—but this year (even for the big 250) I’m really just not feeling it.  

As I’m trying to be fervently patriotic I cannot help but think of the disaster of the Iran war, the freemasonry of the founding fathers, the societal and political indifference to the Epstein scandal, and the sweeping cultural degradation, utter secularization, and demographic collapse of our nation.  I cannot help but ask sadly:

-Are we still the America I always loved so proudly? 

-What would the founders or the dead of Omaha and Okinawa say if they saw their nation now?

And worst of all

-Were we ever even that Nation on a hill or was it all a lie?

—This pessimistic state is where I was this morning. 

Today was the 4th of July and we were 15 miles from Vermillion Valley where cheeseburgers, cold beers, and surely some fellow patriots waited to welcome my sister and I to society after a week in the woods.  

With about 10 miles left we hit a wet and windless stretch of trail and found ourselves miserably swarmed by bugs, swallowing some with each breath.   After another mile, Kackie’s knee began to hurt, a few miles more and she was limping and in serious pain.  Eventually she was injured to the point where I was carrying her pack in addition to my own just so she could limp down the Mountain.  

With 3 miles to go, the trail joined a dirt road and after a while two trucks passed us and offered rides when they were coming back in a few hours, but hungry—we stumbled on.  

Then came a Grateful Dead stickered Jeep packed with 6 characters covered in piercings and colorful tattoos, a dog, and a roof rack overflowing with backpacks.  They immediately pulled over to ask if my sister was OK and upon learning of her struggle the three dudes and girl in the back hopped out of the jeep, and without even consulting the driver they volunteered the jeep to give her a ride while they waited on the side of the road.  

They fervently rejected any payment or compensation and acted legitimately happy to help us and to have met us.  We learned that they were locals and members of a reggae band (they smelled like they had been practicing), and that they each had permanent Fridays off in the summer to have time to hike.  They could tell from the cross and flag that I carry on my pack that we may have been different sorts of people but they didn’t care at all.  They were happy and eager to help.

As they drove Kackie the last 2.5 miles I ran as fast as I could (to maintain my continuous footpath).  While I was running I was so overcome with gratitude for these people that I was really becoming quite emotional.  

When they, returning, passed me running down the road, they stopped to say goodbye and that my sister was safely dropped off.  I thanked them and said to them emotionally what I had realized.

“I’ve been having a tough time loving America this week, but YOU GUYS ARE WHY I LOVE AMERICA”

-They returned to me “we feel the same about you my friend” and drove away waving and smiling earnestly with Rosalie McFall playing.  

This exchange may be meaningless (or worse) just cheesy to some of you, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it.  

Even if all the worst possible things imaginable are true about “America”.  If the American Empire is fading, if Trump is compromised by the Epstein files, if nobody will ever afford a house again, if the moon-landing was fake, if America was created by the Illuminati, if Mossad controls the CIA, if America will become a communist totalitarian technocracy—-it doesn’t matter.  It doesn't matter at because patriotism is a duty and more importantly it was never the government that I should have loved.

No matter how bad things are (or seem) to be—> I love America because of the deadheads who get out of their car to give you a ride.  I love America because of the veteran living in a wind farm who gives his well-water to hikers.  I love America for the waitress who gave me 14 water refills when I was dehydrated.  I love America for my Ommish hiker buddy, for my Marxist guitarist hiker buddy, for the trees, for the mountains and the park rangers.  

I don’t need to love our country for any reason other than the fact that it is mine and that I am its. Maybe next year I will make another argument for why America is “the best” but I shouldn’t need to.  Your mom’s pie recipe doesn’t have to be world renown for you to call it the best in the world—you just call it that because it is to you.  

We have been spoiled growing up surrounded by such American excellence that now in the digital age as we realize that we are only great and not perfect we feel cheated.  This happens to every kid when he learns that his dad isn’t actually superhuman, it doesn’t make the kid’s love less real afterwards but moreso.

So for today, the 4th of July, I love America because of deadheads and that is more than enough. To me, America might be a lot like those hikers who helped us. I disapprove of their sexual ethics and career choices, they disapprove of my conservative religious stiffness—but we both love the mountains and regardless of lifestyle the Grateful Dead are a beautiful American treasure.

Out of love I will fight for my way and they for theirs, but on the way I’ll return the favor and pick up stinky deadhead hitchhikers if I see them.

God Bless America

The best I can communicate is to say this–as you picture me these days, imagine me smiling ear to ear with my eyes wide open.  I am sticking my head in every stream, touching every sequoia tree, yelling at every marmot, cackling at every gust of wind, and stopping for every sunset.   I am thoroughly smitten once more by my old love, true mountains.  

But, much of my ecstasy in the Sierras comes from the relief they have offered to the final stretch of the desert which was absolutely brutal.  Somehow, we had it in our heads that the last 150 miles of desert were less desertish as they approached the mountains–this is far from the truth.  Those 150 miles were very hard.   

[[In these descriptions I got a little more descriptive than I would have liked so feel free to skip, skim, or even just browse the pictures.]]

Day 28 [566-576] As you may remember from the last chapter, I had been invited to stay with some people at their Airbnb.  Anyways, I woke up early to the violent radiance of the rising sun cooking me as I lay on the turf of the backyard.  Nothing makes you so aware of your lack of sleep, the coors banquets you drank, and your miles on trail, as such a wakeup by the desert sun. {I don’t always do a good job of resting on my rest days} Then I cooked myself a bunch of eggs and my leftover bratwursts(enough of Emriique’s restaurant quality French vegan)!!! 

I spent the next couple hours reading, journaling, and writing letters.  It was a very good day.  Then in the evening I ubered to the trail and began the steep ascent back up, 17 miles to water.  That night as I hiked there was my favorite sunset yet on trail and I listened to a Jason Isbell album and felt very cinematic-and don’t you dare tell me I wasn’t.   Then I thought: “It would be way more cinematic if all my letters hadn’t been to dudes”

Day 29 [576-608.8] I woke up at 5 to beat the heat and hiked the remaining 9 miles to a spring and chugged a couple liters of water as fast as I could filter it.  After this water carry there was another 20 mile stretch (ugh).  Those 20 miles ended up occurring throughout the heat of the day (mid 90s with UV of 11) and were very dry and very hot.  Throughout the day I would stop and talk to strangers and try to be nice.  And as always I found myself proudly picking up trash (treebeard environmentalism). 

-Yet, at the end of this monster day where I did everything right, something felt wrong–I felt bad, maybe even guilty.  I say this now because maybe sometime I’ll figure out why and tell you, for now let's just call it dehydration.  

Day 30 [608.8-635.4] Today was worse, a 23 mile water carry with no shade.  To make matters worse, I overslept and so had even less productive hiking in the cool morning hours.  This carry was very hard, and at the end the trail turned to soft sand which zaps your energy and slows you down by at least 35%.  But ¾ through the day I got cell service and found that I had some nice/any texts from friends and was so happy and energized that it turned my day around and I was flying again.  (I guess I’m not so complicated)  Then I cooked dinner by the water and hiked to the summit of a nearby peak where it was very windy–this meant no bugs, cold air, downhill to start the next day and I slept like a rock.

Day 31 [635-665] I woke up and was in good spirits to start (downhill!) I made it 18 miles by noon and was feeling great. I had planned on taking a siesta to beat the heat between 1-3, but when I found myself crossing the road at noon ahead of schedule I couldn’t resist and hitched myself a ride(still got it!).  In the town I found the divebar, got a double cheeseburger and a beer and watched USA beat Australia in Soccer with the noon Friday regulars.  I obviously had to get a beer to make friends with these beautiful (exclusively Mexican) new friends of mine.  1 beer, however was like a horse tranquilizer and I knew a second would put me to sleep and so I went next door to the ice cream shop.  I got a milkshake and an icecream sundae.  Then I hitched a ride with 3 nice hippies who were going to the trailhead.  (I later found out that they were a thrupple) ((the girl had the hairiest legs I have ever seen on a woman and top 5 hairiest for a man)) After this I cruised some evening miles with a full stomach and had the time of my life recklessly running down all the hills.  It is crazy how happy food makes me.  I love running downhill!

Day 32 [665-688.5] I slept in after my late night to bed but woke up covered in dew–the penalty of not sleeping in a tent.  Then I hiked casually for a while until about 4 when I saw a sign that said “trail magic ahead.”  There was a former hiker “Spilly”  a photographer from LA who loved hanging out with the community and who had a box full of chips and rice krispy treats, a cooler full of beer, and a winebag!  He also has a camera setup to take hiker portraits(mine will come in a week). There with him were a number of hikers whose ambitions had been spoiled by generosity, some of whom had become quite drunk.  I joined the commotion and made merry for a few hours (wisely avoiding the winebag) before night hiking another few miles ahead.  

Day 33 [688.5-704] I woke up and hiked downhill to Kennedy meadows.  I passed mile 700.  There started to be water.  At Kennedy Meadows I got a large pizza, a double cheeseburger, a pint of ice cream, a sleeve of oreos, and even charmed my way with the cooks to have their leftover Burritos de chicharrón.  

Day 34 [704-726] I probably sound like a fremen from Dune or a stoner or surfer or something but WOW! 

Water really is Life 

And WOW!!

Did you ever really see the color green?

And WOW!!!

I love the birds chirping, and I love watching the moon grow each night, and I can’t believe I have seen more deer today than rattlesnakes in all the desert

Yeah, it was that kind of day. And to further the (incorrect) suspicions that I’m on drugs, tonight when I cooked dinner I played a Grateful Dead album and for the first time I actually liked them.  Top 1 dinner spot so far btw

JUST LOOK AT ALL THE GREEN

Day 35 [726-751]  The great hiking continues… Also, I met a Polish girl named Alexandra with a 50lb pack who barely spoke English. I gave her lots of advice on what to throw away and how to ship much of the extra weight ahead.  Anyways, pray for her because she needs it.  (picture of her comically large pack below) Then I made it to another lovely campsite and fell asleep.  

Day 36 [751-752] Today I hiked down off the trail to meet my sister Kackie who is going to hike with me for the next few weeks.  I’m pumped to have a friend and a sister at that! More on this later.  

I don’t think I had realized the spiritual and psychological effects of the desert on me until I left.  Now I feel as though a weight has been lifted from my mind, body and spirit and I feel truly encouraged.  

Anyone, over the next few months feel free to

-text me

-send me books to listen to

-send me albums to listen to

-ask me questions to think about

-rent computing power from my head and have me ponder existential questions for you while I hike

-criticize my blog posts or other writing or thoughts or behaviors or actions

The Lord’s Prayer appears in both the Gospel of Mathew and the Gospel of Luke and in both cases it is given to us by Jesus.  In Luke 11:2-4, Jesus gives the prayer when his disciples ask him “how do we pray?” 

In Matthew 6:9-13, Jesus gives the prayer as part of his sermon on the Mount when he as he is rebuking long, public, and extravagant prayer.  

Jesus says not to pray extravagantly primarily due to the reality that those who exalt themselves by the skill of their prayer make their blessing only Earthly: to enhance reputation. 

The less obvious reason Jesus rebukes extravagant, personal, emotional prayer is that “your father knows what you need before you ask him.”  This is the point that I think frames the structure of the prayer—that prayer is not about asking God for things but about coming into God’s will. It is about making ourselves want what God in his infinite wisdom gives us.  

This prayer is packed with wisdom and power and is found directly in the Bible. To me it is surprising that it is not the source of annual sermons in every church ranging from this most to the least traditional.  And yet, it is said blandly and often ignored by many.  But it has been a fascination of mine in the woods!

—So without further delay, let’s dive in line by line and just scrape the surface of the infinite wisdom of Christ.

There are two things I will ask you to keep in mind throughout this prayer, the first is the present tense of the prayer, the second is that it is said in the first person plural. +The collective “our” and “we” of the first person plural remind us that we neither are nor should be alone, this prayer and our live as Christians are not “individual” but “collective.” We are firstly members of the body of the Church, the bride of Christ, we are not individuals acting alone. +The present tense shows that the prayer is simultaneously a request, a promise, and acknowledgement/praise.

Our Father, which art in heaven,

God is our father, we are his sons and daughters, we are bearers of his divine image.  At the same time of our filial connection to God, he is also the transcendent divinity of the heavens beyond our existence and comprehension.

Hallowed be thy Name,

The Lord’s name is holy (obviously) and so we say this as acknowledgment and praise. But also as we pray this we vow to make it holy ourselves.  This is not a request but a promise to fulfill our responsibility as humans and as Christians. This is a calling and sacred oath for us to shape our lives around.  

Thy kingdom come,

The LORD’s kingdom is coming in the eschatological (end times) sense—yes.  But also, the kingdom is always coming and has already come in the person of Jesus.  “The Kingdom of God is within you” “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” etc.  This is less of a request for God’s action but an acknowledgment of it! It also reveals part of our responsibility.

Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

And so this continues as we promise to make Earth like heaven.  This is not a boast of our power, nor fantastical Utopianism, it is a summation of the life of the Christian.  We are to bring the glory of the Lord into the world as the glory of the Lord has been brought into us!  This acknowledges both God’s supreme power that nothing can happen unless he allows it, but also our responsibility to carry out his will. Beauty, goodness, truth and love are the qualities of heaven and the result of God’s will being done—so too should they be the signs of a Christian society.

Give us this day our daily bread;

Here we acknowledge our own powerlessness, we cannot continue in our service without that spiritual food and drink of the Lord which sustains us.  We are in need of sustaining not once, not occasionally, but always, every day.  And so we return to Christ every day for this sustaining.  

The point of Holy Communion and the Christian life of which it is the summation is:

“that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us”

We are to become little Christs by consuming Christ!!!

And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us;

And the reason we need this sustaining is because we constantly destroy ourselves through our sinning.  We ask for mercy with the promise that we will also be merciful to those who sin against us.  We promise to love and forgive not to earn our salvation but because of it.  

And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil.

The prayer ends with the only actual request that we really make for the future.  This request is not for prosperity, nor for happiness, but to give us a burden we can bear.  This acknowledges that nothing happens without God’s willing, God only allows as many demons around a man as he can withstand.  And so we pray for direction, and in our kneeling, looking up, and praising God we find our compass and the so prayer works.  

For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen.

This addendum is not in the Bible but is a liturgical invention of the first century.  Roman Catholics separate this from the Lord’s Prayer by a few moments but still say it.  Either way it is an embellishment.  A beautiful, spiritual decoration.  The wording of seems to spiral up into heaven as we lift our hearts and minds eye spiritually to heaven for guidance throughout this prayer.   

Stay tuned for the rest of the thought…

It is said that “a man who lives alone is either a beast or a god”.  I would further this by saying the man who living alone becomes a beast begins to think he is a god.  

—The trail has humbled me enough to ensure I do not think myself a god and to avoid becoming a beast I knew I needed some friends.

Yes, I am writing this from an AirBnb that I am sharing with 11 other hikers as I enjoy a coors banquet.  Last night we all cooked a big dinner together, drank together, and sang together.  After a restful night of food and friendship with these people I will leave them to continue ahead and past them on my own pat as they stay for a full rest day.  

For reference this group has

-2 Australian couples

-a French chef

-a critical race theory scholar/ guitar player

-a ski bum

-a very familiar seeming triple crowner from Wilmington with his online girlfriend

-an overwhelmed Omish 18 year old

-a nuclear physicist/former college trackathlete

A group which is very strange for reality and very common for the pct

Day 23 [454.7-478.3]- Woke up in a hammock at the weird “Oasis”, hiked 23 miles to the fire station which hosts hikers.  Because the fire station is such a good place to stop I went less far than I might have—this gave me extra time to write and to socialize. I then withdrew to my own spot for some quiet space to camp.

Day 24 [478.3-504.5] Every day at the fire station there is a kind Christian man who cooks pancakes for hikers at 6am.  At least a dozen hikers grabbed a flapjack, me and a group stayed for about an hour and ate our fill.  This forced even more fellowship. I passed the 500 mile mark. I explored a cave. I also love that because the trail signs are steel they serve as pistol targets. I ran into the track physicist at a water source (the water now is in underground cisterns like in Dune!) at the end of the day and ended up in a long conversation with him and then ended up cooking dinner and camping with him and two others.  It was pretty nice not camping alone.  

Day 25 [504.5-517.8] Today was just a short 12 miles to get to “hikertown”.  Which is an abandoned movie set/hiker waiting spot at the beginning of the Mojave desert crossing.  Hikers usually rest here before hiking the LA aqueduct across the desert through the night to avoid the heat.  I had slowed my pace to be able to hike the culturally iconic aqueduct night hike with a group.  On my way down to the aqueduct I hiked with a Dutch-German man who studied/worked as a global economist, and was an Olympic rower!  Very interesting conversations about both subjects for a number of hours. Hikertown was very sketchy for a number of reasons but they did have an old limo to drive us to a gas station burrito???

Day 26 [517.8-549.7] A group of at least 14 woke up at 2am and began the trek across the dessert.  The first 6 miles or so were across the metal aqueduct before it went underground and then we walked on the concrete above it.  Hiking at night with a group was fun, the vibes were very high.  Then as the sun came up we were approaching 20 miles of continuous hiking!

As the sun rose the group began to split up as people veered off to use the bathroom or have individual conversations and the blob turned into a stretched line across the desert.  The aqueduct also turned into a vast expanse of wind farm with the strange whirring and occasional screeching of windmills. From 11-4 we napped under a tree.  Then we hiked another 7 mile to water. The feeling of community was fun and encouraging for such a long day.  

Day 27 [549.7-566] Most people woke up at 4:30 to make it the 16 miles into town before the sun got high.  I slept in till almost 6 but caught up to them.  We got into town by noon and then hit the bottomless Chinese buffet for $16.  (Yes I got my money’s worth, yes my stomach was ruined) Then we went to walmart to resupply which was overwhelming compared to the gas stations we are used to.  Then we went to the Airbnb and the French chef made us some food and I cooked bratwursts and drank some beers.  

-I will now pass all these new friends and go out on my own again, but they will pass me when my sister joins me.  I can say confidently that we will both be happy when that meeting happens.  

-The saying “you may be the only Bible some people ever read” is an incredibly daunting task and one that makes me very nervous.  

-On a similar note, you may be the only conservative a leftist ever speaks to.  I feel much more confident about this representation than the first

—>This means my priorities are out of order

There is much work to do

At this point I am shortening the daily descriptions to a minimum and will be focusing more on bigger thoughts and alternate essays which (I promise) are soon to come.

-In this section it seemed like there kept being reasons for me to push farther than before and I kept accepting the challenge and as I write now, my feet hurt.

Day 15 [266-280.2] Big Bear—>Campsite

Sleep in at hostel (beds are awesome!!!), sent pack home/switched to alternate pack at post office, sat at Starbucks all day to wait out the heat and wrote a couple updates 

Day 16 [280.2-314.3] Campsite—> Joshua Inn (The Bar!!!)

Upon waking up I realized that there was a bar that would let me stay on their back porch—I have never moved so hard and so fast.  I made it a career high 34 miles!!! But like in the attaining of all good things I was harassed by wicked forces. Luckily, they only sent a rattle snake and I had a knife.  The bar was great and all the rednecks loved my rattle.  All small town Americans are the same no matter where-they’re beautiful. 

Day 17 [314.3-341] Joshua Inn—>Cajon Pass (McDonalds!!!)

I woke up on the stage behind the bar where I had camped.  Impressing the rednecks with my love of beer was great for making friends and memories, it was bad for rehydrating after a big day…. I didn’t get back on trail until 10am.  Quickly upon arriving to trail, I realized that there was a McDonald’s .5 miles from the trail just 26 miles ahead.  My hangover quickly turned to ambition and around 9:30 pm I arrived to my feast of Big Macs and nuggets before retiring in a a creek bed barely back on trail.  

Day 18 [341-366] Cajon Pass—> Wrightwood Resupply 

The sequential hard days had gotten to me, as had the effects of the McDonald’s slop, I was feeling slow.  So I made my way on over to McDonald’s again for breakfast (duh).  After that was my worst day on trail, 24 miles all uphill, and I managed to step in a puddle to start the day so my foot was wet.  Somehow Mcdoinks made me feel worse than my already unhealthy diet of Ramen? Also, some Mexican kids almost shot me while testing their new pistol in the woods and I thought they were cartel. The day ended with me atop a peak, looking down at Wrightwood (several hours later than planned) and I had a brutal 3 miles of switchbacks off trail just to get to town.  My knees hurt too bad to walk, so recklessly I just ran down.  At the bottom I got a very cozy hiker hostel, a box of captain crunch, a half gallon of milk, took a shower, and absolutely crashed into the depths of sleep. 

—————

Day 19 [366-379.5] Wrightwood—> Baden-Powell Summit Campsite

In Wrightwood I woke up and went to the local Methodist church (see essay linked here) left Wrightwood restored, road walked 4 miles to meet the trail and happily walked along. I also decided to bring myself hot dogs for dinner which I never regret. I went through a spooky burn zone, passed the 1/7th mark!!! And even sat on a burn surviving bench and tried to write a poem about it.  Then I joined my family for a zoom call from another beautiful bench (lots of great benches), and then as the sunset was fading I made it to the summit of Baden-Powell.  I watched this for some time then I hiked in the dark and fell asleep in the well of a fallen tree.

I also took the best pictures of the trail yet today.   

Day 20 [379.5-411.8] Baden-Powell—->Campsite

Day 20 had more friendship than the rest of the trail combined. After my solitary morning prayer walk I caught up with Sparkles the 40 year old ex Mormon and we talked for several hours.  Then I met ex marine and cannabis enthusiast-ultra marathoner “Ounce”. Then at camp I met a bookworm ski-bum my age “perch” to cook dinner and camp with.  Friendship was very fulfilling and energizing

Day 21 [411.8-444.5] Campsite- Creek Campsite

I woke up alone because I overslept (7:00 am) and then hiked 33ish miles alone.  This sucked.  My stomach hurt, I had some “indegestion” which is especially unpleasant without a bathroom, and I felt lowly.  Inevitably by the evening I was feeling good again and I ended up hiking into the late night in the dark (which I loved) even cooking dinner at sunset before continuing. I later lay down on the ground in some random place and slept.  

Day 22 [444.5-455] Creek Campsite—> Agua Dulce Resupply @Serenity Oasis

I woke up to the sounds of a train horn blast, terrified.  I scrambled up afraid I had fallen asleep on the tracks to be run over… I had not.  Some hours later I got up (7:30) and then slogged the 10 miles to town for hot food and resupply.  Here in town I got a full pizza, ice-cream, Gatorade and tacos (some of the best) all in the Mexican grocery store.  The Campsite is run by a hippie redneck “Farmer John” who loves giving out some Mary Jane and only plays reggae.  Its a very hiker vibe, and although its not necessarily my vibe they let me take the bike to buy some beer so I am very happy.  

{For anyone who needs a laugh, just imagine ultra conservative koon with his cross and flag befriending a multitude of very hippy hippies] (I’m working on my tactics)

——-

The trails is something very different for each hiker. For Sparkles it is because she is unemployed, got dumped and was evicted.  For “Ounce” it is because he wanted to put his body to the test and smoke all day while doing it.  For “Perch” it is something to do in between Ski seasons.  For me I think its something else entirely, although that’s mainly my ego speaking. To think reductively would be to find whatever it is that each person is running (or hiking) away from.  Perhaps to think positively is to ask what each person is moving towards.  

Ultimately, everyone’s life is running from something and to something else—the languages of movement away is just usually used as a pejorative. 

I think as a Christian we are foolish to ignore the spiritual underpinning of such drastic action.  People hiking thousands of miles especially must truly be searching or running from something if they have taken such drastic action.  As a Christian and as a man who is (I hope) here as he is searching for Christ, I am increasingly encouraged by people who are courageous enough to search, to admit their lostness. Although they don’t necessarily think their longing is for him.

How many people live lives in which they are totally lost and too proud to be seen searching?

How many Christians are searching less eagerly for the transcendent beyond than these loser hippies ?

My apologetics need serious recalibrating towards hippies but I think we’re making progress.  Most of all the mountains are stunning.  

God Bless,

Treebeard

As I was catching a ride from a bearded man in a big truck, some Californians watching (who themselves didn't offer a ride)  warned me scornfully “be careful.” Other Las Angeleans in with second homes in Idyllwild also warned me of the “local redneck trash” with completed assurance that I too hated them.  I thought about these encounters for while and have an essay coming soon on the subject…

ANYWAYS… I was dropped off at the trail and had to resume the same brutal slog up those switch backs to get back to the trail with all the water I could carry.  For some strange reason I wasn’t angry for the climb, or scared, or anxious. 

I was feeling calm, strong, and excited for the beginning of the real adventure.  “I sure loved having a buddy but lets see what I can really do now” I thought confidently.

I then proceeded from the trail another several miles and thousand feet of elevation up to the summit of San Jacinto.  So much for easing back onto the trail…

But it was absolutely worth it.  At 10,834 ft tall and being the 6th most prominent peak in the lower 48 (8,319 ft prominence) it was absolutely stunning.  

Once at that view I knew I couldn’t go further or dare to miss the sunset, so I set up my pack and pad at the top and for the first time of the trip truly sat and enjoyed a view.  And with that, I also did my first typing! (Sorry I’ve been behind)

Standing there above the endless sea of clouds with a stomach full of town food, fresh shoes, the wind in my hair and the sun on my face I could not be stopped, I could do anything.  “This trail will be wonderful.”

I even found out that there is an old abandoned cabin near the summit where I could escape the cold and wind of the summit and more importantly, begin early the next day for my long descent!

The next day I woke up in the cabin and began early.  

I was moving fast and I seldom stopped.  By 1:00 I had done 20 miles, by 5:00 I had done 28. -The day was all downhill and I was rolling smooth.  I stopped by a sweet lady's house to charge my phone and get a water before pushing another 2 before bed.  I fell asleep exhausted and proud.  

^(actual desert like the movies as I leave pretty mountains)

Pride comes before the fall and that Sunday was (like many of a different sort before it) my reckoning.  I struggled to get up with my alarm and then lost my breath quickly while walking.  In about the same amount of time I had gone 15 miles the day before I barely managed 9.  I was probably just tired…

Luckily at mile 9 was the first/last/only river of the desert section and I was able to bathe, drink, and relax.  

After washing off I tried (unsuccessfully) to find a place with some shade to wait out the peak sun of the day.  —->I actually ended up just burning my legs.  

After that was 7 miles to the next water source and so I got going and resumed my audiobook.  

—>Advice for hiking alone: DON'T READ The Road BY CORMAC MCCARTHY

The book is masterfully written (hypnotically so in my case) and is about a man and his son wandering a road as they starve to death and are hunted by cannibals…. Yeah, horrible, horrible, horrible for a solo and hungry hiker.

At one point I was exhausted and taking a nap under the tree and realized I wasn’t distinguishing between the nonsensical internal monologue of the starving protagonist acceptant of his death and my own.  What is wrong with me????

—-> Anyways, It was silence for the rest of the day and I’m only listening to epic or fantasy from now on!!!

{{for anyone doubting the power of literature-> go to the desert alone and briefly lose your mind}}

When I finally reached the next little creek bed I sat down angry with myself and cursing the desert, pissed I was stuck on this trail, lonely and just altogether down in the dumps. —-> So yeah, it took me less than 2 days alone to completely unravel.  

Looking back I can say technically that I was sunburnt, dehydrated, and probably lonely.  But in the moment (and in actuality) it was an immensely spiritual darkness that I felt.  I remember looking at the great cliffs surrounding me, the lizards crawling, and even the stream trickling but with indifference—I in my “misery” had so quickly become completely blind to the grandeur of creation which I am often so proud to notice.  The world of course is always “charged with the grandeur of God” but I was having no part of it.  

I sat there praying angrily for God to make me happy again (yes, like a 4 year old). It didn’t work and so I just stumbled along the rockbed for another several hours.  Finally, I saw a campsite that would work, and just as I put my pack down Victor the Ukrainian who passed me that morning popped out.

  F**K!! I said, maybe even loudly enough for him to hear, I hope not.  

Victor invited me to camp with him and then even convinced me when I objected.  I grumpily set up my tent and then sprinkled myself in the stream ( a luxury I was too angry to celebrate).  Then me and Victor cooked dinner and ate together (15 yards apart from our adjacent campsites) and we talked for about an hour in his broken English.  We talked about the war, and about his window installation service, and his baby son, and about trucks.  

I don’t know how to say this in my prideful intellectual way, so at the risk of sounding like a silly evangelical: It feels like Victor the fat Ukrainian was a total gift from God.  Just that little bit of friendship lifted my spirits more than almost any other experience in my life.

After that day I hiked 26.5 miles easily and was happy as a peach on the trail.  Somehow I got out of the weird dead zone of the trail I had been where there were no people and got to seeing tons of people.  

None of the Europeans are particularly fond of the cross and American flag on my pack(even the hot French girl), the American hippies are even less fond.  But I’m gonna win them all over. And if all else fails I can slow down and hang with Victor!

The next day (Tuesday, June 2) I quickly pushed the 11 miles to the town of Big Bear!  It was a great day.  

I hit 1/10th done with the trail 265 miles!!! I slept in an international hostel (interesting folks believe it or not), I sat in a pizza shop for 5 hours and updated my blog as well as ate several pizza, and my weight returned to a normal 203 from the hungry dehydrated 192 of my arrival. Finally I slept wonderfully in a bed and very much appreciated a shower.  

—I found a spare backpack in the hiker box that I’m gonna try out—this could be a legendary pull or a horrible/hilarious mistake.  

—Now I’m sitting in Starbucks on Wednesday, June 3rd publishing this before I go out to the trail and try to push the 20 miles to the next water source tn.  First night hike!!!!

Wish me luck!!

-Treebeard

Day 5.  Leaving Julian we had a famous Trail Angel (someone who helps hikers) named “The Professor” [a beautifully strange man and is certainly autistic] scheduled to give us a ride at 8:00.  So me, John, Tim, and Frenchie went ahead and got another meal in town to start us off.  I crushed my second Chicken and Waffles of the stay and was almost moved to tears again. (Mainly because they give a thorough relapse to my butter addiction)

On the trail we began the long and gradual ascent again.  On this occasion, for the first time since the start of the trip we put in headphones.  I am proud we made it 5 days of just talking, but man did it feel good to have music for a brutal uphill.  

-With the combination of music and a full stomach we crushed another 24, effectively neutralizing our 11 mile resupply night in Julian and keeping our average mileage at 20.  

Day 6

We wake up and for the first time there is some sign of weather—a deep fog descended over the mountains.  This made for a confusing wake up, a remarkably pleasant morning, and my favorite pictures of the trip yet.  Also on this morning we passed the famous “Eagle Rock” and our first natural stream of the trail!  

We then stop at Warner Springs which is only a half mile off trail for a half resupply and some microwave pizzas while we wait out the mid day heat before crossing out further into the vast expanse.  We end up camping at a dry campsite but one overlooking the cliff, we get our first sunset of the trip and I begin to remember the numinous beauty of the terrain.  

Day 7

Once more we wake up to clouds over our campsite and begin hiking.  We begin to enter some truly strange parts of the trail—the wilderness is a strange mix of industrial, desert, and I don’t know what else.  

We power our way 9 miles to Mike’s place which is itself strange but of course such a blessing to have water offered.  

Than we push another 12 miles into the strangest looking thing yet. A half mile off the trail there is what looks like Spawn Ranch from Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.  There are people in their underwear, a brown pool, broken flapping tents, an abandoned looking trailer, and a half dozen dogs of all different kinds.  —I eventually realize that the people in their underwear are hikers drying from their swim, and rather than being hippies for being in their underwear they are actually conservative for wearing any clothes at all. 

 [{Of course I use the word conservative loosely as most people seem astonished or even hurt to see a person hiking with a cross and flag}]

-And the owner is not some druggie but a kind mexican veteran who is just extremely friendly and ALSO hates the government.  The multitude of dogs is so they can team up to hunt coyotes.  Stop Judging Henry

We leave this strange place to try to get a few miles further and maybe more normal to sleep—but the strangeness is not over.  We see a what looks like a combination of a Middle Eastern Royalty’s Oasis and something from Burning Man.  Several tents aligned together, books, couches and chairs all just a couple hundred yards off the trail.  Clearly it had been quite the party spot weeks ago according to the evidence of beer cans in the trash bins, but now in the late season it was abandoned.  

-And most importantly, because there was tents already set up, I didn’t have to take ours down for the morning and I slept all the better!

Day 8

In the morning I found out that this Oasis also had an Archery Range!! So I had some good fun while John taped up his 8 blisters.  9 Miles later we got to the road where we walked a mile off trail to paradise valley cafe and crushed a monster breakfast and then desserts once lunch came around. 

After our massive lunch we began our climb up to 9,000 ft.  This climb is absolutely beautiful and is a true diamond in the desert.  There was views, wind, cliffs, everything.  I was absolutely invigorated.  Eventually the wind turned dangerous and the cool air turned to freezing.  I may have overestimated the safety of our camping site and we had to push chic her in some seriously legit weather.  

By the end of this very long day we were seriously limping, had there not been this storm coming on we would have surely camped on the side of the trail but I had read about a spot by a cave where we would be protected.  

We finally got there just as the last light was fading, we could hear the wind howling above but it wasn’t hitting us.  Finally it was cold enough for me to really sleep well!!

(I tried to underplay the prescience of mice to John)

Day 9

At about 5 am I rolled over to a wide awake John, he hadn’t slept as well as I had…. To make matters worse it looked like his feet might be actually injured, those miss had been making noise all night, his food bag had been chewed through, and in our haste to safety last night we had bypassed the water source.  But on the bright side there had been so much ice in the clouds we could get some water from the bush icicles!

Those were the longest 8 miles maybe ever.  We practically crawled our pace was so slow.  Finally we reached some water to filter, drank and improved marginally.

The last 2.5 mile trail down to town descended several thousand feet and that was brutal too.  Infinite credit is deserved by John, he was beyond beat up by the trail and didn’t complain once.  He also did 180 miles wearing borrowed Keens!  

—In Idylkwild we enjoyed our first shower of the trail, some hot food, and our first bed in some time.  

Having a friend join me was absolutely everything, starting this trail alone would have been infinitely harder than what was already difficult.  Good laughs, shared misery, and even the occasional opportunity to have expertise lifted my spirits in more ways than John will ever know.  

^hiking with a buddy is the best

The trail will get harder, darker, and stranger in this next phase.  I pray all these things work in the service of my growth however it may go.

The adventure continues!

Stay tuned to hear what happens….

(in the future-expect updates to be more thoughtful and less daily details)

After housing a stack or two we head off onto the trail—and we’re the first one’s to leave!

The first 8 miles absolutely fly by, conversation ins flowing, the trail is mostly flat, and it isnt hot yet.  The daunting first day had to be 20 miles because there is no water until mile 20–but this seemed easy all of a sudden because we were half way done by 10:30

-We were sure that we were somehow unusually gifted natural hikers and that things wouldn’t be so bad as we thought.  

Then we descended down into Hauser canyon…another great sign. (John’s last name is Hauser) We took a break at the bottom of the canyon with spirits high.  

As soon as we began our ascent of the canyon we hit a wall, the sun had got to its peak and it was well into the 90s, and we had a 2000 foot climb out of the canyon. 

We stumbled into our campground at 2:30, incredibly (and unnecessarily) early.  [After that day we adpted taking breaks during the hottest parts of the day]

—The PCT is gentle as you get in (aside from the heat, snakes, mountains, and lack of water) because it goes through small towns or campgrounds at least every couple day for the first few weeks.  ++At the end of day 1, we were rewarded with a gas station diner and doubled cheseburgers and milkshakes.  Well deserved!!!

And after our meal, we sat around and introduced ourselves to the other hikers who made the 20 mile push—our friends or the next few months.  

Then, as soon as the sun set, we fell into dark dreamless sleep…

Day 2-  My sleeping pad continually deflated throughout the night, I gradually realized that it had popped. Ugh!  In my tiredness I just slapped some duck tape on it and went back to bed as it related more slowly.  In my fatigue I slept well enough and despite waking on a completely flat pad (and a large rock under my back) I slept well enough.  Only later in the day as I was hiking did I remember that I had a repair patch in my bag.

Day 2 was way harder than day one.  We didn’t have the same nervous energy, we were tired, John was developing blisters, and it was all uphill.  But once again we ended at Mt.  Laguna which had a small restaurant we convinced to stay open for us and so we once again got to have a cooked dinner.  (Truly spoiled hikers I know)

—-> There was a bathroom at the campsite which me and John were sitting outside of in the evening as we charged our phones. Our friend “Frenchie” (who his from France and does not appreciate the name) warned us that a sketchy man came in and looked at the sink where our phones were and quickly walked away twice.  We were grateful to have such a selfless guardian on our side!  Then, as we were sitting outside the bathroom we saw an old man and quickly leave exasperated and say to his wife with disgust “It’s extremely opccupied, somedbody’s living in there!”

-At once we finally realized, the sketchy man after our phones was scared of the hobo in the bathroom and the hobo was our friend and fellow hiker! 

-Well, anyways it was funny in the moment and is telling of the PCT lifestyle

Also had the first rattle snake sighting^^

Day 3 things turned pretty (ish) for the first time and we pushed almost 25 miles!  This came at great cost to John’s feet and he claims to have reached his 5th blister that day.  We end up cooking dinner at a water source, then missing the turn for the trail, then looking for a campsite in the dark and ultimately getting to camp exhausted. 

Above are photos: “the first beautiful sight”, “An attempt at midday shade” “Lots of desert”, and “A long way to Canada”

Day 4 we stumbled 11 miles downhill to the road where we tested our charm and worked to get a hitch the 11 miles (and 6,00ft) to Julian.  We were underwhelmed to say the least…. Between John’s neck beard and how bad I looked like I smelled there were many people who wanted nothing to do with us until we got some kid with his learner’s permit show some mercy on us.  It was funny to watch a Dad correct his kid’s driving and the kid be too cool to listen—until it wasn’t.  That winding mountain car ride has been by far the scariest part of the trip.  

In Julian we found ourselves amazed at our newfound lack of desire for beer and desire for water or Gatorade? (The trail dies strange things to a man)

Anyways, the American Legion let us stay on their porch for $10 and so we got to spend some time with some vets on Memorial Day.  They were proud of their offer (and correct) cheapest drinks and food in town. They let us do laundry and showers with a bucket so we even got clean(er) clothes and washed the dirt off.  —To normal people this seems filthy, but normal people haven’t been 4 days in the desert.  With the amount of salt from evaporated sweat combined with the desert dust caked on our bodies, hair, and clothes we felt as if we were new men completely. 

In between our gigantic meals we wandered around the small town and I made my way into the Church, a small, poor, Catholic Church with most of its writing bilingual between English and Spanish. It was simple in design but its stained glass was beautiful in the afternoon sunlight. I sat down and then kneeled to pray, grateful for the trip and in need of strength and of courage. Without knowing I fell asleep for several minutes with my head on the pew. I awoke, embarrassed and rushed out of the church. Looking back I don’t think God would be anything but pleased.

———————————————————————-

Notes

It is unbelievable to compare the amount of calories I burn normally vs hiking.

-For reference. This means on peak days I would have to eat 34 Krispy Kreme glazed doughnuts per day to not lose weight…

We ate, and swill continue to eat like absolute maniac gluttons, devouring anything in sight because we burn such a ridiculous amount of calories.  

Until next time, thanks for caring

-Treebeard

(Essay on my trail name soon I promise)

As another, even stranger guy said “All truly great thoughts are conceived of by walking”

-Nietzsche

Alas, you are here to hear about my quest! 

It all began in midtown Atlanta where I almost lost my sanity.

There in that horrible place I swore to myself that in reward for my finishing that corporate summer I would go on a ridiculously difficult and grand adventure the next summer—one that would clear my head (and liver) from college and launch me into the many adventures and (figurative) mountains of life with the fullness of my soul, body and mind.  

I will talk more about my mind and motivations later but the physical journey really began on Tuesday May 19th.  I woke up at 5:00am and came downstairs to hug my mom goodbye and then give my Dad a firm handshake! (And then hug him too).  My Mom dropped me off at the airport with a grocery bag full of fresh sausage balls and my sister’s chocolate cookies.  [savored last home food!]

At the airport I met my friend from high school John. John is one of my oldest friends in the world, a hard worker, apparently something of a clean freak, and is going into Real Estate Banking in July.  John is coming out to do the first 180 miles with me.  

Eventually we landed in San Diego which, suprisingly…… I kinda loved.  

They had 

Aircraft carriers, pirate ships, and beers on the water… It was practically Bath!!

Then we got on the PCT shuttle which took us to REI, then a gas station on the 2 hour drive to our campsite on the border.  On they shuttle was OneSpeed- the driver who is a PCT vet and runs the nonprofit that does the shuttle and campground, and then 2 Canadians in their 60s. 

OneSpeed gave us the option to be dropped off at ther border, take a picture at the PCT southern terminus monument, and then hike the .5 miles to the campsite so we wouldn’t have to backtrack the next day.  She even smirkingly told us that some other guys bought beers to drink at the border to celebrate the start—we didn’t take much convincing.  

So we, with our beers began the trail before we even started day 1.  

Upon arriving to the campground, we (like the typical men that we are), began to survey the other “competition.”  Of these many fellow hikers, the Canadian gentlemen were our best friends there and the conversation shifted to the ever important “Base Pack Weight,” this conversation is so common and transformational that the starting campsite has a scale, a gear donation box, and ready to ship UPS boxes. Well, we did not avoid the stereotype—John shipped home 6lbs of unnessesary gear and clothes and I even added in my extra water filter and an extra pair of socks.  This was all thanks to the Canadian’s making taunting/advising.  So it was an honor to participate in their great anxiety induced (but necessary) excess gear shedding ritual.  

Finally, we crawled inside our tent and attempted to sleep.

Notes anbd takeaways:

Thru-Hikers make a rule of only learning someone’s name if they are someone adjacent to their hiking pace.  This is done either by superficial assumption and more often after multiple interactions or leapfrogs on the trail.  It seems like it is simply impossible to befriend every person you see on the trail—there are and will be thousands.

….I will not comment on how few people thought me to be at their pace and worthy of an introduction on day one

The next morning (Wednesday May 20th) will be day one on the trail. I expect to have well over 100 days on the trail as I venture 2650 miles north to the Canadian border. This trail will take me through the mountain range common to the Mojave desert, the high sierra, the volcanoes of Oregon, and finally the cascades of Washington.

As I hike I expect to be thinking and writing a lot so stay tuned for my thoughts, stories, and commentary of this adventure.

Disclosure- If you are here to read about my hike—explore my blog at your own risk. I talk mainly about religion and politics (what else is there besides mountains?) and my views are unusual and may even be different than yours.

Enjoy!!!

Share

Introduction

It is a great mystery how profoundly man is moved by art: sonnets and symphonies, grand murals and guitar solos. Stranger still it is that artist and physical medium can be so far surpassed in beauty and power by the art itself. C.S. Lewis describes this stirring incited by art as a longing for a far-off country. Great and diverse thinkers ranging from Emerson to Augustine have thought this disproportionate power of art suggests that it mediates something beyond itself, that its effects do not come from it but through it. Lewis writes: “It was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing”(Weight of Glory30). Lewis’ claim is that it is not artistic material which man longs for, but that art awakens the desire for something else which is greater and more real. Long predating Lewis, Plato offers a philosophical foundation to Lewis’ intuition with his account of a higher reality than human perception—“the intelligible realm.” In this realm reside transcendent forms: truth, beauty, and goodness in their fullness. These transcendent forms, partially encountered, draw man beyond the immediate sensory and the merely rational—awakening a desire for something higher than either sense or reason can contain. This essay argues that art, when functioning properly, becomes a medium of this transcendence.

Human beings do not only suffer from being detached from transcendent reality; they also suffer from being divided within themselves. Man can understand something abstractly or can participate in it experientially, but seldom at once. One either understands pain as an abstract idea or feels it concretely as he suffers, but the two modes of knowing inevitably pull apart. Because of this internal division of person, humans are diminished from what they could be, they have less being. Lewis proclaims that art, namely myth, bridges the horizontal divide within man, unifying him as it pulls into truth.

Poet-Priest Malcolm Guite articulates that man’s perceptive faculty is shrouded by his own knowledge and senses, occluding the true radiance of reality. Guite suggests, the solution to lifting the obscuring veil of perception is not through transparency but through artistic coloration. The walls of the cave cannot be smashed through and made into skylights, nor can they be replaced with TV broadcasts of the world outside. To help his brethren in this cave of ignorance, the artist creates a stained-glass window: carefully shaping and constructing the colorful panels, not assuming to show the true world and yet allowing diverse and true light to shine into the cave. Stained glass and art alike refract the true and blinding light into radiant color, painting the world anew, and allowing eyes to see the sun without being blinded. Guite’s chief contribution is that it is the imagination by which humans receive true sight, true perception, and true understanding through art.

Among the redemptive and liberating arts, storytelling, and the genre of fantasy in particular have been especially maligned as being unreal, childish, and escapist: a distraction from real work, knowledge, and progress. And although primarily levied at fantasy, all art is vulnerable to this attack as it works through image and symbol. The accusation rings: why does the artist not make a clear window out from the cave? Furthermore, how could any artist who is himself in the darkness make anything but further darkness? Plato himself gives voice to the classical form of this suspicion of the creative arts in The Republic. In “On Fairy-Stories” J.R.R. Tolkien makes his descriptive defense of himself and his fellow imaginative artists. Tolkien claims that art is not a harmful distraction, it is in fact a healing medicine. He argues man’s rightful place is not in the enslaving darkness of ignorance but in the emancipating radiance of awareness, and that the artist, just as the philosopher, has a real part to play in this liberation. This essay endeavors to prove that properly understood, creative art does not confuse man from reality but connects him to it.

At stake in this paper is the claim that Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation is a holistic articulation of what art is and does when it functions redemptively—bringing man into fuller being by unifying and growing his soul. Plato lays the foundation and reveals man’s need for liberation and ascension. Lewis names myth as a working bridge to the beyond, explaining its workings and effects. Guite gives name to this crossing, and reveals imagination as its mode. Finally, Middle-earth is the proof, a fantastic secondary world so true the reader encounters it as lived reality, entering inside it to love, to know, and to become.

Plato: Establishing Ignorance and Introducing Transcendence

Millennia before any inkling put pen to paper the questions of perception and of being were introduced by Plato. In Plato is also found the foundation for the solution the mythopoeic thinkers will put forward. Plato’s contribution can be seen in his allegory of the cave. In this cave prisoners are chained with their vision directed towards the inner wall. Across this wall move shadows cast by models of real things against the fire inside the cave. Plato posits “what people in that situation would think of as the truth would be nothing but the shadows of the manufactured objects behind them” (515c). The prisoners could not know that, in addition to the shadows, the puppets and firelight are also artificial so they are doubly deceived. If they were to break free of their chains they would only move towards the shadows, deeper into the cave; it is their inverted orientation that is their deepest problem. The prisoners are analogues for uneducated humans, and the walls of the cave represent the limits of their perception.

The liberation of these prisoners is painful; not only must they accept their world to have been a deception, but they must also suffer to know the real world. Plato says the prisoner must be forced, dragged up to the real world where he would be dazzled and blinded at first by the light of the sun (516a). The road to truth is in fact so brutal that seemingly no man would make it unless dragged there unwillingly. So, the question is raised: if direct exposure to naked true light is blinding, can there be some other medium by or through which the prisoner can receive this true light?

But before that question can be answered, it must be clarified what the sun represents within the allegory. Plato says, “the sun is not only the cause of things being seen, but of their coming into being, their growth and their sustenance” (509b). As the cause of “things being seen,” the sun makes things visible; without it nothing can be seen or known. As the cause of “their coming into being” the sun is the source of existence from which each other form derives its being. Finally, as the source of “their growth and their sustenance” the sun is the source of development; it sustains and nourishes over time. So the sun is the source of knowing, being, and becoming. The sun is the analogue of the form of the good in the visible realm; it is not one form among others but the highest principle from which the others flow. Plato says that to ascend towards the Good is not only to accumulate knowledge, but to participate more fully in true reality; one does not merely know more, one becomes more. By growth into being, this essay means the soul’s movement into fuller participation in truth, goodness, and reality, as the person becomes more truly who and what they are meant to be. This is made visible in the gradual ascent of the prisoner: “He’d need time to adjust… first he’d find it easiest to see shadows; next it would be reflections of human beings and everything else in water, then the things themselves” (516a). As the prisoner’s vision moves to brighter and more real objects, his capacity to perceive, and so his soul, must also grow. Each object is not just a truth acquired but a transformation. Education then, in the deepest Platonic sense is the growth and orientation of the soul to the source of its own being. So man must suffer and labor to come to see the form of the good, and as he does he will grow from what he is into what he was meant to be.

Plato’s account also implies a second problem, that there is a vast epistemic divide between the philosopher who has seen the real world and his brethren still in the cave. Even if he could convince and by some means explain to them the reality outside the cave, he could not transmit the experience of being in the real world. Even if they could grasp the facts of reality, they could not have the appropriate response to it without themselves experiencing it. This is why Plato says that they would hate this philosopher, thinking him a fool to have lessened his perception of shadows through his study of light, and likely despising him and killing him for it (517a). Growing into being, the escaping of the cave, truly seeing—these are difficult and even fatal tasks, the striving towards them is for Plato, valiant albeit doomed. But beyond Plato there is hope.

Plato says that many painters and poets are deceivers, that they “awaken and nourish the irrational part of the soul and, by making it strong, destroy the rational part” (605b). Plato is not dismissive of the creative arts—he fears them because of how seriously he takes their ability to shape the soul. Plato knows that art which shapes the soul away from the good is truly dangerous. Yet, Plato does not banish all poetry. At the end of book III he permits “hymns to the gods and praises of good men”(398a). Plato’s criterion for permissible art is specific: it must praise the divine good and orient the soul towards it. The graduated ascent of the prisoner towards the sun requires lesser lights; poetry, music, and creative art in general may help if they are good and not deceptive—stars and not fires inside the cave. The true problem for Plato then is not poetry’s capability to hold virtue but the poet’s ability to discern it. In book X Plato says that the imitating poet has no knowledge of what he imitates and so does not know if he leads towards the good or away from it. The poet is very powerful, either for good or for ill; therefore it is crucial to ensure the poet discerns what is actually good. Plato himself is reluctant to define this good, “it seems to me too big a question for the present occasion,” and moves to describe an image of it rather than the thing itself(506e). Plato is ascending to a good which he cannot encounter, so while the poets who rightly praise the gods are permissible—Plato cannot say confidently who they are.

Plato does resolve that there is a necessary, graduated ascent to truth, and so requires musical and poetic education for the shaping of his guards. What Plato leaves unresolved is not whether the soul requires mediated education, but what truly trustworthy poetic and artistic mediation looks like. The question of how to grow prisoners into philosophers without confusing them is unspecified. Of this praiseworthy transcendent good which Plato is uncertain to identify, there are Christian and mythopoeic thinkers who gladly give a view of what it is. These men have such confidence not out of superiority over Plato, but because where Plato cannot quite ascend to the good, the good has in their account descended to meet them.

Tolkien: Introducing Sub-Creation as True Illumination

For Tolkien also the highest truth cannot be approached directly without overwhelming the finite mind—the Ark of the Covenant kills even the well-intentioned who touch it improperly. However, Tolkien is much more generous than Plato about the imaginative mediums which may educate the soul, Tolkien is himself one of the good poets. To Tolkien the artist certainly does not cast shadows in the cave but is a creator of those viewable reflections which educate the escapee. In “On Fairy-Stories” Tolkien explains how this is possible, and in Mythopoeia he shows what it looks like.

The question of why man creates art is central to Tolkien. His artistic imagination is not the trade of Sophists but rather something endowed in human existence. For Tolkien the true artist does not make derivative propaganda, lies or distractions—neither does he want to. Tolkien’s view of art is not primarily aesthetic, but theological. He says: “we make still by the law in which we were made” (Mythopoeia lines 104-07). For Tolkien, mankind must create art because he is made in the image of a creator; each work of art is an attempt to participate in creation. Furthermore, each artist still carries something of the light from his creation.

Tolkien writes of this light again in his poem to Lewis “Mythopoeia”:

“man, sub-creator, the refracted light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind”

Tolkien writes this for a struggling Lewis—who was upset knowing that myths he loved were merely beautiful lies—in order to reframe myth as a good refraction of real truth. The sub-creator does not “make up” myth from nothing; he diffuses the incomprehensible and singular divine truth through his own worldly self into something other people can see. With Tolkien’s understanding of creative art, a myth like that of Cupid and Psyche ceases to be a lie breathed through silver and begins to be wrapped in unfamiliarity—this is a life-changing shift for Lewis. From the undrinkable divine liquor, the sub-creator distills, through his ragged earthy self, a brew which may be drunk.

Tolkien does not make this grand claim of the artist without humility. He confesses that “the fairy gold all too often turns to leaves when it is brought away,” and he asks that his readers “receive his withered leaves, as a token that my hand at least once held a little of the gold” (Fairy Stories1). The materials and instruments of the sub-creator are like him—fallen and imperfect, in need of grace.

The conception of sub-creative art which is distilled stylistically in Mythopoeia is divulged systematically in “On Fairy-Stories”. Tolkien writes “Fantasy is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent” (27). For Tolkien, this “genre” of Fantasy is not merely one of childish falsities, but the labored creation of a disciplined artist. If something is true fantasy, and thereby true art, it cannot be a whimsical or weaponized creation of some arbitrary world. It must be a genuine reflection of that greater light; this is why Tolkien fiercely maintains the secondary world must have “the inner consistency of reality.” This does not just mean mere mechanistic functionality, it requires a moral authenticity. For this reason it follows that like any other art, it must be created for the sake of itself, not coded to prove some point or win some argument. This is why Tolkien does not encode theological lessons to be learned in fictitious forms but transmits a real world in which theological reality is naturally experienced as lived truth. Sub-creation is therefore, necessarily participatory.

Man needs sub-creation, for though man is made in the image of God, he often exists as dimmed—the acuity of his refraction made dull by habit and familiarity. His faculties of seeing and knowing are streamlined to mere identification of category. He writes “we need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity”(28). Recovery is what Tolkien names sub-creation’s solution to this problem. Recovery is the restoration of man’s original and intended perception through sub-creation. Tolkien writes that what is most in need of recovery is that which is closest to man: “Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult to see with fresh attention” (28). Sub-creative fantasy makes the familiar strange enough to be truly seen again. Just as Tolkien says “by the making of Pegasus, horses were ennobled” so too are gardens reenchanted by the shire, and humanity re-dignified by the non-human peoples of Middle-earth(29). Recovery restores man’s vision of things around him—but sub-creation does not stop at horizontal rehabilitation. There is a second movement in Tolkien’s account which surpasses the horizontal unification of perception: that is vertical reception.

Tolkien calls this moment Eucatastrophe—“the sudden joyous turn”—and he argues it is the highest function of a true fairy tale. This is the moment when all else seems lost and in some final unlikely turn at the last second comes, “a sudden and miraculous grace”(33). This rescue is not a denial of darkness, but a denial of its final triumph. In this sudden turn to joy out of darkness there is a moment of vertical penetration connecting the transcendent to the earthly in a flash of grace. Eucatastrophe is described with more theological precision than mere happiness, Tolkien describes it as “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief”(33). The joy and pain are both real, but, in the end the joy wins.

The eucatastrophic glimpse is not an argument and neither is it a proposition. It is a felt experience of the sub-created reality’s structure—the reader is both experiencing the narrative from inside and conscious of that which transcends it. In the eucatastrophic flash, man’s head and his heart are united by something neither analysis nor emotion could alone produce. Recovery and Eucatastrophe are two parts of a shared act—recovery restoring perception of the ordinary, and Eucatastrophe transcending vision to higher forms. Together they do what Tolkien claims of the sub-creative act; addressing the entire person, uniting experience together with meaning in the singular action of receiving.

Tolkien goes beyond arguing this theory—fittingly, he writes it into a story called “Leaf by Niggle.” In this fiction, a painter labors away painstakingly on a great tree which he cannot finish: each leaf demands another branch, each branch demanding other leaves, and so on. One day he moves beyond this world where he finds the real tree which he had spent his life trying to paint. This tree, being real, is more beautiful, more “tree” than any canvas and paint could have contained. Tolkien reveals in his letters that he is in a sense Niggle, and Middle-earth is the great tree which he is blessed to see but unable to finish. The withered leaves Tolkien asks his audience to receive are Niggle’s incomplete paintings of a true and beautiful tree—broken and genuine, reaching towards something which was always already there.

Tolkien develops the idea that sub-creative art can both restore sight and mediate truths above ordinary perception; the question that remains is how such mediation is possible? It is here that Lewis becomes helpful; he explains how it is that the higher may come through the lower. Lewis’ formulation does not replace Tolkien’s but gives further language and explanation to what Tolkien introduces. In his abundance of production Lewis helps to clarify the elements of transposition, myth, meaning, and experience.

Lewis: Explaining Tolkien’s Sub-Created Path

Lewis’ idea of longing, which opened this essay, is more than an emotional phenomenon—it is evidence that beauty works as a mediator rather than an end. Lewis argues that what matters in beautiful things is not the things themselves but what they transmit: “For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard” (“The Weight of Glory”31). Lewis divulges beauty’s structural role as a mediator; it is neither fulfilment nor illusion but a medium through which the transcendent is glimpsed by the non-transcendent. The question that follows this assertion is of how the higher can be present in the lower without being reduced to it; this is the question which Lewis seeks to answer in “Transposition.”

Lewis calls the way by which a higher reality is genuinely communicated through the lower “Transposition.” For Lewis, the relative poverty of the material comprising the lower medium does not make it false, it only obscures the richness of the truth which it transmits. This partial transmission is not exhaustive, algebraic, or necessarily obvious, but it is with the right vision, true. This is essential to the greater argument about art’s ability to be a transcendent connector. Fittingly, Lewis illustrates this idea through a parable.

Lewis moves from abstract principle into vivid image with the story of a boy raised in a dungeon. In this story a boy is born in a dungeon without clear view of the outside world; inside the dungeon, his mother—the artist, attempts to educate him of the outside world with pictures using pencil and paper. The mother is a good artist and tries honorably to educate her son, who knows no true reality except what his mother gives to him. Then, upon finding out that the outside world does not consist of pencil lines the boy is devastated and lost. The drawings were true drawings, they illustrated reality as well as drawings could—but they were not themselves reality. The boy’s problem is not that the pencil drawings were false, they were good drawings; his problem is that he cannot yet imagine what the drawings were transpositions of. The mistake of the boy is the fear of Plato: to mistake the artistic medium for the reality it reflects. Lewis’ answer to Plato is that the image, if received rightly, is not a mistake—it is a saving grace, the only door available.

The mother’s drawings are not condemned by the confusion of her son because they are vindicated by the reality that awaits him once he leaves the dungeon. About this transposition Lewis writes “The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomprehensibly more visible”(“Transposition”110). This is the payoff of “Transposition”: that true reality is so much realer, it has so much more being than the lines could ever contain. Lewis writes that upon the boy’s escape, upon the convergence of true reality and lived experience: “if they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which has become invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun”(111). The distinction made here is precise and significant to his argument, that there are two opposite ways a lower medium ceases to be relevant. The first way is that it is negated—the candle is put out, the drawings revealed as lies, the image destroyed by the arrival of reality. This would be the shadows cast on Plato’s cave, extinguished by true light. The second option is fulfilment—the light of the candle minimized by the exceeding radiance of the risen sun. The pencil lines do not vanish because they were lies, they vanish because they fit truly into something so much more actual and distinct than itself. Outlines are made transparent in front of the reality they describe, theology is overfilled by the presence of God, as true reality surpasses its description. Art then, need not rival truth to be its servant; it becomes a necessary and merciful vessel by which truth may first reach finite minds. The higher comes into the lower, the light enters the glass, the myth becomes fact.

Perpendicular to the vertical problem of alignment with the transcendent, is the horizontal problem of integration for the internal perceptive faculties. When understanding transcendent truth, beauty, and goodness, man can either understand a thing intellectually by analytical deconstruction—or he can experience it personally from inside it. Lewis characterizes this while meditating in a toolshed: he first sees the length a beam of light shining in through a crack in the wall, then he enters into the beam and sees leaves and sky and sun through it. Both of the experiences are true, and yet they are different.

At the same time that Lewis wrote “Transposition”, he also produced his famous essay “Myth Became Fact.” In this essay Lewis argues the internal horizontal problem of “Meditation in A Toolshed,” and the transcendent vertical problem of “Transposition” have a common solution: myth.

Lewis again articulates this division of man’s interior perceptive faculties in Myth Became Fact: “Human thought is incurably abstract…Yet the only realities we experience are concrete”(3). He clarifies “This is our dilemma—either to taste and not know or to know and not taste”(3). However, this dilemma is not a cause for dismay, Lewis argues: “Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution”(3). Myth is the bridge which can span the chasm betwixt head and heart. Much like Tolkien’s vertically penetrating moment of eucatastrophe, this bridging only happens as the myth is being delivered; the very real spell is broken the second one tries to get outside it. The apostle Peter begins sinking the moment he thinks about his walking on water. Lewis says “You were not knowing, but tasting; but what you were tasting turns out to be a universal principle”(3). Receiving a myth is by nature an experiential act, like that of tasting, but the taste itself is universal and unchanging. This action is therefore at once both felt and perceived by the heart, and is also universal and so known in the head.

This universality is of course truth, and thereby a transcendent element; this is how myth bridges also vertically from the earthly to the heavenly. Furthermore, this truth is not mere factuality but transcendence: “What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality”(3). Lewis clarifies that he is not talking about the vernacular meaning of “truth” but of its actual and absolute sense: he argues that truth is necessarily about something, reality is that which truth is about. The ineffable is understood, the invisible made visible.

Lewis has done the hardest conceptual work. He has explained transposition, he has demonstrated man’s disjunction in perception, and he has exalted the role of myth to bridge the gaps both vertical and horizontal. But mechanism is not yet vision, explanation is not yet experience, the meal is prepared and ready but it is not yet bitten into. Where Lewis explains this bridge, Malcolm Guite names how to cross it. With Guite, the conceptual framework of Lewis becomes method.

Guite: How to Walk the Mythopoeic Paths of Escape

Guite is able to articulate most clearly what it is that prevents man from using the bridge that Lewis and Tolkien describe as art, sub-creation, and myth. Guite argues “it is as though there were a film or veil between us and the radiant reality of things”—not an impenetrable wall but a film, a shroud of recognition which clouds true perception (Lifting the Veil 12). This is an expansion of Tolkien’s need to clean the windows in “Recovery.” Guite credits much of the clarity of his sight to the nourishment of Middle-earth and its revealer and is himself also a Mythopoeic thinker and poet.

Guite is the least tolerant of this occluding film and is optimistic of man’s ability to lift it, to look past familiarity, and to see truly. His hopeful invitation is: “look out and see what is really there and to discover that reality is itself numinous, translucent with glimmerings of the supernatural, of something holy shining through it” (11). For Guite, the veil exists but it is not totally opaque; the world behind it is clear and the true light shines through it. As the only priest and the truest poet of the bunch, Guite is able to boldly make the theological claim that underpins this whole paper: the world is not an entirely closed system of materiality. There are cracks and weak points in the material world, places where the light shines through, and true art is able to force open these cracks, if only for a moment, and let the divine light shine forth. Guite does not deny that man is in a cave—he seeks to transform it into a cathedral. Though he may not be able to simply escape his finitude, man has a responsibility to participate in its illumination.

Since the created world is translucent and the veil is the obstacle, then the role of art is clear. Guite states it directly: “the whole purpose of the arts is to awaken the mind’s attention, to remove the film of familiarity” (12). This is Guite’s continuation of Tolkien—the secondary world returns the primary world to what it always was: numinous, saturated with a meaning which habit made invisible. Guite precisely names this cleansing faculty: “the power which art deploys to do these things is the power of imagination”(Guite12). This imagination he insists is not the faculty of making things up but rather of rediscovery. It is the power that sees truly—and is fundamentally theological: “imagination is part of the image of God in us”(13). This is the imago dei argument which also grounds Tolkien’s sub-creation.

Lewis’ boy in the dungeon was given a way out of it through his mother’s art and fell short for lack of imagination. These thinkers agree that the boy will understand the real world when he escapes to it, but Guite encourages the boy, and with him all humanity, to use their imagination because with it drawings move from lines to windows. There are some for whom Eucatastrophe does not yet deliver a flash of joy beyond the world—this is because they still lack the imagination to truly enter in and receive it.

Where Tolkien says man makes because he is made in the image of a creator, Guite elaborates that man perceives truly by imagination because he is made in the image of the original imaginer. This means that the same foundation feeds both the artist’s making and the reader’s receiving. Guite says that it is through, by and because of this imagination that:

“the artist strives to manifest within earthly material those transfiguring glimpses of form and quality which can at any moment shimmer through the stuff of this world: the blaze of unconsuming flame that makes a burning bush” (Guite 20).

The burning bush is the art, the burning bush is the stained glass window through which the light blazes without consuming. The holy shines through the ordinary and does not destroy it but elevates it, transfiguring it.

Guite builds artistically on Tolkien’s development of sub-creation: “the artist and poet, by the magical bodying power of imagination is able to make a body and a home for that fleeting glimpse”( 21). His argument is that sub-creation is giving graspable form to the elusive transcendent. To sub-create is to build a home for what would otherwise escape. This is what Tolkien does so masterfully in Middle-earth.

Middle-earth: The Light Through Tolkien

Many Christian lovers of Tolkien read his Legendarium as an allegory; this is a grand mistake. Tolkien himself remarked often that he hated allegory, it was even a source of contention between him and Lewis. In the foreward to The Lord of the Rings he says that he is insulted by the accusation of his work being a political allegory and that he dislikes allegory in general. He writes of his legendarium in letter 165: “It is not ‘about’ anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions.” This is Tolkien’s fervent opposition of reductive criticism, and specifically reductive criticism of authorial intent; that is why this essay will not go into the war, Tolkien’s mother, the specific Catholic priests who raised him, or any such personal background to understand Middle-earth. This essay will understand Middle-earth as intended—from within.

None of this is to say that Tolkien is against truth, beauty or meaning in and through his writing; he writes later in the same letter “the only criticism that annoyed me was that it ‘contained no religion.’ It is a monotheistic world of natural theology”(Tolkien no.165). In The Silmarillion Tolkien demonstrates this clear monotheistic cosmology of Middle-earth in the Ainulindalë where Eru Ilúvatar leads the Ainur in singing the universe into creation. Specifically, he also indicates that this ancient world, though theistic, is very much pre-revelation. There is no distinct religion, scripture, or priesthood; Eru Illuvitar is only known through his created world and by those living in harmony with it. It is because Middle-earth is religious without overt religion that it is so uniquely illuminating to readers in a world full of religion who may have grown blind to the theistic metaphysics of their own world. This is how he can say in letter 142: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision”(Tolkien no.142). The Christianity of The Lord of the Rings is accidental and metaphysical, woven into the fabric of reality rather than algebraically representative.

All of these thoughts are not contradictory but reveal the tight distinction which Tolkien makes; namely that The Lord of the Rings is true. Tolkien believed that his Legendarium was not his invention but something he discovered or translated; he admits “I have long ceased to invent” (Tolkien no.180).This is why Tolkien really refers to it as history, not as a quirk or boast but in his actual opinion. The Shire is not scoured because Tolkien wants to say something, the Shire is scoured because that is what happens to shires. The Ring does not corrupt because Tolkien is making an over wordy sermon on atomic weapons, but because that is what magic rings do. It is natural, then, for Tolkien to understand that the underlying fabric of a true, revealed world to be similarly ordered to that of his own.

Tolkien, Guite, and this essay argue that Middle-earth is so truly effective at lifting the veil because it is truly foreign, non-allegorical, and theologically true. The foreignness is proved by the lack of orcs, dragons, and Sindarin elvish in the modern world. In addition to Tolkien’s fervent denial of allegory in his works, the proof that Middle-earth is not allegory is evidence of it being something higher; that it is genuine sub-creation. The theological truth of the Legendarium is by its nature something that is only truly known inside the story itself—so at long last the argument must go within this secondary world.

The Ring: Slavery of The Self

The namesake of The Lord of the Rings, the Ring of power itself, is something even more real and core to reality and existence than any mere allegory. Throughout the narrative the reader sees the Ring promising power, knowledge, kingship and happiness and then bringing forth weakness, ignorance, slavery, and misery. The nature of the Ring does not just map on to vice in general, but maps further onto idolatry which all vice ultimately grows towards. In their idolatry, worshipers devolve and diminish into a plane of non-being. This is revelatory of a true and palpable Christian ontology.

Everyone is tempted by the Ring and many, to their doom, succumb to it. It promises Boromir glory and power under the guise that he would use it for good. It promises Galadriel beauty and power unsurpassable. It promises a magnified kingship to the Nazgûl. To each it promises an exalting of their own freedom and power; to each it promises an expansion of their own being. The Ring however, does not give what it promises, and it takes far more. Those who succumb to the Ring do not grow in being, they do not become more of themselves; rather they diminish, becoming distorted inversions of what they once were. Of the effects of the Ring, the devolution of Gollum and the Ringwraiths are most revelatory.

The Ringwraiths were once great kings of men who took rings of power to expand their glory. In taking these rings, they grew enslaved to the rings and to their master the dark lord. Gandalf tells Frodo of what happens to those left under the spell of the ring: “he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the rings”(57). These wraiths are wrathful creatures of shadow; writhing themselves into vacuity, twisted into themselves as miserable wreaths. These creatures are faded, invisible, shadows—they are without shape or form save their guises. They have no will left of their own and cannot die; they are caught in a limbo of miserable agony between life and the release of death. They do not perceive the visible world as bodied creatures do—so averse are they to light, they exist as and see only shadow. They are not monsters full of darkness, but voids, shadows where once stood real and good men. They are by nature vacuous, inversions of light, and being just as their shadowy forms are merely the absence of light. In service to the rings the Great kings diminish in body, in spirit, in power, in freedom and in being—this is the Christian ontology of slavery to sin. The Nazgûl, by valuing their power over goodness are not made evil kings but servants, the promise of vice and of the Ring alike are the same: a lie which ensnares, spiraling downwards into doom and misery.

The Hobbit-creature Sméagol is not kingly but lowly, and although his doom begins and manifests differently, in the end it is the same. The Ring bends his will inward, making him radically possessive, fracturing his identity, isolating him and finally enslaving him. Then the Ring drives him into isolation as he is banished from his community for using it to spy and steal from friend and kin. Finally the Ring dismantles his personhood until he is reduced to a wiry, pale, sub-human creature. Driven from the real world he retreats into the darkness under it and becomes a creature that cannot bear to see it or what it reveals. This is not incidental, but revelatory: the longer he loves the ring, the less he is capable of loving or even bearing reality.

Before the Ring, Sméagol is a jealous and selfish creature although seemingly harmless; once he is possessed by it, his jealousy quickly becomes murderous. The Ring exacerbates Sméagol’s selfishness in cycle which spirals into his exile and destruction. Sméagol himself becomes a captive to the Gollum inside of him. Sméagol seemingly wanted common things like getting a good birthday present—he was not seeking evil and yet, by placing something above all else, the Ring dominated and distorted him into something truly horrible.

Such is the insidious nature of all vice inside and outside Middle-earth, that just one disordered love can tear down a person’s entire life and humanity. Just as Sméagol’s inordinate love of birthday presents ruins him, the Nazgûl’s desire for kingship destroys them, and Boromir’s excessive love of power causes him to betray his friends and break his oath. Bilbo notices that he is beginning down the path of diminishment saying: “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread”(Tolkien 32).

The story of Sméagol is the relationship of all people to sin: isolating, weakening, fracturing and diminishing. Bilbo’s feeling of being spread thin is the effect of vice on the soul, stretching into disunity, weakness and pain. Turning the person against themselves is not insignificant, it is the empowering of the Gollum within: “he hates and loves the Ring just as he hates and loves himself”(58).

There is no partial subservience to the ring: it demands full enslavement. This promise of the Ring is the lie of all idolatry: “and he saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me” (Matthew 4.9). In Middle-earth the Ring shows clearly the reality of vice, that it is an act of self-enslavement and that it diminishes man from what he is and could be—into something far less and far lower. In Middle-earth, the Ring reveals the true nature of vice, not empowerment but diminishment, not fullness but shadow. It is therefore no accident that those most overcome by wickedness become creatures of darkness themselves—recoiling from the true light of reality itself.

Galadriel and Gandalf: The Ascending Ontology of Humility

In the character of Galadriel is found a goodness which surpasses her person; her beauty and authority are not self-grounded but bestowed, received and faithfully borne. Her beauty is not erotic or merely aesthetic in nature; it is of a surpassing morality and transcendent goodness. Though she is luminous, she is not the source of the light but a refractor of it. In Middle-earth, light is not just brightness but the visible form of truth, purity and fuller being. This makes Galadriel a positive counter to the Ring: where the Ring offers false enlargement by possession, Galadriel actually grows by reception, surrender and humility. Galadriel is glorified as she becomes transparent to the divine light, letting it shine through. Furthermore, this mediatory goodness is not only an abstract idea for her but becomes materially concentrated inside the plot by her gift to Frodo: the Phial.

Galadriel’s purity is a purity of fidelity, not of innocence; her luminous goodness is far from ignorance. She knows Sauron and his temptation well from the long ages past and from the present temptation she feels within herself. She remembers the corruption beneath his beauty, she remembers the Noldor’s exile—an exile she shared in. The Ring calls to her and she perceives with clarity what she would become through it. If she were to succumb to the Ring, she says, “Instead of a dark lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn!” and so she would become the devouring mother, the tyrannical queen. However, Galadriel does “pass the test” by refusing this false glory and power. In accepting diminishment, she wields a greater light than she could herself possess.

Her gifts to the fellowship each proceed from an aspect of her vast personal nature and power. But all her gifts culminate in the Phial she gives to Frodo; the Phial reveals clearly what Galadriel is. Galadriel does not create the light she bears. In her hair she carries the brilliance of the Two Trees of Valinor. In the Phial she gives to Frodo is the light of Eärendil’s star, which itself contains a reflection of the original light of creation. In each stage of transmission, the light is not generated but borne and handed on. The creatures of Middle-earth do not create light, each can only receive it and pass it on. What Frodo holds is merely a small glass bottle; yet he bears in it a sliver of the ancient light of creation, burning still against darkness. Because of her submission to the greater good, Galadriel’s personal power is extended as her Phial shines against darkness far away.

This specifically female temptation which Galadriel rejects in her diminishing is very real and is embodied in Galadriel’s opposite: the wicked devouring mother Shelob. Galadriel and Shelob alike are matriarchs of Middle-earth both ancient and powerful; however, where Galadriel bears light and gives it freely, Shelob swallows it, seeking only satiation, possession and darkness. Shelob is the realization of what Galadriel is promised by the ring: complete and unopposed dominance, even by the masculine power of Sauron. Yet, Shelob is defeated not by like domination but by humble luminosity. When Frodo and Sam raise the Phial in the tunnel, the light of Eärendil’s star blazes against her and she cannot bear it. She is not wounded by it as a weapon—she is overcome by it just as darkness is defeated by light, because what the Phial carries is the light and truth which she is a perversion. Then in the depths of despair and loneliness Sam cries out “Elbereth Gilthoniel!”—the name of the Vala who hallowed the Silmaril, whose consecration is transmitted to the Phial(729). Sam doesn’t know how or why he says it, and yet the words which come through him force the darkness into retreat! Tolkien shows the ancient light to be more real and more powerful than the consuming darkness it battles against. The theology is not argued but enacted, it fights the battle no hobbit ever could.

Mirroring Galadriel and Shelob are Gandalf and Saruman. The ontological metaphysics of Middle-earth are consistent: those who humble themselves before the greater good grow in being, and those who serve themselves diminish of themselves. Saruman was once above Gandalf in rank, prestige and seemingly in power. Yet, in his insatiable quest for knowledge and power, through the use of the Palantir and by industrialization, he becomes less than himself. The quest for power consumes his mind, Saruman diminishes in wisdom and power as he ceases to be good. He begins to wear a robe of many colors, a sign of his richness of character and resources—but this really just reveals he is no longer pure of soul and being (“the white”), his being is fractured just as his staff will be. Gandalf, on the other hand, despite his Ring of power, spends time in the Shire and humbly wears a ragged grey cloak. Where Saruman fights for any power, Gandalf refuses even the ring: “No! With that power I should have power too great and terrible”(61). He does this out of respect for a greater divine providence which he can sometimes sense, for he was once part of the Ainulindalë. Gandalf even encourages Frodo to join him in compliance with a greater plan: “I can put it no clearer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought”(56). In the end, Gandalf simply speaks humbly to Saruman and tells him he has lost his color and position, then breaks his staff. This is not only a moral contrast—it is the governing law of being in creation: those who give themselves to the good are grown beyond themselves, and those who serve themselves are hollowed into servants. It is the law of the Ainulindalë, of Galadriel’s Phial, and eventually of the Pelennor fields. Not only are the wicked and self-serving defeated by good, their own wickedness rots them internally. By his cowardice and corruption, Saruman reduces himself to something far below a great wizard—because of his evil he is dealt with even by hobbits. In giving himself to service, pity and providence, Gandalf becomes more authoritative, luminous, and more fully himself. But the fullest and realest image of this law is neither wizard nor elven queen—it is found in an old king riding to his death in the dark, with the sun on his arm.

Théoden: Ascending from Shadow to Glory

This paper has argued that Tolkien’s Middle-earth bridges two gaps at once: the chasm between the human and the transcendent, and the void separating abstract understanding and lived experience. The argument has moved from Plato’s cave, to Lewis’ toolshed, into Guite’s study, and finally from the two trees of Valinor to the treacherous darkness of Cirith Ungol in the hands of a Hobbit. But no further explanation will suffice.

King Théoden arrives before Minas Tirith in the darkness and sees it in flames, the Rohirrim see its gate is blown open—they may be too late. The king is old and the race of men is diminished, perhaps he will take his men and preserve what remains. The darkness in which they stand is not the night sky but the shadow of evil, the same emptiness that swallowed the Nazgûl is now spread over the last city of men. Yet, if it is too late for Minas Tirith it shall be too late for all men. The king may yet find strength in his old bones. Then the king stands up, taller and prouder than ever and yells greater than any man before:

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake, fire and slaughter!
spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor! (838)

Then he lifts his horn and sounds a blow so great that the horn shatters and his great host joins in the dreadful tune. Then this old king bolts out on his horse and cannot be caught by even the youngest or strongest. He goes knowingly to what will be his death. He rides with hope which is beyond reason. He rides with love for his men and they for love of him. His veins flow with righteous rage against the wickedness of Mordor, and there will be no stopping him short of death. The sun rises as a wave of terrible joy, and passion sweeps across him and his men as they burst into song both beautiful and terrible. The darkness of the enemy and the light of the rising sun clash in an instant and the darkness does not comprehend it. The old king is transfigured in a blaze of light and glory. “The battle-fury of his fathers ran like fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old… his golden shield was uncovered, and lo! It shone like an image of the sun”(838). This is the king of Rohan!

The charge of the Pelennor fields is so moving not only because it is honorable or brave but because through it the reader sees Théoden assume the true form of kingship, courage, and manhood—becoming in that moment more truly himself than he has yet been. This is more than metaphor: Théoden truly grows in his essential being. Under Wormtongue’s corruption he had been reduced to a shadow of himself; then in Edoras he was restored to himself; but here, at the Pelennor fields, he exceeds restoration—he is transfigured. Tolkien renders him “like a god of old” bearing an “image of the sun” because his kingship has become so radiant with the Good he serves. The man once enslaved by fear to this darkness is now riding anointed with light. As he gives himself over to providence, his people, and the cause of good, Théoden enters more fully into what he is; he grows in stature, in power and in command. Because the reader has watched him since Edoras and has grown to love him, they too have awoken and grown alongside him. Théoden’s courage and kingship pass through the story into the reader, who have come to know them in their embodied form. The moment feels so large; the charge of the Rohirrim to certain death for a hope beyond sight is not only the story of Théoden King—it is also the recognizable shape and story of the life of faith.

This is what Tolkien constructed: a world in which transcendent truth can be encountered as reality is. In Middle-earth, the reader does not think about light and darkness, sacrifice and kingship, divinity and grace, but encounters and loves them there in embodied form. In this sub-creation, the reader is able to really know and really love that which is true, beautiful and good. In this land, the reader’s head and heart may be aligned, if only briefly, “escaping” to a realm where they find themselves hating evil and loving good without reservation or guilt. Plato knows the prisoner needs to be oriented towards the light and made to love it. Guite knows the world is translucent for men with eyes to see. Both long for what Tolkien here provides: a story where the reader finds themselves naturally loving the good. In this escape of the prisoner, the escapees are able to grow into who they might be. The reader who stands on the Pelennor fields and cries as Théoden charges does not just understand the argument of this paper: they have lived it. The bridge is real; the light was always there; Tolkien built a world clear enough to let some through.

Works Cited

Freeman, Austin M. Tolkien Dogmatics: Theology through Mythology with the Maker of Middle-earth. Lexham Press, 2022.

Guite, Malcolm. Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God. Square Halo Books, 2021.

Lewis, C. S. God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Edited by Walter Hooper, Eerdmans, 1970.

---.Letters of C. S. Lewis. Edited by W. H. Lewis, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966.

---.The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Geoffrey Bles, 1950.

---.”Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper, Eerdmans, 1970, pp. 63–67.

---.That Hideous Strength. John Lane The Bodley Head, 1945.

---.The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Geoffrey Bles, 1952.

---.The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. The Macmillan Company, 1949.

Plato. The Republic. Translated by Christopher Rowe, Penguin Classics, 2012.

Tolkien, J. R. R. Beren and Lúthien. Edited by Christopher Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

---.The Children of Húrin. Edited by Christopher Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

---.The Hobbit. George Allen and Unwin, 1937.

---.Leaf by Niggle. HarperCollins, 2016.

---.The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

---.The Lord of the Rings. 50th anniversary ed., Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

---.“On Fairy-Stories”. Edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson, HarperCollins, 2008.

---.The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

There is a quote which is anachronistically attributed to Thomas Jefferson but that he and the other founding fathers would doubtless have proudly claimed. “When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” This quote mirrors such actual quotes as “when tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty” and that “rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

These quotes reflect the true and foundational ideology of our great nation and yet are unheard of in contemporary culture and politics. Only to a fringe and recluse minority of the American people do the sentiments of Thomas Paine still seem like Common Sense: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

Of course the world dominating cultural, economic, and military superpower that the United States is today cannot easily be made to “fear its people” and the minimalist republic of our founding is surely unlikely to ever return.

And yet our politicians and the revolving sphere of “entertainment” still capitalize on this latent reflex to rebel, our instinctive longing for liberty. Practically every movie involves some sort of rebel underdog, and every politician still uses “freedom” as their political tool. Every new Star Wars media will always be about rebellion, and every political movement will always be about the “freedoms” to choose, immigrate, smoke or have loud trucks. Of course, any war we fight is to keep us “free” and if you oppose any of these things you hate freedom!

Thomases Paine and Jefferson are surely cringing from their graves; not only have we given up and rolled over but we have ceded the very language of liberty as well. We, the inheritors of a revolution for less than a 2% tax are now happily complicit to unceasing government surveillance, curfews, mask mandates, regulation of every kind, and taxation 50 times more than what our founders overthrew the world’s greatest empire for.

ALL THIS IS BEFORE I BRING UP THE TSA!

Today when I drove home from the library I was pulled over by a police officer and I found myself shaking. I don’t shake in general, I’m not a shaky or fearful person. I wasn’t speeding, I wasn’t drinking, and yet I was scared. These police encounters are the only real interaction Americans have with their government. And in relation to this one touchable extension of our oppression, even law abiding citizens avoid them, dread seeing them behind them, they are scared of them. This is not the relationship we are supposed to have with our government.

When documents come out alleging that entire elements of our government and security apparatus are compromised by blackmail of their sexual predation on minors--does the government tremble at the “people” to whom they are accountable? Surely they make arrests? Surely they release all their evidence?

Nope, and why should they.

Our founders knew the nature of power; it is corrupting and it is evil if albeit necessary. They made a government that would choke itself to slow its growth, they tried to spread its power out systematically, but their ace in the hole was that the American people would simply never allow their government to do what they didn’t want. The idea was, when the government becomes too corrupt to vote back down you must resort to violence. i.e. “The tree of liberty must from time to time be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants”

It is with great sadness that I suspect we are no longer that ace in the hole. In fact the vast majority of every political party “stands against all forms of political violence.” And so the American people have resigned themselves to irrelevance and quiet servitude, we will watch as our nation grows farther and farther from what it was, and what it could be.

And yet, the tree of liberty never truly dies for there is always plenty of drink with which to clench its thirst….

Now, I am not calling for Americans to storm DC, or to kill police officers or anything of the sort. I don’t think our country is entirely beyond the ballot–maybe I am a fool or a coward to say so. But there is a point at which the only hope is force. There is a point where the people must uphold their sacred duty enshrined in our declaration of independence. The day may come when the weight of our forefathers falls upon us and we must do as they promised…Would anyone stand, would you, would I?

“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security”

Leave a comment

The Abstracted Questions and Revelations of Koon Studies

Why is it that Jesus speaks in parables and not in didactic theology? Why does Plato use an allegory of truth before he divulges that truth itself ? How is it that a patriotic man is more moved by the rebels of Star Wars than the history of their own real rebellious ancestors? Why have humans wasted time telling stories around campfires since the evolution of language? Why do we find paintings in caves these ancestors lived in that they would doubtless never see again as they moved on? Why have societies spent vast portions of their wealth and resources on painting and music and decoration? How is it that man can be moved by an unseen abstract idea? What is common between a work of Michelangelo, of Mozart and of Shakespeare? What is beauty? What is art? What does it all mean?

At the center of these questions lies a deeper one: What is it about human nature that is touched so strongly by truth, beauty, and being itself, yet so often only indirectly? Man knows there must be an absolute reality; he knows there must be some rock upon which reality must rest. He knows this must be true, for that foundation rock is truth itself.

And while he can sense it around or inside him, yet it is beyond him and above him never to be encountered nakedly but through some other medium

This truth is beyond complete perception or transmission by even the greatest of mankind, for it exists more than any man can. This being not only has more existence, more being than mankind, it is being itself. The extent to which man is and knows and does is through and by this greater thing.

And so, while wandering in darkness and despair, man is approached by this being cloaked in the garments of images and symbol, masked by the brilliance of its beauty which is both overwhelming and foreign to man.

This greater has always surrounded man: a fiery sunset, a roaring sea, a flowering tree dancing on the wind. And so man tries to respond; the greatest of our music, of our buildings, and of our stories. Man creates such gems with which to crown himself and yet he knows the thing he has made is not like him but above him; it is not for him nor was it truly made by him. No this good which man does is done through the greater thing, and so the poets, the priests, the composers and the painters strain to become conduits themselves, windows to some greater truer reality, to create a momentary reflection of the something beyond them.

Just as the chief physical end of man may be carnal reproduction, the chief spiritual end of man is subcreation. In Christian marriage man and woman yield their individual selves to become one in order to, with God, co-create a new person. So too, in subcreation, man must also discard his self so that the true reality may be reflected through him into existence. The art then, the subcreation, becomes a lens through which man may see this true light refracted. Just as the child bears the marks of the parents while receiving the life that transcends them, so too this art, this window, will be stained and crafted by its subcreator and so will it color the true light which passes through it. This “colored” light is not the full spectrum of light, and these windows are not clear for seeing, but they are beautiful, and they really are windows.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

I really enjoyed this movie. It was fun, and heartfelt and felt beautiful in its own way and I can confidently say I enjoyed this movie more than any movie from the past 4 years. It tried as hard as it could to be meaningful and genuine as a modern 2026 blockbuster can be. This movie really wants to be a great movie and begins to venture to really say something, sadly it remains very much of 2026 and never fully commits to that deeper something we can feel it grasping at.

The core of this movie revolves dances around meaningful and profound existential questions of grace, hope and especially sacrifice. This movie does this from a very secular position but borrows religious imagery, patterns, and even music. The protagonist is named Grace and his arc is about redemption, the movie is about hope and so the project is named Hail Mary, etc. Sadly, this movie raises questions too religious for its secular scope to answer and bites off more than it can chew morally.

A huge theme of this movie is its half executed rebellion against individualist secularism. we begin with the main character; a forcefully individualistic, lonely, and secular man doing his best at the fringe of academic society.

According to trope; in the time of crisis it is only this one fringe individual who was outcast that now can save the world. He is brought into society in order to save it and then seems to do so with the knowledge of the outsider.

Then, after a tragic accident he is needed not just as an outcast but as an insider; to sacrifice himself in order to save everyone else. This is the question underpinning the movie, the existential question of modern secular humanism; What is modern man willing to die for?

At one point our protagonist remarks to the pilot about his commitment to die for the world saying “You must have sacrifice in your DNA” to which the pilot responds “you just need to have something to sacrifice for.” —>But our hero doesn’t have anyone to sacrifice for…

Contrary to our hopes and expectations, our beloved protagonist chooses not to save the world and in so refusing is willing to forfeit millions of lives. Vague humanitarianisms, as it turns out, is worthless when it really counts. His love of “Humanity” is simply not enough to give his own life.

The great failure of this movie is that instead of dealing with this beautifully raised question of faith, the greater good and responsibility, they just kidnap Grace. Instead of character growth Grace is kidnapped and sacrificed forcefully by the world for its salvation.

In typical modern Hollywood fashion, they play this for laughs and diminish the world’s forced sacrificing of a man. We of course aren’t mad at this because we always expect our heroes to sacrifice.… though we, the writers and the characters in this movie may have forgotten why they must.

The true meaning if there was one to this movie can be summarized by the dialogue between Grace and Stratt.

Grace: Do you really believe we can pull this off?
Stratt: God willing.
Grace: You believe in God?
Stratt: It’s better than the alternative.

This is to say the message of the movie is merely: pretend you’re a Christian and things will be better off. (And whether you do or don’t we’re still going to make you die like one)

And while this film is immensely charming, and vaguely heart warming it never connects the dots. This film or any other can never be truly great until they fully commit to taking an idea to its end. Its modern movies like this that drive me crazy the more I watch them.

Like what does this movie suggest: That we should pretend to be Christians because it makes us feel good? That the men in our society don’t really care about it because they’ve been screwed over, but if we make them die for this society that doesn’t care about them then they’ll just change their minds? That the real happy ending for lonely competent white guys is teaching aliens on a planet with no humans to serve, love, or live with? That if you are rejected wrongfully by society you can always find the love and community you really always wanted light years away with cute little crabs?

—I know this movie isn’t designed to really mean anything or be overanalyzed for its true message. It’s designed to make people feel good and laugh and forget life for 2 hours-and it worked, I laughed and cried and enjoyed every second of this movie but it tricked me with the feeling, sounds and images of something actually beautiful.

I am being harsh here at the end because this movie was so close to being a real work of art. It will win awards and make loads of money and sell lots of merch, but it won’t change lives, it can’t, because it doesn’t say anything. This movie has beautiful cinematography, good dialogue, an immersive score, charming characters, and yet it will ultimately be forgotten for this reason.

I wish I could tell you what this movie should have done but I really don’t even know.

Idiots on the right will call this a win because it has a good looking white guy as the main character, and because it is named “Project Hail Mary,” and because it doesn’t aggressively force transgenderism or homosexuality down their throats. If the appearance of goodness is the win they want then sure they can take this one. I wish they would aim higher than that…

That said this movie was superficially pretty good…

4/5