Mike Comins is the founder of TorahTrek Spiritual Wilderness Adventures. The first director of education at Kol Haneshama in Jerusalem, Rabbi Comins is an Israeli desert guide and serves the Jackson Hole Chaverim in Wyoming. He begins with two propositions which are the foundation of all that follows in this paperback:
• "Wilderness matters because it is an optimal place to work out a personal, unscripted, fresh relationship with divinity."
• "Judaism matters because it offers a vocabulary and a practice to translate the sublime experience of wilderness into a life of purpose and meaning, a life lived in community, a life of beauty, integrity, and moral action."
Comin examines three sources of sacred wisdom that celebrate the vitalities of wild nature: the writings about awe by Abraham Joshua Heschel, the works of Martin Buber, and the mystical stream of Kabbalah. The author then presents more than 40 spiritual exercises to use in the natural world to deepen and enrich one's faith and experience of the Divine. Among them are:
• Mindfulness exercise for the trail
• Meditative walking
• Wilderness blessings
• Four-winds wisdom from Jewish tradition
• Soul-O Site solitude practice in wilderness
• Wilderness retreat
• Fast in wilderness.
Comin sees wilderness spirituality as "the call of the times":
"In offering a primer on Jewish spiritual practice in wilderness, it is my hope that readers will come to understand that the organic partnership between wilderness and Judaism begun in Sinai over thirty-five hundred years ago is just as relevant now as it was then. In the age of global warming, when the quality of our grandchildren's world hangs in the balance, I believe that the renewal of our spiritual relationship with the natural world is the calling of our generation. . . . We need to unearth our wild roots."
