Monthly Archives: November 2017

2811, 2017

A walk through the valley of shadow of death and back again

debs/ November 28, 2017

The process of mountain hiking is conducive to becoming a metaphor of journey, spirituality, and life. I mean, it literally has a rising action, a climax, and falling action. For the duration of the hike, I can self-indulge and romanticize myself (or my party) as a main character(s) in some heroic journey. Hiking is a celebration of life as a process rather than a destination; and that’s a much needed for a soul that’s trapped in a “destination”-oriented mind like mine.

While hiking, I need to be hyper-aware of time and space for mundane things like daylight, my own safety, and such. Yet for the same reason, the fact that a hike occurs within the time span of a really long conversation, puts the mind in a space where internal dialogues can fester and run (read:walk) their course. Given that long internal ~~dialogues~~ monologues are prone to recursive thinking (…at least mine are?), it follows that the activity of hiking is conducive to forming nested micro-metaphors within the broader “hiking metaphor” as a whole.

But–and forgive me for being trite–isn’t the phenomenon that hiking is fertile with nested metaphors, itself a metaphor for life? After all, any metaphor about life is just a subset of life that is modular enough for the human mind to appreciate the parallel. Every metaphor about life is nested in life. So it really shouldn’t be a surprise that a powerful metaphor of life, like hiking, is a Russian doll of nested-metaphors.

I’m convinced that the hike on this day is somehow a metaphor for all my other days. This is my absolute favourite “story” to tell about my trip because the things that happen in a certain sequence within a certain time. On a deeper note, I love telling it because I feel like the story hasn’t ended yet. I feel like this day had more subtle metaphors I haven’t fully teased out, and perhaps symbolism that I don’t yet know the meaning of.

2511, 2017

Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Mittenwald, Take 2

debs/ November 25, 2017

It’s a new day…… and you know what that means! Another chance to tackle Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Mittenwald!

There’s really no reason why I should be so determined to do this. It’s not supposed to be a hard hike or anything. Somehow having it denied from me yesterday, made me want it more today. Also, having it denied from me yesterday made me want to make it longer today. I’m convinced that irrationality like this is what makes me human. I’ve learned to live and breathe it.

2311, 2017

Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Mittenwald, Take 1

debs/ November 23, 2017

Between the conference and WWOOFing in Norway, I had a little less than a week of alone travel time. The morning after the conference, I took the first train I could out of Munich (marked 1 on map below) to the Alps on the German-Austrian border (3 on map). For (my own) reference, I labelled Starnberg (2), because that’s where my professor took us that day we skipped part of the conference together. A couple days later, I would take the train to the end of the line at Innsbruck, Austria (4).

Specifically, the town I visited is Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which, according to my research is a great skiing place in the winter and a great hiking place in the summer. I had already picked out several hiking routes to take. I had two goals for the 3 days I will be here:

Hike from Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Mittenwald.
Reach the summit of a mountain.

But, aware that I am completely at the mercy of the universe and such (in terms of the weather, health etc.)…
I’ve learned that anytime I refer to a desire as “my goal”, it’s really just an arrogant way of saying “my request to the universe”.

We will revisit these goals later.

2011, 2017

Book Report: Surprised by Hope

debs/ November 20, 2017

I read N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope for Sunday School earlier this year and compiled some thoughts on it.

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The “Human Colossus” seems to goes through cycles of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. I and more aware, now, that even within the larger arcs of these cycles (large enough to have fancy names like “modernism”, “postmodernism”, etc.), there are phases of micro-construction, micro-deconstruction, and micro-reconstruction. I view Surprised by Hope as N.T. Wright’s attempt to reexamine and deconstruct some conceptual fallacies that the Christian community has become comfortable, and then reconstruct them. Wright reconstructs our understanding of Resurrection, Baptism, Eucharist, temple, prayer, marriage, scripture, evangelism, justice, hell, love, etc. as “signposts” pointing to new creation and the Kingdom that new creation will be subject to. I’ll comment on some of these in the following paragraphs.

1811, 2017

4 days in Munich

debs/ November 18, 2017

Tourism posts are boring.

Every (western) city has the same building, per chance, with different architecture (Which we have already established that I don’t care about). Every city has some permutation of a transportation system. Every city has parks. Maybe some attraction that’s actually unique to the city, those are often over-crowded and swarming with tourists. In short, travelling to cities is pretty much my bane, but I would love for a chance to live in a non-Toronto city.

That said, this post is going to be one of those tourism posts. Slightly modified by the conference aspect, but mostly touristy none-the-less. Still, I feel like I need to give this leg of my trip some attention. After all, the conference is the reason I get to come here in the first place!

I promise, dear reader, this is the most boring post of the trip. Not necessarily because I was bored, far from it! I just don’t think it’ll be very interesting for you to read.

Enough dilly dallying, lads. Let us commence.

0211, 2017

18 hours in Reykjavik

debs/ November 2, 2017

My 2+ months time away from home began with a 1 day stopover in Reykjavik, Iceland on the way to Munich for a conference. I was waaay excited.

I landed around 6:20 at Keflavik Airport on a Sunday morning and took a bus to Reykjavik. It was a beautiful day and looking out at the purple-coloured weeds springing up from an apparent wasteland on the way to the city was absolutely stunning. At June 25, I was there in prime “midnight sun” season and the sun was already bright like noon!

As Reykjavik is pretty small, I decided to go on a leisurely walk to explore the city. There is absolutely no better way to know a city intimately than tracing its features on foot (that is, if you, like me, refuse to make talking to strangers a thing you’d do casually). Below, is the route I took to maximize exposure to attractions I expected to be most interested in: