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During these excursions inside the lives of others, I have this feeling of being swept along by events I’ve done nothing to make happen. It’s like I’m riding a cosmic wave I haven’t paddled into, yet somehow I’m there—body, mind, and spirit all together in a curl that keeps on rolling. The sense of union feels not strange but innately familiar, like something in me had known this before I ever hit the road.

We’re usually reminded of our link to fellow humans only in times of disaster. Travel gives us a glimpse of that connection in the day-to-day, another example of its ability to guide us beyond the surface to a truer nature, to the 'underglimmer,' as the Japanese poet Basho called it. And the light glinting through is nothing less than the spiritual recognition that you and the other are one.

This sense of a truer nature comes across especially in the natural world. Cicero once said that when you enter a tall grove, the presence of a deity becomes known to you. This is abundantly clear to traditional cultures, who see summits, forests, and waterfalls as holy, as evidence of a sacred continuum in which land, gods, and people are all connected. Cut off from this experience by a blitzkrieg of concrete and glass, many Westerners are turning to ecotravel expeditions to try to reclaim their relationship to this ancestral richness, to get back to where they once belonged. It’s a development that’s good for the soul and the land, as long as the mode of travel and accommodations are low-impact. Revenue brought in from ecotravelers is helping to keep forests and endangered species alive from Madagascar to Costa Rica.

Wilderness is the ultimate in roots, that comforting sense that you’re part of something deeper than your cell phone plan. Standing in the midst of a rainforest or atop a snow-capped summit, you realize you can have a larger perspective on the world, understand a grander scheme to the universe. One of my favorite places for that is a backcountry trail (a few hours up the road from my Santa Monica, California, home) in Kings Canyon National Park that carries me above a waterfall in a narrow canyon with granite walls rising up a thousand feet on either side. I sit on a slab of rock with the foam of the South Fork of the Kings River roaring into space inches from me and gaze at the huge canyon below, and the white-domed Sierra peaks beyond. And I can see the whole journey—from feldspar to glacier to river to me—in one eyeshot. It’s a harmonic convergence that reminds me I’m not urban flotsam, but part of the scenery, part of an eternal passage that transcends human conflicts and career crises. The supreme authenticity of this moment brings the calm of alignment—and a glimpse into the sacred.

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