In my previous post I wrote a bit about the "whys" of the process of making youtube videos.  You should probably check that out for more information.  That said, the reasons  are pretty basic.  One is that they provide a creative outlet for me. They are a way to generate a dialogue with nature and with others who might be interested in the experience.  Also, this experience is a bit of an experiment into the possibilities for spiritual communities, who will increasingly find themselves in need of creative ways to reach out beyond their doors.

In addition to the previous post, you might be interested in the reasoning behind the initial project or my attempt at a method for sabbath walking, which underlies a lot of this work.  

However, what I would like to do in this post is share some videos, talk about my motivation to make them, and discuss a little about what I have learned from them.  I will be going in reverse chronology--most recent to least recent--as it may help to set where I am now before talking about where I have been.

Mount Watatic in Winter:
​This video is fairly typical of what I have been trying to do.  The format is fairly well established at this point.  It opens with a description of why I am hiking the trail and what I--or we--hope to see.  I also talk about my relationship with the walk.  In this case I am climbing my favorite mountain. Earlier hikes up Mount Watatic helped me to refine my thoughts on mindful walking.

Technically there are still problems.  While the music has improved a bit, I am still not a great musician.  There are compression issues and sound issues, too.  These are all problems that could be fixed with money...which I do not have.  I am using my phone for all the elements of recording.  I am using a fairly basic editing platform (Filmora) which is probably best suited for end-of-year high school slideshows.  The musician is free.  Also, I was not terribly satisfied with much of the footage I recorded initially.  It took quite a bit of work to tell this story.

Mount Kearsarge (South) in Winter:

This video was fun to make because I had the company of my wife Allison!  She did some recording of me and I could also record her.  The addition of people--including an anonymous fellow traveler--gives the video more motion to carry the story.  Also, while Watatic is important to me, one could argue that Kearsarge has more general importance. There were a lot of human (historical and artistic) resources for this video, which helped.  The view from Kearsarge is also one of the best in New England.  

By the time I got to this video I felt I had hit a wall technically.  The music needed to be updated. You will hear some of these same cuts in every video as we go back in time.  Why bother with music?  It helps to move the story along.  There are walks-and-talks that need a little something sometimes. There are moments when the view is the story and some framing is necessary. That said, it went together fairly quickly, which was nice. 

Tecumseh in Winter

This was a fun one.  I recorded it just a couple days before the Kearsarge hike so many of the points in that video are relevant here.  I had a friend with me--Andy Linscott--and we knocked out one of our favorite 4,000 footers.  Here we had the challenge of too many people, which made recording awkward at times.  For some reason editing was a BEAST.  You will note a couple spots where the sound gets clipped a bit.  I will say that after this video I tried to develop a method for layering the various elements together; completing one layer before starting the next.  The system is imperfect but having one was probably the adjustment that made the Kearsarge and Watatic edits go more smoothly. 

Finally, this marks--I think--the ideal length for one of these videos.  Keeping it Between 8 and 9 minutes tells the story before tedium sets in.  I feel this way about sermons, too.  However, it seems easier to stay tight when you have another hiker with you.  My solo climbs are all a bit longer.

Poet's Seat, Deerfield, MA

I had the most fun making this video.  It is different from the others in that the hike, itself is relatively unremarkable.  Instead I spent time talking about the poet Frederick Tuckerman. He is relevant to the walk.  Things don't always work out that way so I took advantage of the opportunity  You will note there is no music in this.  My one assignment from my son was to record voice overs instead of leaving long stretches of relatively silent (or scored) walking. Thankfully Tuckerman had enough poems to fill things in.  

Also, this was the first time I used a tripod mount for my phone.  This enabled me to film myself sitting and walking. It feels ridiculous while you are doing it.  However, it does help to give motion to the narrative.  This is a worthwhile practice...if you can avoid other people.

Starting Seeds and Hiking High Ledges

Before these videos--and you are welcome to look--my channel was mostly either panoramic views of mountains I climbed, sermons I wanted to share, or music from our various music ministries.  I think one can also find some of the earliest pandemic worship services hosted here before we got the church youtube page updated.  That was fun too.  The services were even necessary. I do feel, though, that the two videos below mark the beginning of something new. 

Like the pandemic worship videos, they are self-contained and internally consistent.  The goal is not to record something and say "look what is going on out there." Instead they say "look what is happening right here."  That is an important distinction between, say, an edited youtube worship video and a recording of a live-streamed worship video. The first has an immediacy.  The second is a document of something that happened in the past.  With these nature vids I am looking for immediacy. They differ from the pandemic material in that while they may be spiritual or even worshipful in some ways, they are not beholden to the traditional ideas behind those concepts.  They are meant to have their own patterns and pacing because both the media and the context are different.

I am putting these two together because they show some of the same challenges.  They are both too long,  The planting video in particular drags in the middle and is saved by my cat.  There are too many musical interludes in the hiking video and there is a sort of "reflection" bit that goes on too long at the end of both of them.  I think that somewhere in my subconscious was the form of a traditional worship service.  I wanted a "sermon" of some kind. 

​Still, I like them.  They are watchable and they represent an effort to do something creative and new.

Professional: This process obviously impacts my professional life. These skills are not what they taught me in seminary! Back then we were preparing for the 20th Century church. We even paused every once in a while to look back to the 19th Century with its battles both intellectual and literal.  I remember being vaguely discontented much of the time.  We were prepared for a world that was already over, but people didn't really believe it.

These are different 21st Century skills. There are plenty of areas for growth as we realize some of the "old ways" left the stage a while ago. In this case, I am learning about sound, picture, lighting, and technology. Also, I am learning different ways to put together a story. Since the life of a clergyperson has a lot to do with living into and interpreting stories--personal and scriptural--this is no small thing. We can become stagnant, after all. The new techniques and new lenses have influenced how I use the many remaining familiar tools of my trade.

​Congregational: This interest of mine is not new. I have had some kind of weblog for decades. I have made YouTube videos for years. Most of these were of sermons or the performance of various iterations of our music ministry. If you want to know who took this work seriously, just look at who is in the music vids. Otherwise it seemed that most people thought of this as a "hobby" that detracted from more sober activities.

Then March of 2020 occurred. On March 11 we decided to cancel in person church for March 15 of that year. Yep. That first online-only worship service was exactly three years ago today.

Things changed then, didn't they? Our little side-ministry gave us the ability as well as the confidence to pivot immediately. It took us minutes to form the plan that became the foundations--or the spine, or the trunk--of church life for the next 18 months. Within a couple days we had our first service "in the can" and ready to go live that Sunday morning.

We kept learning through that period, but we did not scramble. We didn't need to. Now we have moved back to "normal" and it is easy to forget what we did.

​However, we should not forget. It was our finest hour.

​These podcasts, videos, and blog posts are insurance against another time where we need them.  Yet they are more than that.  They are an imperfect window into what will come next. Increasingly, in fact, we will find that spiritual seekers will start their quest online rather than in person. These interactive technological tidbits are our front door.

Spiritual: Yes, I am doing this for spiritual reasons, too. Partly the needs are my own. However, I believe that the sharing of my own quest and questions helps to enrich a ministry. Each "platform" connects to the others in order to form a whole:

In person worship feeds our souls in real time and brings us together as a community in ways that are just not possible otherwise. Our services and events are designed to create both formal and informal settings to gather, to explore life's questions, and just to hang out without the demands of a busy world.

The Sabbath Walks Podcasts are designed to augment this experience. Most of them are under half an hour long. The goal is to put them on headphones or a speaker in order to connect once again to the spiritual element of life. We can take time for these topics while driving to work, or cleaning the house, or (even) hiking or walking around town.

While The Sabbath Walks YouTube videos are relatively new, this technology has always been a popular extra for us. We used to share the musical performances quite a bit in the before times. Most of them did double duty as hymns during the plague. We reached the peak with weekly worship. Now I am trying out some other topics and styles. Each is an attempt, though, to reach out and show how the spiritual interacts with our everyday existence.

Finally, we are steering our way toward workshops and walks. These will be--and have been--in person. There are many ways to worship and be worshipful. The "future church" whatever it may be, will need all the ways we can muster.

That is all for now. Feel free to explore the links to our online resources. In the next few days I will try to curate them a bit for another post here. I have no illusion as to how often they now are or ultimately will be visited. The various counters and measuring sticks tell me that even when they get "liked" in a Facebook post, they aren't always interacted with.
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They are there, however, for when you need them. Perhaps that isn't today. Just remember that they might help you out some time. The Sabbath Walk isn't just for Sunday, after all.

It really was snowing and raining for most of the time. However, the gray moodiness for this hike worked well. The trail along the long ridge undulated and the the snow shifted slightly under my feet. The rain and mist rising up from the warming snow was atmospheric, creating the sort of environment that must have inspired a writer like Tuckerman. He preferred to keep to himself, after all. In 1860 when he published his first and only book--perhaps unimaginatively named "Poems"--he received a confused response. Many of his friends and acquaintances among the New England Literati didn't actually know he was a serious writer before their complimentary copies arrived. Tuckerman's book was only a mild commercial success. The response from his transcendentalist and romantic friends like RW Emerson, Jones Very and the Longfellows indicated that he had potential. However, only Nathaniel Hawthorn seems to have actually enjoyed it entirely.

In spite of their surprise, his early readers saw moments of brilliance, particularly in his collection of sonnets. They praised his close observation of nature. Later he would be described as a writer of herbariums. His focus on the minutia of the natural world could--when his writing was on point--create an immersive effect prized by people interested in their relationship with the world around them.  His description of beans--in a poem ostensibly about coffee but really a story about some local characters--is typical of that work;
"The bean, the garden bean I sing--
Lima, mazagan, late and early
Bush, butter, black eye, pole and string
Esculent, annual, planted yearly"

He was also known to make up place names and allude to people he invented as if they were from the Bible or ancient literature.  The dude could create a world, which is something that--as a gamer and reader of speculative fiction--is something I can get behind.

That said, not all was happy in his life.  Most of his poetry is dark. His later poems--after the death of his wife--are even more gloomy.  As a young man he retreated out to Greenfield to be away from society and from the many connections cultivated by his family.  He was the brother of a famous botanist, Edward Tuckerman, and a composer, Samuel Tuckerman.  Henry Tuckerman--another writer--was his cousin. Far from Boston, apparently, he could be his romantic self. 

​In the early 20th Century, Tuckerman was rediscovered...or...in some ways discovered for the first time. But the discovery was brief. At least it got him a monument, right? Now you can find his work in some anthologies of poets from the era. However, the easiest way to read him is to get his one book for your e-reader. After all, it is free online.

There is more about Tuckerman and about the hike in the video below.  The only problem with it is that I incorrectly--and repeatedly--identify the seat as being Deerfield, the town immediately to the south of Greenfield, where it actually is.  That's embarrassing..