Abigail Thomas, Axis Mundi interaction

From the introduction, I don’t know what “center of focus” is. It’s a reference to place, but what would be the “focus”, what are the trekkers suppose to be focusing on, and why the ‘center’, what is the center.
I realize that in reading so many professional writers’ and their professional definitions, and discussions of definitions, and etymology of the word “wilderness,” that are pages and chapters long that it’s almost no longer about the wilderness but just another writing exercise or subject that professional writers can write about. I don’t mind reading these accounts and arguments on wilderness but I’ve read enough now that I’m to the point where it’s no good anymore. It’s to the point where someone might as well be describing to me something that I’ve never seen before, and the words and descriptions the explainer is using don’t even have a chance to do the description of this something justice. There needs to be different medias in exploring wilderness and spiritual journeys from one chair in a little white classroom. I might as well have never seen the light of day and have lived like a mole my whole life and now have come across a class that’s trying to describe and teach me about the sun and life outside and above the ground without any field trips to these places, and I have no previous experiences that I can relate to and imagine this outside world. But outside the mole metaphor and as a person taking this ULLC class on the wilderness as a sacred place, I would have thought I had some previous experience to relate this to, because it’s title and description caught my interest and now the class is keeping it. I’m fairly sure I have previous experience, but all these writers writing their exercises and being professional writers confuse me. I think, as Roderick Nash researches the meaning of the word to include the definition of wilderness as a place “where a person is likely to get into disordered, confused...condition,” that reading writings on wilderness, is a wilderness itself for me, and it’s not spiritual. This class is in dire need of a field trip (best media in the world, with maybe a journal in hand).
I almost don’t distinguish between symbol and a word for something (a word for a definition). In action they’re both the same to me as a word is picked out to stand for, and represent a definition just as a symbol is to stand for and represent a definition. And about Michael Frome, and him saying “wilderness is a state of mind.” Of course wilderness is of the mind the word was born of mind, there were words of other languages and descriptions and experiences, in which someone came up with the word wilderness. The word is a meeting point in discussions of experiences that wilderness and its etymologies represent.
Wilderness in Judaic and Christian scripture is just a bunch of those religions’ stories the Dr Riddick interprets as God choosing wilderness and people of wilderness as favored over developed and urban places. That’s very interesting though about the pattern of how whenever the people made artifacts of God themselves that they tended to be punished and the objects destroyed. Almost as if what people didn’t create and what God must have created, in these bible stories, the wilderness, that God may be teaching that promote what he made not man-made worship “artifacts.” And that the meaning of wilderness for Israelites is that wilderness is something that’s thought of as “bewildering domestication.”
I like the description of time, I can imagine what a nod, blink day....is and when its described that those perceptions are switched around, brings out my curiosity, I think i’d go hiking on the AT just for the different time perception.