Glenwood Writer Finds Spiritual Freedom in Rocky Mountain Solitude

Glenwood Springs —The air up here is sharp enough to cut, thin and cold against your skin even in the height of summer. It’s a silence that has weight, a kind of pressure you can feel in your ears when you step off the main drag and into the backcountry. For many of us, that silence is a luxury; for others, it’s a reckoning.

If you’ve been wondering how the political and spiritual landscape shifts when you trade the dense, humming corridors of an East Coast metropolis for the sprawling, empty canvases of the Colorado Rockies, you’re not alone. The question isn’t just about where we live; it’s about who we become when the crowd thins out.

In a recent column for the Post Independent, Schwartz, writing from his new home in Glenwood Springs, tackles this exact shift. He writes about the disorientation of leaving a community where identity was handed to you on a silver platter, wrapped in the same package as your grocery list and your voting record. Back East, he notes, being Jewish required no explanation. There was a synagogue in every town and a kosher deli on every street corner. The culture was so pervasive, so rigid in its consensus, that individual doubt felt like a foreign object. Kvetching was passed down like a prized crystal candy dish, a shared language of complaint that bound the group together.

But out here? Out here, Schwartz admits, encountering a minyan is as elusive as seeing a nesting bald eagle.

The move to the Mountain West, he argues, delivered on its promise of untamed individualism. The vast open spaces meant there weren’t very many of us to gather and examine our own habits of accountability. Away from the watchful eye of a crowded congregation, Schwartz learned to see his religion and political views independent from the collective whole. He describes walking earth hardened by years of self-reliance, a landscape that practically begged him to carve out his own religious identity.

That carving process led him to havruta, a traditional philosophy encouraging friends or companions to question, debate and challenge each other’s certainties. It was a release valve. "How refreshing not to be given a 'right' answer by someone in authority," he wrote. His faith, he says, soon became as craggy as the mountain peaks where he lived.

This stands in stark contrast to modern politics, which Schwartz describes as often blind faith doubled down with loud chanting and bad behavior. It demands you damage relationships beyond repair by drawing a line in the sand with friends and family. He notes that even the brand of dish soap he chooses to use in his kitchen is divisive now, a small domestic detail that has become a political marker.

To escape the noise, he goes on long hikes in remote trails. It’s there, in the quiet, that the real work happens.

There is a warmth to this kind of solitary reflection, though it comes with its own rough edges. The isolation that allows for self-discovery can also feel like a void when you’re looking for community and finding only trees. But for those of us who have felt the suffocating weight of consensus in our own lives, the idea that our beliefs can be as jagged and individual as the terrain around us is a compelling one.

Schwartz ends his piece on a note of personal worry, mentioning that it is in the woods that he worries about his chi. It’s a quiet admission of vulnerability, a reminder that even in the vastness of the West, we are still human beings trying to make sense of our own energy and existence.

The sky above the valley turns a deep, bruised purple as the sun dips below the ridge. The air cools rapidly, and the first stars begin to prick through the darkening canopy. It’s a reminder that out here, you are on your own to find your footing.