The destination areas for outdoor recreationists are often ecotones, or along edges such as lake shores, or both. Earth includes the soil and rock, the planet itself, and the animals and plants that inhabit it. Imagine rock as hierophany. The sacred shows itself in rock as irreducibility, absoluteness, power, hardness, permanence, beyond time, and so on. Rock is enhanced as a symbol when its erodibility is included.
Soil offers substance and form which appear lifeless but which give rise to life.
Animals and plants reveal truths about relationship and interdependence. Among these are the lessons of harmony and disharmony, balance and imbalance. Animals and plants are cast in multiple symbolic roles. Animals and plants provide food. The gathering in of food is the concrete experience of the fact that Creation is a cosmic, metabolic act.