Into the Woods I Go

Seeking the Essential- Part 1

Into the woods I go. For 40 nights.

Please join me.

40 consecutive nights lying awake amidst the wild, its vast forest surrounding me as trees rise high to the dark sky. Why am I doing this? Because I must. Sometimes in life it becomes crucial to cast aside comfort and routine and so many unthinking mental accretions, cast them aside by doing something radically different. By shocking the mind, body, and soul into a vibrantly new awareness. And, in doing so, hopefully delve down deep into the truly essential. Into myself, yes, but even further, into that timelessly silent place underlying all existence. My own self being but one tiny facet, miniscule yet eternal.

I have no idea what to expect. What I will experience, those long shrouded hours stretching before me night after night, opening into that silent darkness that seems almost infinite, expanding throughout the universe and beyond, into the transcendent. I might sleep a bit, but that isn’t the plan. The night, the vastness, the solitary awareness, these are the aspects I seek, the experiences I crave. I desire alertness, a pure alertness unlike any I have ever before experienced. Myself, the forest, and the vast mysterious cosmos, all conjoining in those hours into something uniquely enraptured. Anything could happen.

About my experiences I will write. To share with you, in part, but mostly to process for myself, because that is what writers do. But to be very clear, I’m not going to write, nor process, beyond a certain point, because that would be counterproductive. A travesty, really. Because essential experiences, alternately enchanted, disturbing, illuminating, and gutting, shouldn’t always be filtered through modern rational thought processes. Sometimes an experience, epiphany, rapture should simply be allowed to exist, unaltered. Settling into the deeper being, beyond evaluation or reason.

But I will write some. About once a week, for the next 40 weeks or so, I will write a post that encapsulates in some hopefully essential way one night of my experience. (If you know of anyone who might be interested in these experiences, please share this free Substack with them.)

The plan. Across from my home is a great old forest, thousands of acres, somehow as yet untouched by developers. I’ve chosen a spot within in, about a half hour walk from my front door. Why this particular spot? I’m not exactly sure. I was ambling through the forest, looking for a location, allowing instinct far more than logic to guide me, a sense of quiet rightness, and when I came upon this spot, I just knew. It doesn’t look much different from the rest of the forest, and yet somehow it is. A small clearing covered with last autumn’s leaves, the remnants of winter’s snow having melted not long before, surrounded on all sides by tall trees. The coniferous spiky green, while the deciduous, bare through the long winter, are now vibrant with buds that will soon unfurl. Just to the west a stream, crystal clear water, rushes along, still merrily swelled with the last of the snow melt from higher climes. Its lovely rushing sounds blend with the greater forest silence. In this place I have anchored a tent.

Every evening for 40 days, about an hour before final darkness pervades, I will walk from home to this small clearing. Besides the tent, I will have only the following: a blanket, a bottle of water, a knife, a little hand-held air horn, and a small shovel. Nothing else. At dawn the next morning I will walk back home. Each day I will traverse slightly different paths in walking to and from, because I don’t want to alter the forest by inadvertently creating a trail. I heartily wish I could stay in that forest for 40 days without returning home. That would be my ideal. But I have obligations of multiple kinds, happily so, as most people do, so created this alternative, which still pleases me greatly.

I am very specifically not taking a flashlight. Because I can’t think of anything worse than casting bright artificial light amidst cool dark wilderness. Because artificial light is a crutch, a way of casting modernity into the wild in order to reassure the self. And because it is amazing how human vision adjusts to a forest night, allowing a person to perceive what otherwise would remain hidden.

And I am very specifically choosing spring rather than summer, which would be more warmly pleasant. I don’t want pleasant. I don’t want seamlessly easy. Spring nights are always cool, and sometimes downright cold. There is something about that—being cold in darkest night amidst a forest—that appeals to me greatly. (I’ve been cold before, so am not romanticizing the experience.) The vital alertness I seek will be far better elicited amidst a chilled awareness than swaddled in cozy warm comfort.

I am excited, and also a bit nervous. I have rough camped many times in wilds of various kinds, but this will be an entirely different experience. A different experience, with a different intent. I can’t wait to get started. Tonight will be the first night. It is already expanding around me. Cool and mysterious.

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