Backpacking

When you’re off the grid for long enough, you inevitably come into communion with the rhythm of earth and the life of your environment. It’s a truly magical experience.

You wake to birds singing the dawn chorus, and rise with the sun. You go about your business in the fullness of day, eating, packing, hiking, observing wild nature around you doing their version of the same. You come across beauty that reminds you, as Mary Oliver put it, “your place in the family of things.” A seemingly delicate flower on a windswept alpine cliff. A view that takes your breath away. An osprey with a fish in its claws, drawn from the lake you were swimming in. You are small, insignificant, and most of what worries you most of the time is of little consequence. And that’s freeing. You remember, or realize, you are strong and capable of hard things, and yet you are powerless against forces of nature: a too strong river you must avoid, a storm you must wait out. And yet you need what the world provides: its beauty and wonder and rhythm and air and water and life. You are nothing without it. And as the sun comes down, you listen and watch how the creatures around you prepare for darkness, while you do the same. You’re tired, you’re fulfilled, you’ll never sleep so simultaneously poorly and well in all your life. And you rise again with the sun to see what awaits.