My Time as a Human

In Cody Lundin’s survival book, 98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping You Ass Alive he describes the essential attitude for dealing with stress as “Party On” and gives the following examples:

“Holy Smoke! We lost our last match and there’s a storm coming!”
Party On!
“A flash flood swept away all our gear and we’re twenty miles from the trail head!”
Party On!
“My femur bone’s sticking through my skin and I’ve gotta cross that river!”
Party On!

This weekend I had to skip a camping trip and told a friend not to visit because I’d already scheduled time with people that were important to me, only to have every single one of those people vanish at the scheduled time. I showed up at the wrong location for the first meeting of a new job. I also screwed up a difficult discussion and drove through the rain to an outdoor event that sold out minutes before I arrived.

There are a variety of ways to look at this weekend.

1. My friends hate me.
2. The universe hates me.
3. I am a complete disaster.

There’s one more.

4. No one died. Hurrah! Now what part of those situations can I control next time?

My friends flaked on me. I have some flakey friends. This part I cannot control, neither can I stop loving them. Was there some miscommunication? Probably. Can I figure out exactly how that happened? Maybe. But maybe by stepping back and looking for places where I can change my own behavior, I can work around these things. After making plans with my friends, it may not seem fair that I should have to check with them once or twice as the date and time arrive to make sure things are still on track. But “fair” is not what I’m looking for here, I’m looking for “effective in making things work out they way I want them to”. Dropping an email a day before a scheduled event to confirm, and making a phone call an hour before, really isn’t that great a cost. It may take a total of several minutes, but if it allows me to know ahead of time that I’m free to spend hours doing something more exciting and productive with my time besides waiting, that’s well worth it. In this case, it also allows me to not be as angry with my friends, and potentially to want to see them again the next time.

Showing up at the wrong location is an expansion of the same idea. My friend gave me the date and time, then sent me a separate email with the details to make sure I had them. After adding it to my calendar the first time, I didn’t bother to re-confirm details by looking at the email. When I have run projection or managed a crew or event in the past, the most important lesson I’ve learned again and again is to never assume anything. Believe me, I’ve been badly burned more than once, and I’ve learned to make time for other people’s mistakes, bad equipment, wrong information etc. so that I was no more than singed and back on track the next time around. Again, the cost to confirm the location of this weekend’s meeting? About 4 minutes on the phone. Anything someone doesn’t tell you explicitly you should confirm. Is it someone else’s fault for not telling me an important detail? Maybe. But I’m the one who loses if I don’t check and re-check.

Fortunately, checking and re-checking works. That’s what’s empowering. Obviously I still make numerous mistakes, this weekend being a good example. But I see how my own actions could have made things work out differently, and that’s what leaves me feeling strong and capable. I’m not fighting impossible odds, a universe that hates me. I’m just working on making myself better.

I wasn’t walking particularly carefully but my awareness was turned up high when, suddenly, the smallest movement to my right exploded like fireworks in my brain. I froze immediately and snapped my focus from a wide, expansive view to a narrow tube, zooming in on the barely visible fawn. Her colors, a complex blend of camouflage patterns, would have made her nearly invisible if not for her slight movement. Only days ago I would have missed her entirely, but now my brain was turned up to a level of awareness innate to all humans, but trained to disuse by environments like cities, thick with background noise. I was perceiving the world in a way that was essential to the survival of our ancestors.

Awareness. Throughout my experience, my understanding of what that word meant expanded as rapidly as the thing itself. Awareness is like reading. Awareness is like feeling. Awareness is a way of being.

Learning to read

When I first started to learn Chinese characters, they were beautiful scribbles, little bits and pieces of art neatly woven together. As I learned the radicals (simple bits of characters that form larger characters) I started to see them pop out of the background until the whole written Chinese language started to break apart and form simple, repeated shapes I could recognize. I think the experience is something like standing up close to a painting entirely of dots and, as you step back, seeing the dots suddenly form into people having a picnic.

As I learned about the various plants that surrounded us, just as with Chinese characters they began to emerge from the green mush before me that my brain called, “woods”. Suddenly I could spot the medicinal plantain and then the tulip poplar, with its catlike leaves and easy to peel bark, ready material for tinder or cordage. Quickly my brain used this head start to begin breaking down and separating a whole variety of plants I couldn’t even name, but could recognize instantly.

Where is the moon

Awareness is about keeping track of things. Like the moon. Every time I was overly focused on moving I lost track of the moon and went in the wrong direction. I don’t have a child, but I imagine that the way a parent maintains a constant background connection to where their child is in the room is how I learned to love the moon. It was another center, ever present, but also moving over time. By being constantly aware of its shift as it moved across the southern sky I could make continuous adjustments for how I was moving in relation to my glowing friend.

Spiritual?

I’ve been asked if we did anything “spiritual” during our week. I think the best answer is yes, we did: we set tripwires for each other linked to small, very loud firecrackers. Most importantly, awareness is about learning to sense. The secret to learning to be very aware is repeatedly catching yourself when you are not aware and turning your awareness back on. I am particularly prone to walking while looking at the ground, completely lost in my head as I play out a story or song idea or problem that is thousands of miles away from the present moment. There is nothing like an explosion next to my head to bring me quickly into the present. After your first explosion, you suddenly feel every very slight tug against your leg or arm. Feeling for each little sensation of unnatural resistance means you are also feeling out everything else around you. Sounds. Smells.

Awareness is about taking in a lot of information simultaneously, without focusing overly much on any one piece, and allowing the subconscious to learn to process that information. I remember the first time I was instantly aware of a temperature drop. When I began repeatedly noticing hawks overhead.

This wide open, full awareness I’ve been describing comes from a whole variety of seemingly unconnected practices. Walking blindfolded in the dark. Stalking other humans. Being stalked by other humans. Knowing there are tripwires somewhere between you and the glow stick you are trying to steal. All these things produce a state that is difficult to describe but beautiful to experience. Everything feels expansive and also like a thick space, or material, stretching out in all directions where I am at the center. Things are continually in motion through that material, interacting in an ordered and coherent way over time.

Even with the brief time I spent in this state, I was able to feel the connected nature of everything around me. I glimpsed the integral way that things play out, and how one movement leads to another. It is abundantly clear that, living in this state for a longer period of time, even more attuned to the movement and shifts of nature, seasons, and the millions of cycles that repeat time and again, I would want to find a name for this ever present essence. Maybe I, too, would call it, “The spirit that moves through all things”.

It’s an incredible way of being, and at our last fire together many grown men were overwhelmed and even cried. Wallace put it best. “I don’t ever want to forget… this”, he said, yanking out a wad of mud and leaves from the ground before him and holding it up in a fist. I knew exactly what he meant.

That feeling, that connection to that fistful of earth, came not just from spending time on trails in the woods or the awareness we built. It was shaped by living in the earth, quite literally as the week progressed. The many physical challenges I would face over the week forced me to time and again learn to take on my single greatest opponent and obstacle: my own brain.

Stay tuned for more tales from the underbrush!

I paused mid step, my right foot frozen just above the ground, my breath, slow and even. Then I heard it again, the distant bung of the drum, echoing through the trees on the hill high above me. The blindfold was tight and cool across my face. The lively nerves across the bottom of my bare foot sang of a dry twig and I adjusted slightly, shifting my hips smoothly, and placed the foot carefully into the leaves before rolling my weight forward. The sounds of crickets and the feel of soft breezes across my bare skin shaped the space through which I passed. I wove my way slowly through thick tangles of vines and piles of logs, navigating through and over complex terrain that unraveled and simplified as I focused on the immediate and moving through flow instead of resistance. At times I gently thumped into larger objects, and was careful to move my head back slightly and feel out with my senses what I had somehow missed. Always around me the crickets lay a thick background that made subtle shifts when trees or thickets came near. Always came the interruption of the drum, every half minute, providing a brief glimpse of my destination.

The blind drum stalk was a crucial turning point in the nine day survival course I took this last week. As at last I sat blindfolded among the growing group of silent men emerging from the forest, the drum pounding mere feet from us, I absorbed and reveled in the sense of fearlessness that came with having moved through what would have, during the daylight, appeared nearly impassible. I no longer needed trails. I no longer needed light. I no longer hesitated to join the earth, mud, leaves and vines. I had begun my transformation into becoming them.

We were a group of fifteen men: twelve students and two instructors. Karen, who owned the land where we trained, joined us for most of our adventures in the first half of the week as an enthusiastic observer. Many of the students’ wives had attended previous classes, but something about this particular course, that required us to dig and live in mud pits, convinced them to sit this one out.

From the very beginning the driveway spoke of the group’s diversity, with tiny fuel efficient cars parked next to massive trucks covered with gun stickers. Dave was a cop that taught firearms. Matt ran a green building consulting company. Chuck, ever good humored under his bright red mop of hair, was on his way to Kuwait as a soldier. Craig, with his quiet presence and strong center, was a redneck turned Aikido master. Phil did autopsies at the morgue before becoming a copy repair man. David was a preschool teacher and amazing at Tai Chi. Wallace was a former wrestler we referred to as the, “Primate” who painted abstract art.

While we may not have shared the same political views, we relished the opportunity to spend time with other men who shared our passion for both ancient and modern skills and the natural world. We were forever taking moments to discuss or try out new equipment or ideas. If you make an alcohol stove out of a cat food can, don’t forget to add a drop of food coloring to the alcohol… so you can see it. Leaving your tent behind and using a poncho or tarp to build a shelter is great, but adding a hammock to raise you off the ground and allow you to sleep on steep hillsides is even better. Hatchet handles inevitably break. Why not forge your own hatched head with a tapered hole so that you can replace it with a sapling?

The instructors, Richard Cleveland and Tom Laskowski, also set the tone by setting their egos aside from the very beginning and pointing out that despite their years of experience, they still had plenty to learn. They even expected us, as our skills improved, to sometimes catch them during stalking exercises. It was a dark night several days later when it became a good thing that Richard, in particular, had said something up front.

Tune in for more thrilling tales as my adventure continues!