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!