into the woods

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” - Walden.

While I have a penchant for philosophy, I liken my lifestyle to a Theroux way of living. I live simply in the woods. Unlike Theroux, while I wasn’t lent my cabin in the woods from Emerson, I resolved to live in simplicity in the woodlands. My loves and I lived without electricity for many years. We ate by candlelight, built fires, bathed in dam water, and lived wildly. I had this romantic notion of living amongst nature, close to my roots. Close to the earth, reconnecting back to wisdom.

I am sensitive. The world pulled me, the external, and others by circumstances and knowledge. I needed to retreat in solitude, away from it all, to feel my truth, to hear my inner callings. To reclaim agency of my life. Time away from it all. I craved simplicity and authenticity. The idea of being able to read the life works of Emerson in a matter of weeks fascinates me, his writings taking a lifetime to create. I don’t imagine Emerson reading other philosophers or being distracted by all the pulls of the world that we have today. Instead, what he wrote arose from deep within, free-thinking and unique, what Theroux would consider as the need for individualism. Someone once told me that they had the opportunity to live in the woods. After careful consideration, they knew they could not be with the honesty of the forest, raw, exposed, naked, and bare. Living simply amidst the forest called for a certain directness of self. It is where I met myself, a call back home to the wild. My inner wild, excavations, and discoveries of the psyche. The woods are an initiation, at times excruciating. For the most part, I stand naked, with nowhere to hide.

The wisdom of the ancients called it time to connect deep within and touch what is meaningful. A longing is a meaning that can’t be told or sold, yet one that calls from deep within resides where my hunger meets my longing. Thoreau spoke of simplicity and finding a path, one of heart. This time to be alive is an excruciating privilege; the human condition is tender, the fragility exquisitely one of beauty. These times if we forget to wander, we can get lost, lost in existence and the enticing, shiny, loud pulls of the world.

It is time, time to come back in, time to come back home.