Here.

I was on a cross-state backpacking trip with my spirituality and the environment class a few years ago. We had just completed three days of solitude by ourselves in individual sites with only a tarp, a sleeping bag, a knife, a gallon of water, water purification tablets, and our journals and pens. Our teacher was handing back our watches and we were all still pretty dazed. One of my classmates kept saying his thoughts out loud. Actually a few of us did, after all three days alone in the woods you start to talk to yourself to not scare yourself with the absence of human noise.

Not only were we isolated, but we were fasting as well, it was pretty difficult not to go a little crazy. A brook ran near my campsite and I built a dam in it to pass the time. then when I was finished I could swim in the deep spot I had made. Time passed differently, It wasn't just the fact that we didn't have our watches, It was that we had nothing to keep time for. Our assignment was to write down whatever it was we "perceived". A few days earlier before we started our trip a poem stuck with me. A saying from a Northwestern American Indian tradition.


What to do when lost in the woods?
Stand still.
The trees beside you and the rocks below are not lost.
Wherever your are is called
Here.



These words carried me through and as we were getting our watches back I thought back to them. I often forget that not only does the world not revolve around me, It doesn't revolve around humans. When I leave this place it still exists. That dam I made, my unconscious desire to leave some mark of myself on where I was, even that will be washed away. Not that I don't matter but I am a piece and not the sum of the equation. It will keep going long after I have disappeared. long after all my other dams have gone as well.

There I was hiking out of the forest far more confused then when I entered. Trying desperately to grasp on to an idea I still have trouble holding on to. You are Here.