I reflect today on all the things I’ve given up in the pursuit of my life’s deepest calling. I see the faces of friends, teary-eyed, as I hug them goodbye in a California meadow after a night we all spent beneath the stars, talking around a camp fire and eating wild rabbit stew. I still wonder often how and why I let a dream lodged deep in my mind pull me away from the beautiful reality of their faces——their conversations. Some yearnings are apparently like that. A dream, it seems, can be more tightly anchored to your sense of meaning than the entirety of the loved ones and the environment that surrounds you. It was a question unanswered——a fate I had managed to push away, for I hadn’t been strong enough to embrace it.

There is this vision from my youth of being seated in a long, thin dugout canoe, as it ploughs it’s way upriver. The forest edges envelop the banks, and the cacophony of all the forest’s unseen residents resound over the outboard engine’s drone. I must have seen it somewhere on television, probably National Geographic, at a very young age, but my mind claimed the experience as it’s own. I saw and still see the vision from the inside as if it was my memory——a memory of mine that I lost somewhere a while back, and picked up again from the T.V. And it has never left me. But I don’t run lightly into the realization of the dream. Life is far more nuanced. I still carry the old life of mine I killed in order to birth this new relation to primeval Earth. And it is a heavy burden.

My heart is heavy with the distance between it and its old companions, and yet my heart is light, in openness to radical transformation. And I don’t mean radical transformation of the self, but of the life—-of different modes of attention, never before realized. Of a different context with the non-human. The self? I hope to leave it behind, perhaps in the forest somewhere, in the last place where self-referential thinking held any significant grip on my attention. For life is limited, and attention a finite resource within that already limited span of time we’re given. I guess that’s part of the reason I left. In community our mind spends some of its time wondering what worth it, the self, has in concert with the others. Is it a significant contributor to the dynamic spirit of this or that cluster of human lives? The forest, notably, cares not for the human. The forest will give the human its richly oxygenated air, or a taste of its fecund fruiting, but the forest will also parasitize the human, predate upon the human. The forest, ultimately, will treat the human with complete indifference. And for those looking to be absorbed into something greater than themselves, greater than even the strongest human community, that can be a strange blessing. I’m unsure if it can be sustained in the long-term, but I intend to find out. It would be like taking the beautiful refracting prism of the human mind, shattering it, and dispersing it up amongst the branches, across the soil, and behind the million peering eyes.