Silence is the home of the word.
Silence gives strength and fruitfulness to the word.
We can even say that words are meant to disclose
the mystery of the silence from which they come.
— HENRI NOUWEN
Years ago during my first long wilderness retreat, writing was not part of my daily activity. Only near the end of my time in solitude did I set down some short poems that seemed iconic of the experience. Later, I wished I’d written myself directions on how to return to the mysterious inner world of flowing aliveness I’d experienced. This time I wrote much more than I’d expected I would, and I eventually realized I wasn’t simply describing my life in the wilderness, but was leaving a trail of crumbs to lead me back to the beauty and spacious wonder I often experienced.
THE MAGIC OF WORDS
Daily journaling was important to me during most of the year, but I also questioned its effect on my heart and mind. Writing, like thinking, is magical, but has a dark side. It’s easy to get lost in the words. Since description and analysis require time, I could capture and understand an experience only once it was gone. Thus, writing tended to pull me out of the present moment and mute the intensity of experience — unless I remained clearly aware of the actual process of writing. Remaining silent was often preferable.
In fact, it was not actual journaling that became distracting, but thinking beforehand about what I would write and mentally describing to myself what I was seeing and feeling. When I did that I wasn’t really in solitude, but in an imaginary future where someone else would be reading my descriptions. During those times I remained embedded in language and in my social identity, rather than free to experience my deeper identity as part of the universe.
But there was also a positive aspect to writing, and I’m glad I wrote as much as I did. At times putting an experience into words encouraged me to look more closely and reflect more deeply. And also, the journal now allows and invites me back into the days and months of solitude.
SHAPING A STORY
My original journal was almost nine hundred pages long, but during editing I haven’t omitted any complete entries. If there’s no entry for a particular day, there was none in the original. But I have had to choose which passages to exclude. This felt vaguely deceitful, until I remembered that the original entries themselves scooped only scattered dollops from the vast swirl of daily experience: they told one among many possible tales. I have, though, both in the original journal entries and in the editing process, tried to tell my truth as I lived it.
Although I’ve removed much of the repetition that was in the original journal, I haven’t deleted anything — even painful and shameful passages — I believe to be important. I’ve been tempted to cut more of the descriptions of inner turmoil than I have, but to present only joyful events and meaningful insights would idealize and falsify the process of exploration and discovery. I’ve also tempered the profanity that peppered the original journal. Swearing was an important part of how I felt and how I recorded my feelings. There is risk and pain as well as satisfaction and joy in writing as nakedly as I have.
The weather, the challenge of survival, and the experience of physical and emotional pain were always important — sometimes overwhelmingly so. This physicality grounded my mind in my body and contextualized my psychological and spiritual explorations. Wanting to honor these rhythms as I recorded them, I have rarely moved passages from one day to another, but I have frequently rearranged and restructured paragraphs within any given day to smooth their flow.
In editing the original journal, I at first believed I should carve that mass using a single consistent narrative voice for the whole year. That dream slowly faded as I sat for months trying to develop a coherent plan. I finally gave up and let each paragraph emerge in its own way. Instead of one, there are many voices. Some are cultured and insightful, full of analytic critique and aesthetic caress. But there are also frightened, enraged, and uncivilized voices — howling from dark distant places. The different points of view, fluctuating emotions, and variable states of consciousness sometimes seem — and perhaps are — contradictory. The journal remains rough and irregular in places, not well-rounded or nicely squared at the corners. It’s incomplete, full of unanswered questions.
I still fluctuate between experiencing myself primarily as a member of society and feeling myself to be a solitary embedded in the nonhuman world. The man shaping this essay in North America is not identical with the man writing in his journal far away in the remote reaches of southern Chile. This is why the different voices from solitude insist on being present in the journal and on contradicting the culturally accepted form of a structured narrative.
CULTURAL EXPECTATIONS
In the journal I can distinguish different stages during my year in solitude. The stages are not distinct or mutually exclusive, but they do reflect my shifting focus of attention as the months passed. At first I was dealing with surviving in the extreme environment, the challenge of building a camp and hauling firewood, and with physical pain. Once most of the heavy work was done and I had time to come back to myself during the long nights of winter, I sank into self-analysis. When spring sun began to stretch the days, restlessness urged me into books, adventure, and observation of the wildlife around me. As time passed and solitude gathered me in, I gave up reading and wandering the physical world, and settled more deeply into spiritual exploration.
While these stages loosely track changes in my inner and outer experience, they are also probably shaped by modernity’s attachment to the notion of progress — to my belief that inner transformation would create a more dynamic personal story and signify a successful conclusion to the enterprise. In spite of questioning cultural norms, I was still vulnerable to their hidden power — in my actual experience, in my documentation of that experience, and during the process of editing.
The balance between inner dark and light shifts in the journal as the months pass. All through the year, inner and outer storms continued to pound, but my relationship to them changed. I also grew weary of recording the difficult times and began to notice how seldom I described the joyful ones. When settled into the moment, I seldom felt the urge to write about it, and so the original journal was unbalanced toward the painful.
LIFE SCRIPTS
When we are finally able to see (however dimly) the scripted story our family and culture have cast us in, what are our options? Must we either knuckle under or attempt to create a new persona/story and thereby alter our relationship with ourselves and our world? In the latter case, aren’t we simply enmeshing ourselves in yet another cultural story — a story of reinvention? Any story we create — if we actually believe it and take it as our own — will limit our freedom to be who we are not in that new story. In Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, Mark Epstein writes:
The crumbling of the false self occurs through awareness of its manifestations, not through the substitution of some underlying “truer” personality. The ability to become aware of self-representations without creating new ones is, psychologically speaking, a great relief. It does not mean that we drop the everyday experience of ourselves as unique and, in some way, ongoing individuals, but it does mean that whenever we find ourselves entering narcissistic territory, we can recognize the terrain without searching immediately for an alternative.1
At times in solitude I was deeply concerned about the story I was telling myself, and imagined I would eventually tell others, about my experience and about who I am. But in times of peace and self-acceptance, the need for a coherent narrative seemed to fade. Just as scientific theories are likely stories about a world that is deeply mysterious, so are personal narratives about ourselves. When I slipped beyond words, I was simply a mysterious being existing in the present moment.
But personal stories often do seem indispensable as we wander through our days, and some stories align with our lived experience more closely than do others. The fit between our experience of ourselves in the world and the story we tell to make sense of that experience is crucial. When we recognize not only that we create stories to make sense of our experience but that the stories we tell also structure the experience, we have to acknowledge that our existence is very circular, indeed.
TALE OF THE HERO
In the journal, a saga of physical adventure and spiritual transformation runs parallel to and weaves through the drifting account of daily life — the autobiographical quest of the hero. This is a recognized, even expected, storytelling mode for someone spending a year alone in the wilderness, and I could have enhanced the heroic saga during editing. But instead I’ve allowed that tidy narrative to remain interrupted over and over by the unruly wildness of the “hero’s” soul.
In the messier story, the hero’s cultural ideals of personal success, social progress, and free will are questioned in view of the cyclic storms of depression, rage, fear, and doubt about his place in society and a felt lack of spiritual development. Despite differences in theology, moral orientation, and self-discipline, the man in that pedestrian tale may have more in common with St. Augustine and his surrender of personal agency to Divine Will than with the stereotypical self-oriented striving of modern culture’s secular hero.
My goal in the wilderness was not to conquer either the external world or my own inner nature, but to give up the illusion of ownership and control and to experience myself as part of the ebb and flow of something greater than individual ego. But the goal of attaining enlightenment was elusive — except when it was not. Through a shift in consciousness, my quest came to an end as I realized there was nowhere to go and nothing to get. The notion of a holy grail out there — or even within — was illusory, and what I was seeking I always already had: I was not a special hero, but simply a speck of life like all other specks — unless I was not. Personal agency always reasserted itself, and these two aspects of my being struggled and then tentatively began to dance together.
Stories of spiritual seekers or solitaries in the wilderness are often portrayals of heroic adventure. It’s difficult to not slip into this mode, but I’ve tried. We already have enough of such writing, and in its most blatant form it’s little better than checkout-counter publications flaunting the amazing lives of superhuman “stars.” To me this seems a disservice to us all. When I read such stories and compare them to my own actual life, I feel diminished. “That’s not how my life is; what’s wrong with me?” I’m also pulled out of my own actual life and into vicariously living the imaginary life of another. What I offer instead is a more human account so perhaps we can wander the spaces and silences of wilderness solitude together.