The wonderful thing about Zen practice is that you get to do it whether you like it or not.
— ZEN SAYING
Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.
— H. L. MENCKEN
When I first returned to Vancouver, it felt like a foreign city where I had no place to live and no idea where I would find an apartment I could afford. Then by chance I met a man who lived in a quiet neighborhood and had a small trailer parked in his backyard garden. In exchange for some rent and ten hours work a month, he let me live there, use the bathroom in his basement, and store my gear in the garage. It was perfect for my needs.
Before leaving for Chile, I’d added fuel stabilizer to the gas tank of my old Datsun station wagon and covered her with a tarp, but by now she’d been sitting for almost two years in a wet climate. Moss was growing on the outside and mold covered much of the inside. The carburetor was so gummed up it had to be rebuilt.
Although I thought I was returning to an empty bank account, I discovered a forgotten $3,500 term deposit. Still, that wouldn’t go far. Then I won a fellowship that would see me through the next year and a half if I was frugal. I hoped to complete my PhD by then.
I had, though, no idea how to turn my year in solitude into a dissertation. Some of the nearly nine hundred pages of the original journal was already typed, but almost a third was scribbled longhand in spiral notebooks. When I’d stopped to visit Patti in Texas, she had heroically offered to transcribe the written portion, which she did with virtually no errors — even though I had trouble reading my own writing. I felt overwhelmed by this huge amount of raw data.
I sat facing my computer for more than a year waiting for a vision of how and where to begin. The traditional social science approach would be to use conceptual theory to structure the work, and then add short excerpts from the journal to support and give life to the abstract ideas. But what I’d learned in solitude was as much in my heart and body as in my mind, and I couldn’t even put it into words, never mind theory. All I knew was that somehow the daily journal, itself, would be central to the work.
During that year I told myself over and over that I simply had to begin to write, but resistance and inertia bound my imagination and energy. On some level I wasn’t yet ready to write; I was still processing what had happened to me alone in the wilderness. I again became a semi-recluse, spending long hours hidden in my office.
I even asked my supervisory committee to delineate the minimum requirements for a dissertation that would be academically acceptable. They declined the bait and said that I’d fought long and hard for the freedom to follow my inner call, and now I needed to trust myself. They encouraged me to stop worrying about some supposedly acceptable dissertation and instead to write from the heart. They reassured me I could write absolutely whatever I wanted, and then my job would be to convince them that it deserved a PhD. I appreciated the gift, but still didn’t know how to begin.
THE SLOW DANCE OF THE CHILEAN LIMPETS
In the meantime, I returned to the limpet study. That data — numbers in tidy columns — I did know how to work with. I defined a simple computer procedure that would plot on a graph the limpets’ daily low-tide positions. Vaguely at first, and then with growing interest and excitement, I noticed that the sequential positions of some of the limpets showed strong geometric patterns. It was as if they might have been using the earth’s magnetic field to orient their movements. My mind was captivated by the patterns that were emerging from the limpets’ apparently random positions on the rock. I wondered if I had discovered something that no one had noticed before.
Then, sitting alone late at night, hunched over the eerie glow of the computer, things got a bit weird. I began to imagine setting myself up as a sort of soothsayer — using the patterns of limpet movement as my tea leaves to predict the future. I might even develop a cult following as the limpet guru. Such are the bizarre imaginings of a, or at least this, solitary scientist.
But in a flash of understanding, the prosaic and disappointing source of the pattern suddenly became obvious: my own methodology. While measuring the positions of the limpets on the stormy southern rocks, I rounded my measurements up or down to the closest division mark on the radius of the dial I’d made from the bucket lid. I also rounded up or down to the closest mark on the string attached to the center of the dial. This twofold rounding up or down created the artifact of apparent geometric pattern in the data. Alas! Once I reintroduced a random element into the measurements to compensate for the rounding off, the geometric — almost mystical — pattern disappeared.
It’s fascinating how readily the mind creates and projects regular patterns onto the world, and how exciting it is to then “discover” those apparent patterns. Scientists consciously examine their methodology and data for just such artifacts, but on a deeper level, the mind constantly and unconsciously creates and projects patterns. This process is pragmatically useful because it allows for some degree of predictability, but it can lead to a false sense of power and security, and to the extent we become caught in our own projections, it can dampen our experience of the mysterious wonder in the world.
Often when we clump things together into categories (such as species of limpet) we lose the grounded actuality of the individual. I was intrigued by the uniqueness of each limpet’s daily behavior. Each just seemed to do what it did rather than follow a regularly repeating pattern or a pattern common to all individuals.
I still imagined the limpets to be doing a kind of very slow free-form underwater dance, and persuaded Axel Anderson, a fellow grad student, to write a computer program that simulated their movements. I could watch it for hours. I presented the results of my statistical analysis and the computer simulation at a conference, but no one else seemed particularly thrilled. I guess without having spent time in the wind and rain with the actual limpets, the graphs and moving dots on the screen didn’t mean much.
POST-SOLITUDE BLUES
I was often asked if coming back was difficult, and I usually replied that since I was familiar with the process it was not as hard this time as it had been after previous retreats. Nevertheless, although not aware of it at first, I slowly settled into depression. I felt confused about what I had and had not learned in solitude. This was a continuation of the doubt, frustration, and anxiety I’d often felt on the island about not finding the answers I was seeking, and the belief that I should have Answers to share with others.
Many spiritual teachers claim to have found ultimate peace and joy and that they can show others how to find it, too. I would love to be able to say the same, but that would be dishonest. In any case, I tend to mistrust people who profess to have evolved beyond uncertainty, doubt, and pain, and appreciate those who openly share the ups and downs of their journey and the partial wisdom they have found.
Eventually, troubled by my lack of a sexual relationship and my lack of productivity in writing the dissertation, I began to see a psychiatrist. Perhaps someone formally trained in the workings of the mind would be able to help me see what I could not see and accept on my own. From my office in Vancouver, southern Chile seemed far away both physically and psychologically.
At the UBC mental health center, a nice therapist talked with me for a while and then said she felt I should seek professional help. I’d thought that’s what I was doing there, but apparently not. She referred me to a psychiatrist, who after talking with me for fifty minutes told me, with no apparent doubt, that I needed long-term therapy and strong medication if I wanted to be free of my obsessive-compulsive perfectionism.
I declined his invitation and found another doctor who was not as eager to prescribe pills. I worked with her once a week for about three years, and the process was very healing. I didn’t learn much I hadn’t figured out on my own, and I was disappointed that I couldn’t deal with my distress alone, but her steady mirroring of positive regard gently began to soften my self-deprecation.
Although I hadn’t found any ultimate Answers in solitude and sometimes still felt grief at that failure, more often I remembered to not take my questions so seriously. Slowly the gloom of depression lifted, and there was a gentler sense of quiet spaciousness in the movements of my heart and mind.
TELLING MY STORY, AND FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME
I spent a lot of time working with the images I’d brought back from Chile. I’d taken photographs for a year without seeing any results, and I was very happy that many of the images were beautiful. As a way to share my research and evoke for others the experience of solitude, I started giving slide-show presentations at the university and in other venues around Vancouver, using storytelling and journal readings in conjunction with the images to create a sort of guided meditation.
My work was definitely nontraditional, and it triggered interesting responses — most of them positive. One of the people who came to a slide show said that what she appreciated most in my talk was that I didn’t try to provide some universal Answer, but rather, by openly sharing my journey, created the space for her to follow her own path of exploration. Via the website my nephews helped me create, I received frequent email from people I didn’t know thanking me for sharing my experience with them.
One day in the spring of 2003, as I was sitting quietly in my office, the phone rang. It was the UBC Public Affairs Office. They said they had heard about my year in solitude and asked if I would do an interview for an article in the university newspaper.
Two weeks later the story appeared and within hours I received a call from the Canada National Post also asking for an interview. That story made the front page and was picked up by the Vancouver Sun and the Ottawa Citizen. Local and national radio and television stations invited me onto their programs. I often go days, even weeks, without having phone messages, but for those few days I was sometimes on the phone talking with one reporter or producer and would hang up to find messages waiting from other programs.
I knew it was a transient bubble that would soon pass, and I didn’t take any of it too seriously. People kept saying, “Hey, I’ve been seeing you everywhere in the paper and on radio and TV. You’re famous now.” I’d laugh and say, “It’s just my fifteen minutes and will soon be over.” But it lasted longer than I expected. The media attention didn’t change my private life or my relationships, though. It’s odd that our culture values public recognition so highly when it seems to make so little difference to lived experience — except during the (usually brief ) times of public performance.
A PHD IN SOLITUDE
One day during this period I ran into my friend Anne who had recently finished her PhD in nursing. In celebration, she ’d flown back to Ottawa to visit her family. Her mom met her at the airport, and the first thing she said was, “Well, your PhD from UBC isn’t worth a damn!” This startled Anne and she asked why. Her mom showed her the Ottawa newspaper and said that some guy out there was earning a doctorate for sitting on an island and telling a story about it. Anne laughed and told her mom that I was a friend.
But when she told me, I wasn’t amused. One of the painful aspects of doing unconventional work was the worry that it would be seen as narcissistic drivel. Even though the media and many people expressed interest in what I was doing, the demon of self-doubt always lurked in the shadows. I was quite upset, and Anne found that even funnier.
A few days later I met Carl Leggo, one of my academic supervisors, for breakfast. I was still feeling glum that some people obviously thought what I was doing was crap that should not be recognized by the university. Expecting reassurance, I told Carl the story. He was drinking coffee at the time and started laughing so hard I thought coffee would come out his nose. That upset me even more. When he could finally talk he said, “Congratulations! Singlehandedly you are destroying the value of every PhD that has been or ever will be awarded by UBC.” Ah. I let it go and settled down to eat my pancakes.
During that year, one of my most pervasive feelings was of avoiding the dissertation. No matter how much time I spent with the media, responding to people who emailed me, giving presentations, or working on my website, I recognized that I had not yet begun the real work of telling the deeper more intricate story of my year alone in the wilderness. But eventually the distractions lost their seductive power and I settled down to write. Patti continued to be an invaluable friend and collaborator as I started working through the almost nine hundred pages of the original journal.
Once I finally got started, I worked on the dissertation steadily for almost two years. It was sometimes intense and exciting and other times a boring slog. I often sat in front of the computer for hours before my heart and mind would settle down to work. I began going to the university in the afternoon and staying late into the night when my energy was focused and there was no one else around. I knew I wouldn’t be able to explain to my committee what I was trying to do, but would have to create the dissertation without their guidance by following an inner vision I could still only vaguely see. It was a fascinating process.
On February 14, 2004, shortly after a story appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper that described my retreat into solitude, I received the following email: “I have just read your story in the G and M. As with most (90%) PhDs you are either eccentric or nuts. I don’t know which, but I think you are nuts.” It seemed so incisive that I couldn’t resist including it in my dissertation. I wrote back to thank him for his note.
In the spring of 2005, I finally showed my committee what I’d written. I had no idea what I would do if they rejected it, since I didn’t have the energy to begin again. They loved it, and together we began to polish the text and prepare for the defense.
I defended the following November and earned a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies on the physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual effects of deep wilderness solitude. My dissertation was awarded the highest possible mark. The defense was joyful. Patti flew up from Texas, and many others came to support my innovative approach to research — which included my own lived experience and integrated body, heart, and Spirit with mind. We felt we were creating and surfing a swelling wave of academic change.
Some weeks later I met with one of the university examiners to share a beer and discuss some interesting and challenging questions she had posed during the defense. At one point in our conversation I asked her what percentage of the professors at UBC would probably have rejected my dissertation — not because of quality, but simply because it did not match their preconceived idea of what a doctoral dissertation should be. She laughed and said, “Why, it’s a bloody miracle you graduated.” I guess the wave is still a ripple.
MEMORIES AND REFLECTIONS
What do I see when I reflect back on my year in the wilderness; what insights still seem important? A sense of spaciousness developed during the year, and time expanded. After a while I put away my watch and calendar, and lived with the shifting spill of light on mountains and sea, the changing lengths of day and night, the wax and wane of moon and tide, and the fall of rain and winter snow. Without the interruptions of a social schedule to break my inner rhythms, I often felt a sense of continuity through the hours and the weeks. But I also sent a check-in email on the first of each month, and this punctuated the stream of days. So while I lived more and more in the flow of my inner and outer world, cultural time was still present.
There was an intensity of experience often absent when I’m involved in social activity. My senses became more acute and my perception of beauty more achingly immediate. Sometimes the world and I came vibrantly alive. With the freedom to slow down and return over and over to the here and now, my mind settled and opened to perceive a mysterious Presence that I could experience but not define. I, and all else, belong to and am that Presence. In the silence of solitude I remembered that the world is and always has been Sacred.
My interactions with the nonhuman world paralleled my habitual relationships with people. Usually we believe that going into nature is a peaceful respite from the hurly-burly of our social lives, but this is because we seldom stay long enough for our inner conflicts to catch up with us. Once they do, all the stuff we have to deal with in society manifests itself in relation to the nonhuman world: we take ourselves into solitude with us.
This was especially clear in my relationship with Cat. If I had not taken a cat, some other aspect of the world would have triggered my frustration, rage, and guilt. Had there been another person with me, much of what I dumped on Cat would have landed on my partner. But there was more than that. As I reflect back on my time with Cat, I realize he gave me a profound and terrible gift; he showed me a different world. Dogs are fully domesticated creatures, but cats remain half wild. In our friendship, Cat led me to a fierce and untamed place in myself.
My relationship with the wind and rain was different and changed during the year. In the beginning, I felt the wind to be a threat and an adversary that often prevented me from doing what I wanted. Sometimes I sensed active malevolence, rather than simple implacability, and fear filled my solitary mind. When I began to disidentify with my own desires and fears, I could engage more openly with the wind and allow it to shape me in unexpected ways. Slowly the wind became a teacher, and instead of cursing it I bowed in respect. It is sometimes said that when the student is ready the teacher appears. It seems more likely that we are always in the presence of teachers, and at different stages in our development we become open to their teachings.
The wind taught me to surrender, and the rain taught me to love. In the beginning the rain was an annoyance, but over the months I spent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours listening to it patter on the porch roof. That and other water sounds became a mantra that deepened my concentration and carried me inward. There was often bliss as I simply sat and listened. I learned that love is as fundamental as awareness; an open heart as vital as an open mind. Without love, clarity is not enough. I learned that relationship is always possible in any circumstance and is never possible to avoid. I can change the quality of my relationships, but without engagement I cease to exist.
The quality of my relationships was an outward manifestation of my inner attitude and orientation. Over and over I interacted with the world and with myself from a position of power and control. I was intent on exerting my will and having things be the way I wanted them to be. Slowly I came to recognize the enormous pain this attitude caused and at times still causes me. I began to relax my demands and to accept the world and myself as we actually are. I began to see through the strange delusion that we are separate from — and so can somehow own — the world and ourselves.
Learning to open myself to the Mysterious Presence I’m always already part of was as important to inner peace as accepting the world as it is. In solitude I slowly began to accept that I could not autonomously do what needed to be done. The movement from control to trust and surrender was and is at the center of my spiritual journey. But behavioral competence is still important because the process I surrender to includes my own activity.
This shift involves working with aversion and desire. I can relax my effort to control the world only when I’m willing to experience aspects of life that are painful and willing to not experience things I desire. This doesn’t mean I need to seek out what I dislike (although this can be useful at times) or avoid what I enjoy. But I so habitually avoid what I don’t like and actively seek what I do like that to gently decondition this automatic behavior and simply be with whatever comes into my field of experience allows a sense of peace and spaciousness to emerge in my life. Leaning lightly toward what I do not like and lightly away from what I do has begun to slow my frantic addictive activity. Meditation practice was and is an important part of this process.
Living alone for a year in the wilderness and writing about the experience have brought the realization that more and more I know less and less. I’ve found no sure answers. Because of this I sometimes feel bereft, as though I’ve failed in my quest. When caught in such doubt, I long for and question why others have found certainty when I have not. But when I relax into trust, I remember that certainty is a conceptual illusion.
Although I came to feel that, finally, All is Mystery, I also sensed some tentative and probably transient answers of the heart that emerged slowly and sometimes unnoticed through daily living. I saw more clearly than ever before that simply understanding something on a conceptual level is not enough. Transformation is more than changing my thoughts.
Even though, in many ways, I remain a mystery to myself, I have gained some sense of my inner rhythms. While I’ve failed to learn to willfully control shifts of consciousness from small to Big Mind, I have gained insight into why this is so: the small mind entity that desires freedom actually clings more tightly to itself in its efforts to force a shift. By slowing down and accepting the need to surrender, I open myself for the transformation to take place. The experience of joy, peace, and wonder is a gift — not an earned reward. Rather than ordering myself to march in a preconceived formation, I’m slowly learning to dance. This change requires care, humility, and patience.
In the wilderness I imagined I could somehow live continuously with Big Mind awareness, but (experientially) it didn’t happen. Perhaps it’s possible for some mystics, or even for me in the future, but the actuality was and is that there are cycles that ebb and flow like the tides. Sometimes in some things I strive to maintain control; sometimes in some things I surrender to the flow of the world.
FINDING BALANCE
People sometimes ask if I recommend deep wilderness solitude to others. I do not. It’s painful, difficult, and sometimes dangerous. A person needs to be called to it from deep within, and if someone requires external encouragement, he or she is not ready. But I do think many of us can benefit from stepping out of our hectic daily activities to spend some time alone. Often when I ask someone how they are, they reply, “Busy.” This seems to refer to an ongoing state of psychological stress as well as to constant physical activity. I suspect this feeling is pervasive in modern culture and I wonder how long we have lived with the sense that we don’t have enough time to do what we believe we must do.
We often seem to value activity above all else, but like all beings we need to rest and recuperate. I suspect the widespread occurrence of depression in our culture is linked to our refusal to allow ourselves quiet time. Feeling the need to remain constantly busy — mentally or physically — in socially productive activity can prevent us from turning inward to simply be with ourselves. Such inward turning requires time and might lower productivity and social standing. It is not that all activity is bad, but many of us are far out of balance and our activity does not come from a place of stillness and wisdom.
Many are entranced by an economic worldview in which endless growth is not only possible, but also desirable and necessary. This ignores or denies the fundamental ecological reality that the Earth is an essentially closed system with limits to growth. Much of our activity seems ecologically destructive, and we disagree about what should be done to fix the problems we have created. Many of us think our own plan of action is the solution, but it seems possible that excessive human activity — in and of itself — is the basic problem.
The Earth needs to heal, and we cannot make it happen; frequently our efforts only deepen the wounds. But if we can relax our demand for material goods and reduce our rate of reproduction, the Earth might be able to heal herself. Perhaps we can find fulfillment in nonmaterial terms and learn that what we seek we have always had.
Our culture is so focused on progress that we frequently don’t experience our own lives just as they are here and now. But the world will always be exactly as it is in each moment. It’s astonishing how much time and energy we expend in trying to deny this simple fact.
This doesn’t imply passivity. Our visions and ideals are also part of this moment. Everything changes, no matter how slowly, and we can act to alleviate suffering. Yet if plans for the future are not balanced with acceptance and joy in this moment, just as it is, our lives go unlived. The challenge is to work with our lives as they are rather than imagine that things are different. If we can learn to soften our aversions and desires, our lives might become less frantic and more spacious.
One fundamental difficulty is that we do not directly perceive ourselves to be biological beings in a living world. The nonhuman world has become a sort of inanimate backdrop to our human affairs. Theoretically, we know we depend on the physical and biological systems of Earth, but experientially we are alienated from those systems. We treat the Earth as a stranger we should protect for pragmatic or ethical reasons, but until we individually begin to actually experience nonhuman creatures as family and the Earth as our home, we are unlikely to relax our demands for comfort and security or make the changes necessary for our survival, joy, and sense of belonging.
Wilderness solitude has the power to catalyze a transformation in consciousness and a shift in perception. The felt experience of belonging to the ecosphere is psychologically and spiritually healing and may have profound implications for changing our destructive patterns of behavior. I believe we need spiritual transformation as well as economic and legislative solutions.
COMING INTO THE PRESENT
It’s been six years since I left the island in southern Chile. That sentence could be the first in another long chapter, but this story has been about living for a year alone in the wilderness, and about coming back again. It’s time to imagine a boundary line across the endlessly moving sea of experience.
The year following my doctoral defense was difficult. Apparently, the feelings of disorientation that often occur when students graduate are not age-dependent. The same questions can arise no matter how old we are: What should I do with my life? How am I going to earn a living? Where will I live? Not surprisingly, I’ve found no sure answers.
Patti still lives in east Texas, and I’m currently back in Vancouver, after spending much of last year in a remote corner of northern California. I live in a tiny apartment two blocks from the sea, and teach an online course that weaves together systems thinking, explorations in philosophy, and transformations of consciousness. As usual, finances are tight, and I continue to do home repairs to earn enough to get by while I write.
I still live by myself, but my friendships are deep, and Patti and I remain closely bonded. I often work late into the night and still spend much of my time alone. I’m usually comfortable, even joyful, in my solitude and experience myself to be part of the world, but at times I still struggle with feelings of isolation. In those times, a wall seems to separate me from others; a wall that begins to dissolve when I lean into it and treat myself and those around me with compassion. My life is quiet and peaceful. I’m learning to walk more lightly on the Earth, and to trust Life to take me where I need to go next.
The process of inner transformation continues. Although I know that All is sacred and alive, and that Spirit abides in the city — is the city — at times my heart still longs for wilderness solitude. I see trees as more alive than concrete buildings and hear birdsong as more beautiful than electronic beeping. I continue to practice accepting the world as it is and not as I would like it to be. It is enough, and much more than enough.