Lost in the Wilderness

Growing up, the wilderness was not presented to me as a scary place, but rather one of excitement, adventure and even sanctuary.

Whether it was from playing with my sister and friends on the forested hill of my own backyard or summers and holidays spent in the deep woods of Central Maine , I viewed the wilderness as a stretch of friendly forest trees who consistently welcomed me with their outstretched limbs for refuge and playful fun.

And I thought everyone viewed the wilderness this way.

In fact, this belief was further deepened by camping--often with other families-- on nearly each and every family trip we took, including to places like Disney World- hotels were very much a foreign concept to me until much later in life.

And then there was the annual Wilderness School graduation.

At various points in their careers, both of my parents were working with troubled adolescents.  And being the avid wilderness believers that they were, when nothing else worked, they would recommend Wilderness School as a kind of therapeutic last resort.

On the last day, when the teenagers would return from 5, 8, or even 20 days in the woods, there would be a party for them that included picnic style food, a slide show (what can I say, it was the 70’s and 80’s) of pictures of the kids zip-lining from trees and hiking up high mountain summits, and an informal graduation ceremony.

For my family, it was a ritualized annual event to go and take part in the Wilderness School graduation festivities- literally celebrating the miraculous value of the woods.

It wasn’t until I was well into young adulthood when I realized that everyone did not feel the same as I did about the wilderness, and lately, even for me, the wilderness has taken on some new meaning.

As many of you know, I did not grow up with the bible- Old or New Testament.  So I missed out on the stories of both Moses’ experience in the wilderness in Exodus and Jesus’ time spent in the wilderness written about in Matthew and Mark.

Hearing these biblical stories now though, I am intrigued with the idea of the wilderness being a metaphor for internal psychic states that are far more dialectical than any of my romantic childhood memories.

I was reminded of this recently while reading Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation in his chapter “The Night of the Senses.”

In it he writes:

“The spirit enters a wilderness and travels blindly in directions that seem to lead away from vision, away from God, away from all fulfillment and joy.  It may become almost impossible to believe that this road goes anywhere at all except to a desolation full of dry bones- the ruin of all our hopes and good intentions.

The prospect of this wilderness is something that so appalls most men that they refuse to enter upon its burning sands and travel among its rocks.  They cannot believe that contemplation and sanctity are to be found in a desolation where there is no food and no shelter and no rest and no refreshment for their imagination and intellect and for the desires of nature.”

Imagining this kind of pictorial desolation in the landscape is actually not difficult for me. 

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Central Asia’s Uzbekistan in the early 2000’s, I crisscrossed the country several times east to west and north to south by train, bus and taxi, and those long rides brought a whole new meaning  (and visual) to the words barren landscape.

Therefore, though a born and bred New Englander, it is not a stretch for me to imagine “wilderness” as more like desert than deep forest.

What is very different for me though, a paradigm shift really, is visualizing the wilderness as anything but soothing.

That is until recently.  My latest experience with melancholic brooding and confusion drew out the metaphoric wilderness I had only read about.

Not because this was my first bout with that uneasy feeling you may, or may not, also be all too familiar with.  No, what was different was there was a counterweight on the other side of it- god.

I felt lost in the wilderness, but all the while continued to have a conversation with god.  Well, conversation may be overstating.  Probably more like me making desperate pleas: “god, where are you?! Help me! Show me that you are there. I need you!”

When this groundless feeling continued beyond hours into days, I began to sympathize with Thomas Merton’s other statement about “the wilderness” later in the same chapter:

“If a man in this night lets his spirit get carried away with fear or impatience and anxiety, everything is lost. He will twist and turn and torture himself with attempts to see some light and feel some warmth and recapture the old consolations that are beyond recovery. And finally he will run away from darkness, and do the best he can to dope himself with the first light that comes along.”

For me this would include binge watching hours upon hours of Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix and eating large amounts of carbohydrates.

But wait! Merton assures us, there is another way…

“There are others who, no matter how much they suffer perplexity and uneasiness in the wilderness where God begins to lead them, still feel drawn further and further on into the wasteland…They sense, by a kind of instinct, that peace lies in the heart of this darkness. Something prompts them to keep still, to trust in God, to be quiet and listen for His voice; to be patient and not to get excited.”

I held these words in my heart as I literally, not figuratively, hiked in the wilderness this past weekend.  (Okay, maybe wilderness is an exaggeration, the woods anyway).

It started out light-hearted.  I was even singing  the lyrics to Madonna’s Like a Virgin while I marched through the rocks and trees.

And just in case you forgot the words:

 I made it through the wilderness.

Somehow I made it through.

Didn't know how lost I was

until I found you.

But then I came to this long stretch of trail that was straight down hill and seemed to go on forever, and that familiar apprehensive feeling swept over me like a tsunami.

I had hiked these woods before- not a lot of times, but enough to think I knew the way without a map on me.  But this time I had my 2 year-old with me, in my arms actually because she was refusing to travel in the toddler backpack, and it was 2 hours from dark and it was, is, winter in New England.

I began to worry.  I began to second guess.

Should I turn around? How much further should I go with this amount of sunlight left and the temperature going down? Am I being irresponsible to head out into the wilderness with a child on my back? Should I have chosen a safer path that is more familiar?

Yup, I was knee-deep in doubt which was a short walk from fear; both very tricky emotions to navigate in the literal and the figurative wilderness.

However, something inside of me said just go a little further.  And then, I saw it: the bend.

My memories of this particular forest told me that the path I was on was one large loop, but that one extensive stretch of trail that had no turns for such a long time caused me to second-guess myself and consider turning around.     

But I didn’t.  I persisted. 

Though I was never so glad to see that bend in the road, and with it, faith restored.

This little en vivo wilderness adventure led me to consider these dualities: doubt and faith, dangerous and nourishing,  lost and found,  small self and big Self.  Upon reflection, it seemed so unpredictable that such paradoxical experiences could all be found together in the wilderness, and yet undeniably true.

As an adult now, without those protective childhood rose-tinted glasses, when I think back to those Wilderness School graduations for the teens who in all likelihood were one step away from the juvenile detention center, I would bet they experienced a lot of the “darkness” in the wilderness that Merton described. 

Maybe no one took a photograph of it.  Maybe it wasn’t pretty and entailed a lot of tears and swearing and refusal to take one more goddam step!  But I bet, with all that lightness found at the picnic in the end, there was also a very heavy dose of darkness found at the beginning and especially in the middle.

But then grace happened. 

Perhaps in the form of faith. Perhaps in the form of the mythological guardian angel cast as the Wilderness School counselor who sat beside the teen in the leaves and mud until she was able to get up again.  If bedtime stories, or biblical stories teach us anything it’s that in the end, the phoenix does rise from the ashes.

Like those teens, the wilderness is more complex for me now.  I continue to regard her as a place of solace, but she also can be grueling and transformative as well.  I suppose it is similar to any sort of honest relationship with god, right?

I’m curious, what have your experiences been getting lost in the wilderness? How did you proceed?