When I was a kid—maybe 13? It is hard to say because everything in my childhood feels extremely compressed into the space between the year my father died and the fall I started high school—I went to summer camp for the second time. It was out deep in the woods and I experienced a kind of silence I would not again see for three years and after that not again until college. I kept returning to that silence and stillness of the woods as a touchstone. Each pilgrimage brought me further from the technology of the day and closer to the technology of my mind; to the interconnections of thought, memory, desire, and intention. All of these things can get lost in the noise of modernity and the things that we—that I—in order to escape daily routine. Yet it is in that daily routine that I learn to appreciate variation and to appreciate silence. It is in that routine and the deep disconnect that I finally look at myself and see, and perhaps more importantly, hear what my mind and my heart are trying to say.
These journeys never last long enough, but they usually last long enough to hear the whispers of myself and to see if only for a moment what matters in my life and what is missing in my life and where things are out of balance. I won’t pretend I’ve landed upon that understanding in the handful of hours I’ve spent in the back woods of Tennessee far enough that I can’t hear the highway but close enough to the world that the rumble of trucks navigating the back roads and still stretching the reach of civilization finds my ears pricking up to the sound.
I am happy.
I am mindful of the writers who came before me to places such as this and dumped their troubles unto the page with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and the twinkle of promise in their eyes. I am mindful of the world I left with the fabricated drama of youth football teams, the stress of too many hours of work, the promised challenge of ‘literary competitiveness’, and all that comes with being a man in the world. To that world I say, “See you soon. I’ll be ready for you now.”