“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
– John Muir

Fewer words ring truer in my mind than John Muir’s transcendental musings on nature, the wilderness of this world, and the triad connection between man, the outdoors, and the universe.

For me, Winter arrives with a contemplation as a companion every year. There is something about snow, the coldness of winter, and the stripping down of life to its raw bones that always leaves me in awe. In many ways I am gladly forced into this state of introspection during this time of year; it is during these times that Muir returns to me again and again as I confront the devastating beauty of the natural world.

Places like this tree tunnel in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near Houghton humble me to my core. Standing beneath the tall pines and snow covered trees listening to their moaning cracks as they sway in the breeze, I feel so small yet emboldened by the proximity to such grandiosity. The creaking song of wind blown trees is the only sound I can hear for miles. Silence reigns supreme when the world is held in Winter’s grasp. The power of this silence is both terrifying and awesome to experience; Muir himself described it as “awful and sublime” to behold.

If you lean in close and rest your ear against the wood grain of the trees the only sounds you hear are the winter winds and an almost inaudible rustling like the sound of exhaled breath coming from every living thing. Like a whisper too soft to fully understand you find yourself leaning closer and closer, desperate to capture its meaning; a whisper that would say

We are the sound of life unwilling to succumb to the conditions of this world. Strip us barren, take our beauty, and leave us barely alive, but still we keep on living for the broken are those that shall never die. 

Listen to the trees, they hold valuable lessons even when they do not bear leaves. Muir was right in so many ways, and especially in his observation that forests provide the fastest gateway to the universe and all of its mysteries. These trees existed long before me and will continue their stationary existence long after I am gone. You can gain no greater perspective in life than that which you can find suspended in the canopies of trees.

“Between every two pine trees there is a door
leading to a new way of life.” – John Muir

Ever since I can remember I have been coming to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to visit our family compound on the shores of a lake fed by Lake Superior. I never went to summer camp or a sports camp as a child, instead I gathered alongside my numerous cousins, aunts and uncles, and under the amused gaze of my grandparents to run amuck in the forests and swim in the Great Lakes. The sun never seemed to fade on those long summer nights.The memories and experiences I had during those endless summers forever altered who I was and who I would become in ways so numerous that this blog post could never even begin to contain all of them. The shores of Lake Superior will always be my second home, but standing where I have stood many times before on the Sandstone cliffs of Jacobsville as the light from the first day of 2018 fades into shades of soft pink, I realize just how unfamiliar and new familiar places can become.

The emerald shades of Lake Superior have dulled under the snow filled skies and mist rises from the surface of the gently rolling waves like warm breath on a cold winter day. This place feels alive in a way that I have never experienced before this moment. The thin layer of ice forming across the lake is marked by violent fissures where dark water breaks through the pristine whiteness of snow. The segments of ice rise and fall with the water’s movement and I swear I can see and hear the lake breathing steadily as the shards of ice gather and separate like shattered glass.

How many times have my feet stood on the red sands I can barely see beneath the ice? How many rocks sit at the bottom of the lake just out of sight from skipping rock competitions between me and my cousins? How can this possibly be the same place that once felt as familiar as the laughter lines on my face? It baffles me how quickly the old becomes the new when you are willing to inflict change on all that feels normal.

The first day of the new year is almost over and I see just how desperately I need to pull myself from routine and alter the way I see everything that once seemed repetitive to me. There is always something new to discover even in places you have already been. I want to treat all things as if they were new and beautiful because when you wake up each morning with eyes renewed, truly, the world holds surprises you wouldn’t begin to believe.

Honestly, I do not know how to begin again. This space was my home for so many years when my words could find no ears to fall upon with quiet urgency. For those who have joined me on my journey either part way or all the way back eight years ago from the very beginning, and for those who are starting today, know this: the last two years my words have been nonexistent. I could name a thousand reasons that left me hesitating with my fingers hovering above a dusty keyboard, but none are sufficient to strip the guilt away from my heart. Writing has always been the life-blood of my being and to halt the progress of pen on paper is to bring my heartbeat to a startling stand still. However, that isn’t even true. It was more gradual than that, there was no jarring day where the words stopped coming, it was a slow, drawn out decay of all that made me, me.

The words never stopped coming, they were always there and still remain within me petrifying on the tip of my tongue and on the edges of mymind. Ossified and neglected, I chose to let my words transform into fossils instead of living breathing beings. I put down the pen and stepped away from the computer screen in pursuit of other things. I am not proud of my choices that drove a wedge between my purpose and empty shiny things. I felt I owed you this honesty, this courtesy of explaining to you why I walked away before anything could become of me. I suppose it was out of fear, fear that my words were not good enough to be consumed by another’s mind and transformed into something entirely new. Or perhaps it was just my attempt to escape what I felt was a fate cemented in time and progressed without me whether I ceased to act or not. Scared of change, I halted everything in the hope that I could also stop the world from spinning along with me. Futility does not even begin to describe the time I spent refusing to write, it was simply nothing. I did nothing, lived nothing, felt nothing, and hoped for nothing.

Nothing is a strange companion and for a time it seemed to suit me just fine, but soon nothing became everything. Everything was all hope, all fear, all anxiety, all sadness, and all paralyzing. Frozen in everything yetliving in nothing.

On the eve of a New Year, I decided to begin chipping away at the fossil of my being and slowly stretch the atrophied muscles of my writer’s mind. I wanted to begin here, with the truth so we could move into something new together without questions to fog our path. I will tell you briefly what became of me with the hopes of elaborating more in writing yet to come in the new year.

These last two years have been the most difficult years of my life thus far. After I returned from my half-year road trip across the country by myself the transition from nomadic wayfarer to stable breadwinner was painfully slow and full of yearning for the open stretches of road and the feeling of standing on the edge of a world that was mine to own. When I finally landed an impressive job at an up-and-coming tech company, got the apartment I always dreamed of with one of my best friends, and moved to San Francisco to live out the life I felt was the epitome of my dreams, it quickly collapsed into an unrecognizable nightmare.

I had two weeks of this perfect life. Two weeks until the world came crashing down around me. To make a long story short, after a sudden and drastic change in my health I was left weak, confused, scared, and without a name for a mysterious illness that plagued me. I spent six long months running from doctor to doctor, test to test, and hospital to hospital trying to find out what was wrong with me until I was tentatively diagnosed with a rare Neurological disorder called Mal de Débarquement Syndrome (MdDS).

By the end of 2016 and partway through 2017 I had lost my fancy job, had to leave my beautiful apartment, and had to move away from the city I had come to love. Most devastating of all, I lost what it felt like to benormal. Severe illness has a way of stripping away everything that is not essential to living. Life is no longer about thriving, it is about surviving. My life became one long series of days spent struggling to get by. In all of this darkness though, my fight to survive illuminated in me the most essential parts of my being. I realized how important writing truly was to me despite having neglected the creative parts of me for so long. I could feel the words pushing up against my sealed lips and the jittering feeling in my finger tips of a story begging to be born. But I found I no longer knew how.

Time does not heal all wounds, but it does normalize the pain of even the most devastating injuries. This last year has been my gradual realization and reclamation of the most important parts of me. I am slowly adjusting to life with my illness and reacquainting myself with the petrified words lodged in my mind. If 2017 was the year of painful loss and slow recovery, then I hope that 2018 is the year of new beginnings for old passions. My resolution for this upcoming year is to undergo my own personal Renaissance. The New Year will be a space not for a new me, but the rebirth of who I was. Will you join me?