For years I’ve felt a huge desire to spend a lot more time in nature. The past few months this has been on my mind more than ever. 

Here’s where this journey started for me:

In the wilderness therapy program I went to, we would get food drops twice per week. 

In it we’d each get a new bag of trail mix, a jar of PB, pack of tortillas, several pieces of fruit, and a portion of the group food to carry. 

There was no other food than what we had in our packs, and we all knew the contents of our packs intimately. 

So naturally when one of my oranges went missing one day, I noticed.

So I called a “standing group.”

We could call a standing group anytime we either wanted to express something (using an “I feel statement”) or if we wanted to give someone feedback.

15 boys and several staff members stood in a circle, eagerly awaiting what I would say. 

I started, “I feel angry.” 

“I feel this way because I noticed that I’m missing an orange, and my perception is that someone stole it! What I need is for that person to give it back to me.”

There were a few moments of silence that signified allowing space for the perpetrator to step forward. 

After no one did, my closest friend there, Brandon, lunged into the middle of the circle and screamed, 

“Yo who the fuck stole my boy’s orange!?” 

Brandon either was actually in a gang before he was there, or he looked like he could have been. 17 and completely tattooed on his whole body. He postured and raised his fists like he was ready to brawl.

No one stepped forward and my orange never turned up.

This is one of a hundred instances of me learning how to express myself in healthy ways rather than using drugs and alcohol to run from my feelings.

Wilderness therapy saved my life in ways I’m still unpacking. 

First, it was the catalyst for me overcoming my addiction. I learned to express my feelings, to give and receive feedback, to feel and demonstrate empathy for others and so much more. 

It also continues to impact me to this day by drawing me more and more into nature.

Nature and the soul

My experience out there was the first time I really felt comfortable being myself. 

Part of that was the container created by the treatment program. 

The other part was just the power of nature. The pace of life. The vastness of the mountains. Waking and sleeping with the rhythms of the sun. 

It was the first time in my life I didn’t feel like I had to put on a different mask for different groups of people.

That 9 weeks I spent out there also taught me so much about myself and allowed me, for the first time, to feel connected to myself and in my body rather than constantly stuck in my head.

Ever since then many of my biggest breakthroughs in life have been in nature, but I couldn’t explain why.

For years, I’ve had a belief that goes something like this:

“I discover deeper levels of my soul in nature” or “I come to know myself more deeply in nature.”

I read this quote from the book, Soulcraft, that is helping me start to understand why:

“Nature and soul not only depend on each other but long for each other and are, in the end, of the same substance, like twins or trees sharing the same roots. The individual soul is the core of our human nature, the reason for which we were born, the essence of our specific life purpose, and ours alone. Yet our true nature is at first a mystery to our everyday mind. To recover our inmost secrets, we must venture into the inner/outer wilderness, where we shall find our essential nature waiting for us.”

I still don’t fully understand this, but what I’m getting from this is that outer nature, wilderness, Mother Earth are intimately connected to my inner nature, my soul. 

By spending more time in the wilderness, connections are made, I gain clarity on who I really am, what matters to me, and what makes me special and unique. 

And if nature is powerful, then long periods of time in nature alone are… well… really powerful.

Spending time in solitude

I wrote a couple weeks ago about the fact (fact may be a bit strong) that Jesus, Buddha and Moses all spent significant amounts of time in solitude. Even if you think all 3 of them were made up, there’s something to the point that they were all said to have spent a long period of time alone in nature.

People have used extended times in solitude for millennia as a form of spiritual growth and transformation:

• Dietas in South American shamanic traditions
• Vision fasts in Northern European and Native American cultures
• Prolonged periods of meditation in Buddhist traditions

One of my favorite quotes is “The seeds of clarity sprout in the soil of silence.” – Kunal

I backpacked a section of the Appalachian Trail in the Shenandoah Mountains solo a couple of years ago and had pages and pages of notes and insights about my life. 

I got clear about so much in such a short period of time, and I reconnected to myself and my higher power in a deep way.

Solitude, even for a day, can be extremely potent. Many of the most important days of my year include being alone with or without a journal in nature.

What to do with insights and realizations

When I spend time in nature, especially alone, I have a lot of insights or realizations.

In life and in business I have insights or “aha moments” about what I want to do differently all the time. 

I think a big factor in my success and growth in both is how quickly I can use those insights and integrate them into my being. 

The problem is that it can be really hard sometimes to keep these things top of mind, and I often forget about them.

An executive coach I had for years named Heath taught me something about this that really helped. 

He said that the time between having an insight and thinking about it again or acting on it is called “drift.” 

For instance, let’s say that one day I have the thought that I don’t feel like I’ve been the best son or kept up with my parents as much as I want. If I don’t do anything with that or even think about it again until 6 months later, it’s worthless to me.

The longer the period of time between insight and thinking about it again or doing something with it, the greater the drift. We want to minimize drift especially when the thing isn’t a one time action that can be taken.

For instance, when I first started at WAG there were a few big things I was working on.

One of them was learning to communicate new ideas differently. 

In the past I would just blurt them out to team members immediately. 

I didn’t realize that as the boss, employees tended to take my ideation to mean that that was the direction I wanted to go rather than what I really wanted which was to simply explore the idea. 

This led to me overwhelming a lot of staff members because I had a lot of different ideas and many of them had nothing to do with our shared vision. 

I minimized my drift by asking myself the same question in my journal several times per week: 

Am I doing my best to communicate my ideas to my team at WAG in a way that allows for collaboration but not overwhelm? 

Then I’d give myself a 1-10 rating. 

Doing this kept it and other things I was working on top of mind all the time. It allowed me to almost constantly be thinking about this new insight and enabled me to rapidly improve upon it.

Any time I have a big insight I capture it somewhere and make sure I won’t forget it. Sometimes that means it becomes a constant journal prompt, sometimes it’s a daily reminder in my Things app, sometimes it’s a calendar reminder, etc. 

I am so far from perfect at this, but that is my intention.

Why I started mowing my lawn again

As a business owner, I’ve been taught to “buy back my time” for years. 

The logic goes something like, “If you can pay someone $10/hr to clean your house and you can make $100/hr doing something in the business, then you should pay someone to clean your house.” 

I think that there is great logic in that, but it’s not black or white.

What I realized recently is that this logic led to me outsourcing many of life’s most fulfilling tasks (for me).

This realization has led to me at least attempting to fix everything that breaks in my house myself. 

It’s led to me mowing my own grass for the first time in years and taking care of our yard.

It is so fun to learn new skills, and it feels amazing to know that I can take care of my shit. The Louisiana boy inside of me is embarrassed to even say that because most people fix their own stuff and don’t think of it as anything special.

I understand that even being in the position is an absolute privilege, and that some people fix their own stuff and mow their own grass because they have no other choice.

It’s been great to reclaim some of these activities and just be doing more work with my hands.

Reconnecting with old friends

After wilderness therapy, I went to a residential therapy program just outside of Salt Lake City. A month or so after I got there, my old friend, Brandon (tatted up guy), joined the program. I was so stoked. 

About a week after he was there he pulled me off to the side one day. He said, “It was me that stole your orange.”

Peace,

Michael