TO ESCAPE the compulsion to cycle through all the feeds—and the fresh waves of rage and anguish that kept stirring—I headed into the forest yesterday morning. It was early enough that I was the only human. I often can’t bear humans, and yesterday was one of those days.
Although my phone was in my pocket, just in case, it remained there, untouched, which is part of the ritual for me: no checking or messaging or even photographing except on rare occasions. I hummed a sacred little song because my osteopath friend M—the Body Whisperer, I call her—once told me that humming stimulates the vagus nerve and activates the parasympathetic nervous system—the “rest and digest” state. I took in gulps of green air—it’s at peak green now—and tilted my head back to watch the ferny tops of trees waft against the pale blue sky. The layers of leaves and moss made the ground spring back underneath me. As I lifted each foot for the next step, I visualized drawing peace up from the earth.
All the serenity fled in an instant when I heard a branch snap. Wild boar run in these woods. We’ve encountered them many times over the years, rousting them into action from their otherwise placid lolling and rooting around. Last time there were little ones, a whole drift of them—no, drift is for pigs. A group of boar is apparently called, of all things, a singular. (There’s a poem there, JP, isn’t there.) They’re dangerous, regularly maiming or even killing dogs and sometimes humans, especially when the little ones are around. They just ram you with their mass, all 200 or more pounds of them, possibly goring you if you catch a tusk. The best escape is supposedly to climb a tree, but mostly the trees in the Grunewald are branchless for meters up, pines straight like pencils, unless you happen to be in a birch grove.
The Germans invented managed forests, you know—the same Prussians who gave us our education system, the regimentation designed to make children compliant—planted the trees in straight lines to make them easier to count and later cut, with any wayward curvy trees thinned out, leaving only the good straight soldiers.
When the branch snapped, all my hairs stood on end and my heart started racing. Wait, I called to the pup, one of the only commands I’ve taught her, which unfailingly makes her freeze in her tracks (quite Prussianly). We stood still and silent, breathless and listening, as I scanned for the best protection. I felt powerfully alive. When nothing else came, after a while, we moved on, and I could feel the adrenaline ebb.
I actually really love those singular encounters, which my friends think is bananas, but I do. I love it because this is what this whole mechanism is for: real mortal danger, real flight or fight. As opposed to all the countless ways our modern world triggers the same reactions—manufactured fears, or echoes of trauma.
We headed towards what had emerged as our destination. Part of Living Like My Animal is intentionally not thinking up a goal ahead of time, but following our instincts once we’re out there, for example moving in the opposite direction as a snapping branch or the sounds of a group of gabbing humans.
We arrived at a lake and sat there, watching the steady pulse of the water moving east/northeast with the breeze. The sun was still low but bright—it scattered and flashed across the water. Mirran, I thought—the name of my best friend, whose father created a word for this very phenomenon. There should be a word for the light on the water, he thought, and so he made one up, and named his daughter after it.
I missed a fish jump but caught its splash. I watched small birds fly across the surface of the water, almost touching. Skimming (I read later, curious) permits the birds to take advantage of an aerodynamic effect in which the patterns of airflow around the wing are altered, reducing resistance. You have to be less than a wingspan from the surface for it to happen.
Finally the pup made an impatient noise and so we got up to go. On the way back I reversed the ritual of my steps, now visualizing, with each foot pressing down into the ground, my love and gratitude flowing down into the earth, along the filaments of mycelial networks, until it reached every corner of the forest.
And just like that, I was free.
Healing like my animal