Week One: FWNC

I have to confess something.

As much as I enjoy the outdoors (in theory), like Abbey and his snakes, I unfortunately possess a deep fear of the wild as well. I'm the first to flinch if I hear a sharp sound and the quickest to freeze when I come face to face with most creatures. 

I'm actually deathly afraid of birds - the longer the neck and larger the beak, the more horrifying (because those are basically dinosaur descendants). I'm allergic to practically everything from oak to cedar to pollen to most kinds of grass. I certainly am not the type to hold a semi-domesticated alligator or usually even one to toss food pellets at a herd of bison. (If you ask me, that fence really needs to be thicker.)

So I knew from the get-go that this course would present a major challenge to me. I'm not a natural adventurer. But last week, during our first trip to the nature center, I promised myself I would commit to whatever task I was given. No fear, just work.

While I threw food over the wire fence in the general direction of the bison, I tried not to imagine all the gory ways the group of us could be trampled by a hoard of them. As we laid sweet potato pieces by the prairie dog burrows, I avoided the thought of the ground crumbling beneath us and exposing the deep tunnels of the earth. Writing it out sounds so dramatic, but I'll call it creative since my mind will conjure disaster anyway.

Oddly enough, I was looking forward to the piercing privet and ability to get moving in the cold. No unknown imaginary danger in a prickly plant. After picking my blade of choice, I began digging into the smaller privet tangles along the inner fence. My fingers were freezing, and some of the vines required more upper body strength than I can flaunt as a soccer player, but somehow the "grunt" work went by entirely too quickly.

For the first time in a while, my mind was quiet. There was no music in my headphones, no phone glowing in my face, no heartbeat ringing in my ears. It was a relief. A relief. 

I found myself incredibly thankful for the blank slate of my brain for that blissful, difficult hour. It's so rare to find quiet moments like that one. We forget to build it into our days. 

It reminded me of this experiment my Communication and Character professor ran on us last year. She had us sit in front of an art piece, something simple and pretty - a nature scene. She set a timer for fifteen minutes and simply demanded, "Look." For all of a minute, the class manages it. Then we begin to fidget. Our bodies shift in our seats, our minds conclude we've seen and processed every detail in the painting, and our thoughts go gallivanting.

People are itching for their phones, for their voices, or even for the mediocrity of the whiteboard behind them. But we look. And look. And look. And eventually, we understand. 

This introductory week was sort of like that experiment. An act under-practiced, a world unappreciated. Adventurer or not, I can put in the work for at least fifteen minutes, until I understand, until it all makes sense, until the fear bleeds into quiet, and the privet piles up behind me.