Old Growth Forest of the Soul
I listened to an Adventure Journal podcast the other day where the hosts touched on how they felt that adventuring in wilderness was really just like coming home. It’s rediscovering those hidden abilities you have for toughness, resilience, endurance, and independence. Learning to live and thrive outside is a return to our wild selves, the ones we’ve locked away to become more civilized and pay the bills. You don’t just feel like a more complete person when you’ve spent long periods of time outdoors, you live a more enriched life. Your life becomes seeded with memories of wild places that take root in your heart and never stop growing. With each trip into the wild you’re planting a forest in your heart.
When I grow old and my joints begin to creak and groan beneath the weight of a long life, I can only hope to have nourished an old growth forest in my soul. I want a mental map of the world that has more game trails than roadways, more canyons than shopping centers. I want to know myself as home, A thoroughly capable, adaptable, and independent human being.
The Podcast — How Adventure Can Change Your Life | Episode 001
“Part of what we call adventure, being comfortable in nature, is reacquiring those skills, and in some ways, I think it feels like coming home. I should be able to figure out like where the sun rises and sets when I’m outside. I should be able to know how to find water or to stay dry, because for hundreds of thousands of years that’s what homo sapiens did…I would propose that a core element of falling in love with adventure is discovering slash rediscovering that personal resilience and capability…”