How to be a Wildman

How to be a Wildman

By: Michael Hedrick

It was John Muir who once said “Going to the woods is going home”.
There’s a sense of calm in the midst of thousands of acres of trees that grow up around you, swallowing you whole, quieting not only your voice, but the voices of stress, society, and everything that seems to creep into our lives commanding our presence and attention.
We know these things are a veritable existence but they seem to happen around us without an entirely conscious presence on our parts, as to what is happening.
In the woods, one can breathe. In the woods, there is awareness, a fully conscious idea of what it means to be alive.
To be a lone soul in the wilderness speaks to a greater calling, the journey, the quest for finding quiet and for finding oneself.
Blame it on a mountain upbringing or the copious pot smoked in high school and college, or the varied acid and mushroom trips that found you at harmony in some of the forests above your home town but you’ve always felt more comfortable in the immensity of a wilderness among thousands of trees than in the confining streets of a city among thousands of people.
That life has always seemed nicer to you.