struggled with, I said, this sense of total absurdity. I felt disinclined to relinquish hope in the world, even incapable of doing so since becoming a parent, and yet the rational part of my brain, the graph-reading part of my brain, insisted that the future was intolerably dark.
There was a paradox at work, I said, in the uneasy depths of my life. The experience of becoming a parent had illuminated that encroaching darkness, made it appear closer to the margins of my own life, and yet in that time I had felt the unmistakable stirrings of hope for the future. I was aware of the possibility that this was a psychological defense mechanism, a denial of the unavoidably obvious, and yet it was no less potent for that awareness. I wondered, in fact, whether there was not some deep selfishness in operation here, some covert mechanism of human delusion, whereby the very fact of having brought a child into a world on the verge of darkness was what had forced me to have hope. And so maybe my own increased sense of optimism about the future had been acquired at the expense of my son, who would now, having been born, have to live in that future.
Andres then spoke about an idea he’d gotten from the Vietnamese monk and activist Thich Nhat Hanh, whereby there were three circles of care, widening out concentrically like ripples on the surface of water from a dropped stone. There was, at the center, the small circle of the self, and around that the circle of family and friends, and then around that in turn the wider circle of the world. People who care deeply about the world, he said, activists and so on, have a tendency to get angry and burned out from continually fighting battles. And what was needed, he said, was to return to the smaller circle of family and friends, to invest one’s energy there, which would in turn bring more generative energy to one’s work, to the interaction with the wider circle of the world.
* * *
—
One mercifully mild midday toward the end of the week, each of us set out on our particular paths into the hills and valleys, alone with our tents and our backpacks. This divergence was, in a sense, the whole point of our coming together in the first place, the idea being that we would all strike out into the wilderness in search of a place from which we could see no other humans or signs thereof, there to set up camp for fully twenty-four hours. There would be no distractions: no books, no phones, no conversations or other interventions between ourselves and our situations. I myself went down into the valley and walked along the river for perhaps thirty or forty minutes until I found a little hillock by the bank of the river, flat enough and broad enough to accommodate my tent. Others were more adventurous, heading up the rocky paths and slopes toward the peaks of mountains, toward lakeshores and craggy perches, but I sought the comfort and navigational surety of the water, on the principle that you know where you are with a river, unless you are in it.
I raised my tent as soon as I found my spot, fearing that if I left it until I felt like turning in I might, in the absence of a capable Australian neighbor, come to grief in the cold and dark of a descending highland night. Having thus established myself, I collected some rocks and stones and marked out around myself a circle of roughly ten meters in diameter, within which I committed to remain for the next twenty-four hours. This was the central principle of the ritual: you found a place, and you stayed in it, and you did nothing while you were there. It was known as a “nature solo,” and it was inspired by the practice, common to a great many cultures throughout history, whereby an individual went out alone into the wilderness for a time, in search of insight or wisdom or peace.
There was the Vision Quest, the Native American rite of passage in which young men on the cusp of adulthood were sent out by their elders to commune with the spirits of a place, and to seek by way of a vision some part of their ancient wisdom. Andres had spoken of an Icelandic tradition of “going under the hide,” whereby a person went out