Sometimes I make a shift when I head out for a walk, just after starting out. I call it “going feral.” It doesn’t take much, just a slight lean in a certain direction, a quick thought, a glance around. It can be a few steps down a trail, or a few steps out my back door. In the Tom Brown, Apache-influenced world of nature awareness, it might be called “shifting into the Force.” Sometimes it is called “losing your mind and coming to your senses.”
Whatever I call it, it is a visceral, felt sensation and it puts me in an entirely different frame of mind when I’m spending a moment, or a few hours in nature. Here it is in its simplest form: get a little ways down a trail, away from the car or house. Find a spot where you can just step off the trail into a little cover, maybe under the eave of some trees or behind some brush. If you are susceptible to poison oak, make sure you are clearly aware of your level of sensitivity and that you know exactly what the plant looks like at any time of year. The first rule of going wild is to understand the dangers in nature and know how to manage them. This is perhaps the first rule that any wild animal lives by: avoid danger and injury at all costs.
Have you ever noticed how cautious and careful wild animals are, how wary of anything unusual, and how reluctant they are to get in physical fights? They know, deeply, that a small injury could easily mean death, and they are extremely clear about the cost-to- payoff ratio involved. So if you want to experience a little more wildness, take note of this first. Learn to push your edges, but always with a wide margin of safety and clear knowledge of the dangers involved.
So, take that first step off the main path. If you have a partner who you can do this with, lucky you! Go for it. It is one of the greatest ways to spend time with a friend that I know of. But it is often best to be alone, because the next step is the critical one: be quiet! Quiet your chatter. Quiet your thoughts. This is the shift: check into your senses. Listen out around yourself. Tune in. Open your eyes and let it in. Now you are shifting. Go into your primal animal self. It’s always there, just under the surface, ready to awaken, silently watching over you at all times, waiting to light up.
From this spot you’ve chosen, just hidden from view, you can begin to shift into the mind of a deer or a coyote—deeply aware of everything around you. Begin to move again. Step back out onto the trail. Everything has changed. Feel your wildness. Every step you take sounds loud now. You instinctively step more carefully and see more clearly. You feel your kinship with all of the life forms around you: the grasses, the trees, the insects, the birds. You also deeply feel your vulnerability and the fragility of nature in the face of the onslaught of human power.
But you can use this human power in a reverse direction: a human has great potential for providing safety to other beings. Once we begin to go feral, we touch a universal field of awareness in nature. We can project a sphere of safety around us that emanates from our sense of love and empathy for other lives and from our deepest sense of respect for life. Other animals will sense this, their curiosity piqued by a state so unusual for a human, and be drawn toward us if we can maintain it in spite of the startling close-up encounters that may occur.
Getting feral is a habit I’ve built up over a lifetime of going outside. Some of my earliest memories are of times, barely out of the toddler stage, when I made this shift. I felt like I had moved into the magical kingdom of nature and felt my primal animal self. I always felt welcome and safe in this world, and instinctively knew how to be quiet and slip into the wildness. I think the veil between my human world and the natural world was always thin.
So now, this shift can be as quick as a thought. But it does have to be intentional. It is all too easy to march out on a hike, especially with others, and continue all the talk and chatter, enjoying nature surely, but not as a part of it, just as a tourist, a non-local. All it takes is stepping aside and pausing for second. It is a prayer, but not to a foreign god. It is a prayer of humility and respect, a sense of honor for the depth and mystery of life.
Moving around like this is a living prayer, a dynamic meditation, involving the whole body, mind, and spirit, all working together in what is our natural state of human being. There is a great sense of generosity and kindness in this state of mind. Allowing myself to do this is always rewarding in itself, even providing me with more patience for some of the jarring, haste-driven aspects of our human world.
Richard Vacha lives in Point Reyes Station, where he makes a living as a craftsman and has studied tracking for 30 years. For information about the Marin Tracking Club and the Point Reyes Tracking School programs, email [email protected].