TRANSCRIPT
I’m living in the countryside right now, living on the edge of a lot of forests. I was going hiking in the forest the other day. I was actually looking for wild mushrooms, looking specifically for chicken of the woods mushrooms, a new mushroom that I’ve learned. Very tasty, quite edible, very yummy, very distinctive. I actually found some a couple of weeks ago but haven’t found any since.
Well, I got lost. I was walking and suddenly I realized I have no idea where I am. I had no cell service, I didn’t have a compass. Oh, that’s so bad, people might say. But I also knew that I had been walking uphill, and so really to find the road and eventually to find my way back, all I had to do is find my way downhill. But in terms of finding the path, I was lost, and I was quite a ways in.
Now, the other problem is sometimes uphill and downhill can be a little bit confusing. So you can go over a hill, I could end up going downhill and then going in the completely wrong direction. I say that because I’ve done that before. I’ve also been lost for a long time. One time in the woods in upstate New York, got it going back, hmm, 30 summers ago. I was working as a camp counselor, and all of the other counselors were having a camp out one night way out in the forest in the mountains, in the Adirondack Mountains. I went to find them because I was a little late. I don’t remember, I had something else to do, and I got lost.
It got dark, and I didn’t have a flashlight. All I had was my pair of shorts on, and I had to sleep outside for a whole night because I got lost going up and down hills. Could not find them. Once in a while, I would hear voices because they would bounce off different hills and mountains, but I had no idea where I was. I remember it was kind of scary, but I got under leaves. I put a lot of dry leaves inside of my, on top of myself, and the mosquitoes were kind of annoying, but I was able to put my shirt kind of over my face, and I was able to sleep all right.
Wasn’t that fun? That was the only time I’ve ever been trapped overnight being lost. But I have so many examples of being lost. I got lost in the woods once in Alaska. Went for a long, long hike down in the Kenai Peninsula. I was staying with some friends, and I was out following a moose trail. I noticed there were lots of little moose trails that would lead off to different sides, and I kept walking and walking. I walked for a couple of miles way out into the middle of nowhere in the wilderness.
Then I was like, okay, I’ll just follow the moose trail back. I started following it back, and then I realized all those split-off trails, well, actually I’d come off of one of those split-off trails, and there was no rhyme or reason to them. I ended up wandering for like four hours on moose trails trying to find my way back. No cell phone, no service, no nothing, nobody to call. That was kind of stressful because there’s part of me thinking, will I ever find my way out?
Even a couple of days ago when I got lost in the woods, there was just a little, pardon me, a little voice that said, what if you can’t find your way out? Oh, do you hear that? That’s a blue jay in the background. This is part of what feeds my soul. Also, even when I’m lost, I have friends in the world. I have allies. I have nature. The wind is coming through right now. You can hear it. It rained last night, and the raindrops are falling off the trees.
There’s something I’ve learned about being lost in nature. In some ways, it’s a gift. There’s always beauty in it. Sometimes I’ve been lost, and then I end up finding things that I never ever expected. Sometimes I’ve met people, sometimes I’ve come across communities when I’ve been lost.
And now the metaphor, what it really means to me, and in a way when I was thinking about it when I was lost in the woods the other day, just walking up and down these hills and trying to go down back in the way I came from and wondering, hmm, am I going to find myself? I realized what it really meant to me, and that’s being lost on the emotional journey of life. Being confused about the healing process, being confused about resolving my traumas, making decisions that are huge sometimes, and feeling like I trust myself, feeling like it’s my true self that I trust. But then there’s another part of me that’s like, are you making the right decision? Are you going in the right direction? Is this grieving? Are you just wallowing in misery? Are you playing the victim here, or are you really working out your stuff? Are you depressed? Do you need help? Do you need advice from outside people? Can you trust yourself? Can I trust myself?
I think it’s actually vital to be lost on the journey. I think there’s a lot of people in life. I know a lot. I’m sorry to say, in some ways when I was younger, I kind of fought to be one of these people who was never lost, who was always confident, who always had the answer. I know who I am. I remember when I was younger saying, I don’t have any problems. I was confident about that. I was proud about that because if you had problems, you were vulnerable. And if you were vulnerable, you were outcast. You were bullied. People didn’t like you. You didn’t fit in. There was something wrong with you. You needed help.
Well, what I’ve realized for myself is that at a certain point, I did have problems. I had a lot of problems. I started looking at my behavior. That was the first indication, wait a second, my behavior is problematic. I am engaging in patterns that aren’t healthy in all sorts of different areas of my life. And then realizing, why do I have problems? Questioning it and realizing sometimes I didn’t have any clue of the answers. And then having to accept, god, this is terrifying. I don’t know myself so well. I don’t know me. I’m lost.
But what really hit home, that feeling of lostness, and it was a feeling, was that terrible feeling of pain, of anguish, of loneliness, of confusion, of sadness, crying sometimes, having nobody to turn to, realizing I didn’t have any true friends, nobody I could talk about what was really going on inside of myself.
Well, time went on. I got stronger. I often started making sense of lostness, started actually sometimes tackling problems and solving them, resolving traumas through grieving. Sometimes just totally at unexpected moments, just crying and crying. Sometimes it actually happened while I was hitchhiking. I remember many times sitting out on the side of the road, all alone, not a car for probably 10 miles around me, and just crying and crying and realizing I could cry loud when there was no one around. Maybe like now, the cicadas and the crickets heard me. The animals and birds heard me. Maybe they were curious. Maybe they’re like, what is this odd human being doing? What is this behavior from this human that we’ve never observed before?
I’ve heard a lot of people since then talk about being able to go in the woods, in the forest, when there are no people, when you have complete and total privacy like I have now, and to cry. And somehow for me, crying just accepts and acknowledges my lostness, my confusion. And when I do that, when I grieve, when I can be with myself, when I’m lost, let myself have my feelings and not hate myself and fight myself for it, I realize I love myself. And that lostness, being confused, owning it, acknowledging it, is a state of grace. It’s a state of privilege in a way to be able to be there and feel it, not hide it, not have to push it away and bury it because the kids at school will torment me, because my mom will become anxious and pull away from me emotionally, abandon me because she couldn’t handle me being lost, because she was so lost, and me being lost reflected back to her how she really felt.
My dad, except he wouldn’t pull away. He would go forward into me. He would attack me, humiliate me. “You have no life, blah blah blah. You have no friends. Your best friend is a dog.” That voice runs through my head sometimes. Memories, dreams come back when he said things like that to me. It was like the message I got was being ill, being lost was illegal, even immoral, even insane.
And the funny thing was, as time went on, I realized we live in a lost world, a lost humanity. So confused. People are so screwed up. People are grabbing at anything they can to feel better, to feel comfortable. Jobs and money, work in a life that they hate, marriages that they hate, having children when they don’t even like children, just to pad their life with comfort so they can have a purpose, a mission.
It’s scary to not know what your purpose is, to not be connected to it, to feel lost in your sense of what is the meaning of this life. And yet now I want to say, maybe it sounds grandiose, “Oh, I embrace being lost.” Well, I don’t actually like being lost. I don’t go around choosing to be lost. “Oh, I’m lost and it feels so wonderful.” Well, it doesn’t feel wonderful. It sometimes still is scary.
But what I found is the more experience I get with being lost, the more confidence I have in myself. The more confidence I have in knowing that I’m going to become unlost, that I’m gonna find my way, that I’ve found my way a thousand times or a hundred thousand times in the past, emotionally, out of all sorts of confusing situations that I have.
When I return to me, inside myself, that’s my compass. That’s my compass to get out of the lostness. It might take a while. I might have to sleep in the woods overnight with leaves on top of myself, metaphorically speaking. Sleep in a lot of pain, maybe spend the night halfway awake, maybe have to talk myself down and meditate and be comfortable. But I will find my way out. At least I always have so far.
And when I think of being lost out in the world geographically, sometimes a magical thing happens that doesn’t happen when I’m not lost. When I’m lost, sometimes I just stop, just listen. Listen. If I listen carefully enough, I can often hear my heart beating, can hear my breath, realize that I’m alive. Sometimes I think in this world it’s easy to forget that we’re alive, that we’re here, that we’re on a journey and we’re on a path.
And sometimes what I find is when I’m lost, it’s the best time to remember it. It’s a gift from life, a reminder about who I am, where I am, and well, it’s a chance to figure out where I’m going.