Hourglasses and Tree Stands

Like an hourglass with a turbo engine, time has been slipping through the cracks before I can catch it and the days are bleeding together like a whirring reel of film. My energy, like puffy-cheek chipmunks, is settling into hibernation and is daydreaming of nights the sun doesn't kiss us goodnight at 5:30; and just like last year, I am asking myself once more, "where has this year gone?". My days have prioritized activity over down time, first mornings lights bleeding into last daylights with only the forgetful grip of routine keeping me from entering a spiraling nosedive into the depths of burnout. Burnout is an old foe I met sometime in grade school when I entered the stage of life in which perfectionism and overachievement made a hostage of me, an entanglement I am still trying to free myself of - but this week’s blog is not about burnout, this week’s blog is about quite the opposite, it’s about engagement.

Thanksgiving this year was an atypical one - there were the normal things like love being passed around in the same cadence of turkey and sweet potato casserole, but there was also blood and stitches and funny ER nurses. You will soon come to learn a story of unfortunately hilarious events that overtook the day, but like all stories (even unfortunate ones), the moral of the story is what we should remember when we forget everything else.

Preface:

I fell in love with a well-rounded outdoorsman (meet Auston: the kind of guy who can smell deer tracks from across the county and tell you the wind patterns a month out) who ignited a curiosity inside of me to learn the nitty gritty details of foraging, hunting, and harvesting. As an individual who strives long and hard to achieve self-sufficiency, the thought of better understanding the interconnectedness of nature, the food chain, conservation and sustainability was exciting. Bright eyed and naive as ever, I bought my first compound bow, half-heartedly committed to target practice, and purchased more camo clothing than all of California has ever seen. Leading up to Thanksgiving, I had dipped my toes into the hunting waters before, never having the opportunity to test my budding new skill set, knowing somewhere inside of me that this trip was going to be different.

On Thanksgiving evening, belly full and smiling with crispy turkey skin and pecans (pee-CAN-s), I fell into Auston’s yearly tradition to hunt the evening of the holiday. I caught the cliff-note version of conversations about the wind patterns and the military style debriefing about what corner of the farm everyone would be covering. I raised my hand for the corner no one volunteered for - the intersection of two fields lined on all sides with trees, pine thickets, and thorny bushes that will make you question the definition of “thick skin” - showered in some type of scent removal soap (doesn’t all soap remove scent???), covered myself head to toe in camo, and winked at my invisible body in the mirror.

Before I walked out the door, bow in hand, I’m handed a rifle. “Use this if you see a deer too far out to use your bow,” I am told. I think nothing of it, feeling comfortable enough to grab it confidently and reply “roger that.” Looking back, I can’t help but laugh and add this moment to the list of abnormal things I’ve accepted as normal in pursuit of honing this new craft. Feeling like my favorite alter-ego, a Soviet covert spy with a thick Russian accent that always sounds drowned in vodka - I walked (strutted) out to my tree stand where I would sit until nightfall.

Auston’s instructions echoed in my head: no sudden movements, move slowly and smoothly, do only what you’re comfortable doing, as I did the thing I hate most in the world: sitting still. In this moment, I felt my own hypocrisy looming over my head. What you hate is only a reflection of you I repeated to myself and accepted a self-imposed challenge to fight boredom in the 3-hours of sitting still that lay ahead of me. I had no distractions to fill my time accept for the increasingly darkening visions that filled my eyes as the sun set. Like a pendulum, my eyes swept from left to right on the field in front of me leaving no blade of grass to remain unseen. Slowly, the inanimate became animated like I pressed play on a picture frame. Grassy patches moved in ripples and the only sound more deafening than the silence was the buzz of wasps that came in spine shivering flybys. Birds I would have missed if I had looked away for only a second darted across the sky like rowdy children and the squirrels in all of their cuteness and glory played hopscotch underneath me. The field that seemed dead was so full of miniature life - I was encapsulated, not wishing that the three hours would pass quicker nor that something exciting would happen. All of the excitement that I needed was right in front of me.

I realized just how resounding the peace that filled my chest was when a deer frolicked into sight. Almost at once, I could feel my heart start drumming, pounding from my ears to my toes as my breath transitioned into an uncontrollable rattle.

The deer was out of bow range. This was not what I trained for.

I nervously picked up the rifle that lay at my feet and struggled to steady the rapid vibrations of my arms and bring the deer into the scope. Am I really ready for this?, was the last thought that crossed my mind before the bang and everything went black.

I’ll spare you the gory details (trust me they were gory) and tell you this: there’s a handy dandy tool called a shooting pole that you use to stabilize a gun. I did not use said shooting pole because shooting poles are for weenies, which Russian spy’s are not. The shooting pole could have prevented the events that followed: the kickback from the rifle caused the scope to drill into my forehead leaving me with a gaping gash and a bloody mess.

>> Fast forward >> 

An (actually fun) ER visit and 5 stitches later, Auston asked me a question that I meditated on long after my response. “So, are you done hunting?,” he asked with sympathetic eyes, to which I responded “no” with a giggle. Although I lost some flesh that day, what I gained far surpassed all that was lost. For the first time in a long time, the turbo engine on my hourglass sputtered till it ran silent shattering my once held beliefs about time and how we can control the speed at which it plays.

Broken face for new beliefs, trade for trade, these are the new credences I walked out of the ER with:

1. Time appears to disappear more quickly as we age due to desensitization and routine. As a child, the external stimuli and input flows in at an overwhelming rate, requiring us to deeply observe, imitate, and engage with our surroundings. As an adult, we are less sensitive to these stimuli and the input from our environment requires less of our attention to make decisions throughout the day.

2. As an adult, there is no less stimuli than there was as a child, but we have developed environmental filters; filters that blur, distort and reshape our perceptions to fit our pre-conceived notions about the world around us.

3. Distractions are gasoline that powers the turbo engines on our hourglasses. Engagement and observation are the elixir to removing our filters and reopening our senses to receive environmental, sensory, and emotional input.

I once thought that the solution to preventing time from growing wings and flying away was to do less. I now believe that it is not the number of activities that fill our days, it is the depth of our engagement with those activities and the environment and people that come with them. Where there is room for engagement and observation there is room for growth, connection, love, and most of all, gratitude. We can apply this to our relationships, to our commute to work, or to cooking dinner. There is not one aspect of life too mundane to wear blinders and let time pass you by - observe and see the miraculous.

I’ll leave you with this…

For those wondering, my shot was successful. Auston guided me through the harvesting process from start to finish. I had the opportunity to experience my first genuine farm to table meal. Let’s just say this: yes, I will be back for more, and no I will not be bringing the rifle. As always, thanks for reading and talk to you next week!