I lead two different lives: that of a homesteader, roughing it in the woods, and that of a programmer, punching out software systems in a climate-controlled office.
On the programming side, I’ve gotten pretty deep into artificial intelligence, and it’s been a real adventure to discover its capacities. Some of them are jaw-dropping.
Now these two lives don’t often intersect, but recently it occurred to me to try the following:
- Feed all of my Youtube videos into AI, and ask it to write summaries
- Feed the summaries back into another AI as ‘reference material’, and ask it to interview me about my homesteading journey
I asked the AI to focus on my ‘internal’ process, as opposed to the external projects I took on.
I was astonished by its skill at mining my experience.
What follows is a lightly-edited version of the interview (simple cleanups to help with flow). All questions, including the wording and the ordering of the questions, were asked by the AI.
Even if nobody else finds this interview interesting, I gained great benefit from it – the exploration helped me understand myself better. If you have the opportunity to do this same process with any of your own content (e.g. a journal), I highly recommend it.
The interview
AI:
Let’s begin.
You draw a powerful distinction between the ‘concepts’ your mind held and the ‘truths’ your body learned. Before you arrived, your mind had the concept that hauling water would be hard. Can you describe the specific moment or sensation when that concept dissolved and was replaced by the body’s truth? What did that cellular understanding actually feel like?
ME:
The most simple understanding is that I get a whole different kind of data. Think of my entire physical body as the ‘sensor’, and the weight of the water, the way the bucket handles dig into my hands, the lactic acid creating a burn in my legs as my feet press into the rough ground as the ‘input’.
A mental concept does not have this kind of data input. Sure, at the end of a physical experience, it’s still somewhat being distilled into a mental concept, but I believe it’s also distilled into a different kind of ‘concept’ directly by the cells in my body. It becomes immediately apparent when exposed to this more complete kind of data that a mental concept alone pales in comparison.
AI:
You came from a world, software development, that is built almost entirely on the power of abstract, mental concepts. After you began receiving this richer, “more complete” data from your body, did you find yourself starting to distrust your intellect? Or did it change your relationship with your own mind in a different way?
ME:
No, I never distrusted my intellect, I just realized ever more clearly that a mental concept alone is insufficient for many different kinds of understanding. It was more about growing into an additional way of being/feeling than a wholesale replacement of one with the other.
Mental models clearly have their place – without the friction of the physical world, it becomes much easier to iterate. I think the real wisdom is both rediscovering the value of embodied learning, and knowing when a mental model or this more full experiential learning is appropriate in a given moment or situation.
AI:
This wisdom of choosing the right tool seems central to your journey. Can you recall a specific project or problem where you felt that new ‘embodied’ wisdom clash with your old, highly-developed ‘mental model’ way of solving problems? What did that internal friction feel like, and how did you navigate it?
ME:
The most clear misuse of my mental modeling is described by my tendency to spin out into worst case thinking when hit with a real-world problem that I don’t immediately know how to solve.
The issue I had with the grey water drainage pipe is a perfect example: at the moment I realized the first joint I built at the intersection of the small and large pipe wasn’t going to work, I spun out, imagining all the ways the project was going to fail, and how impossibly hard a solution would be. But once I paused and thought to use the flexible hot tub tubing for the corner, the actual physical work of the fix was trivial.
So compare the physical experience of performing the fix, versus the crazy mental modeling I did on the difficulty of the problem. It’s an open question how best to stop that mental spinning out, but I bet it starts with being fully, physically in the moment as it actually is, before entering the mental space to iterate on solutions.
AI:
This suggests the real, challenging work in that moment wasn’t cutting a pipe or gluing a fitting. The real work was internal—it was stopping that mental “spin-out.” Is that accurate? And if so, what became your most effective tool or practice for interrupting that cycle and bringing yourself back to the simple, physical reality of the problem in front of you?
ME:
In these kinds of cases, when I hit a hard problem, yes – that is the real work, or the real first work. In a way, it’s not so much that I’ve developed some trick to stop the spinning out, it’s more that as I notice over and over again that the mental anguish is way worse than the actual physical fix, I just naturally have shortened and lessened the spin out cycle.
AI:
This makes me think about your previous life. As a software developer, the problems you faced were also complex, but the ‘fix’ was purely mental—typing code. There was no physical act to ground the solution in the same way.
Did you experience a similar “spin-out” cycle when facing a difficult coding problem? And if so, how was the resolution different when the fix itself was also an abstract, mental act, without a tangible, physical reality to contrast it with?
ME:
This is a great question. I can say that the spin out is a general pattern when I feel overwhelmed by any kind of problem, be it mental or physical. I think I’ve gotten better at not spinning out when I run into a physical problem, but I’m not so sure that wisdom has translated into the realm of purely mental problems yet!
The physical world offers a kind of grounding that is so straightforward (“OK, the hose is broken, it runs from here to there. This is what is.”). Looking at that example, I think you can see that the same kind of presence could be applied to the “is-ness” of a purely mental challenge. It’s a work in process :)
AI:
Let’s connect this to another core theme you’ve mentioned. On one hand, you have this very tangible, grounding experience of “the hose is broken.” On the other hand, you developed these very high-level, abstract philosophies, like the idea of your homestead being a “Tibetan sand mandala” and finding impermanence “enlivening.”
My question is this: Does that daily grounding in simple, physical reality make it easier to confront and accept those bigger, more profound philosophical truths? Is there a link between learning to trust the tangible “is-ness” of a broken pipe and learning to accept the “is-ness” of your own impermanence?
ME:
My answer is going to be indirect, but hopefully still on point. I believe one of my greatest challenges coming into this world (let’s call it a karmic challenge) was seeing the physical world as an inhospitable, or even hostile, place. It seems to run very deep, either from a young childhood wound, or a previous life, or baked into my nervous system. What I would say is that although this remains a challenge for me, the lessons/experience I’ve had over the last four years have begun to titrate the intensity of that relationship, into a softer regard which looks out into the universe with more acceptance.
By choosing to live in the woods, poop in a bucket, haul water and firewood, cut down trees, I was faced over and over again with the contrast between the inner feelings that the universe was out to get me, and the outer reality that a tree was being a tree, water flowed where it did by the law of gravity, and the size of my individual being against the size of my environment was a ratio determined before I was born. Over and over that contrast, reshaping my relationship with the physical universe, helping me to see that it just is as it is, and it’s not personal.
AI:
When you started to truly internalize that “it’s not personal,” did that change how you experienced setbacks? Did an obstacle, like the excavator throwing a track, begin to feel less like a personal blow and more like just another impersonal event to be dealt with?
ME:
Yes, for sure, but it’s not been some magical light bulb moment. It’s more like a resilience I build through the exposure. I get more capable, more able to step back in the moment, and the same problem feels less threatening. That’s really the core of the difficulty, the feeling of threat. It sucks to think the universe is out to get you.
AI:
You’ve described how increased capability lessened the feeling of threat from the external, impersonal universe. I’m curious about the things you yourself created.
When one of your own systems or creations had a flaw—like the stove baffle breaking or the first firewood box being too heavy—did that failure feel different? Was it easier or harder to see that as an impersonal event, given that you had invested so much of yourself in it?
ME:
Good question, I’d say generally I am able to hold those kinds of setbacks in a lighter way, or at least in a non-threatening way. If I have a negative reaction, it’s more being mad as myself for making a stupid mistake, which feels a lot different (and frankly more empowering) than the fear that the universe is out to get me.
AI:
You describe being mad at yourself for a mistake as “more empowering” than feeling the universe is out to get you. Can you unpack that? What is it about taking responsibility for a flaw, even with frustration, that feels more empowering than seeing a problem as an external attack?
ME:
That seems pretty straightforward. Anger is easier to use than fear. A problem that comes from my own being is one I have more confidence in resolving.
AI:
You’ve described a journey of building immense personal capability and agency. Yet, there were key moments—milling the first lumber, digging the initial trench, installing the dock—where you relied on your neighbors.
Can you describe the internal experience of needing to ask for help when you were on a path so focused on developing your own self-reliance? Did it feel like a defeat, a relief, or something else entirely?
ME:
I can say that I’ve not been afraid to ask for help when I’ve needed it on this four year journey, and I’ve always felt relieved and grateful when someone showed up to help.
It’s also important to note that I did reserve asking for help for when I absolutely needed it, which meant that I did the vast majority of the work on my own. This was a conscious choice, a further mechanism to embrace discomfort, to put myself at the edge of my challenge zone.
Really, both experiences have their own reward. Asking for help is an act of humility that breeds gratitude, while taking on something alone is an act of dignity that breeds confidence and capacity. It’s very similar to calibrating how much friction and discomfort will yield maximum vitality – how much agency versus communion is healthy?
AI:
This makes me wonder about the inverse. You’ve described the positive rewards of getting that balance right. What are the internal warning signs when that calibration is off?
Drawing from your experience, what does it feel like when there is too much solitary agency, pushing you past your challenge zone into a place of being overwhelmed? And conversely, can you describe the feeling of too much or the wrong kind of communion, which in your previous life left you feeling “disconnected and insulated”?
ME:
I don’t think it’s accurate to say my previous life was “too much communion” – I actually think the agency/communion balance was quite healthy in my co-housing community. What I was lacking there was direct contact with the elements of survival. It’s actually a bit challenging to know when the balance if off, especially in the context of this four year journey.
For example, there were many times I felt hopeless and overwhelmed, and yet I chose not to seek help, and when I was able to overcome those feelings and actually solve the challenge myself, those were some of the most confidence-producing experiences. There were even a few things I did that, logically, I should have had somebody else there to help me, like the raising of the first four bows in the bow roof shed. It was kind of ridiculous that I didn’t ask for help , but man, figuring out how to do it myself was an amazing reward.
I think what I do is try to pay attention and sense if a particular challenge is “beyond my pay grade” as it were, and that’s a signal to seek help. Maybe the key insight is that just because something is hard, or feels overwhelming, that was NOT a signal to seek help – and I think that choice, despite being very uncomfortable at times, yielded tremendous benefit.
AI:
Let’s compare two moments. When you raised the first bow-shed arches alone, you felt it was “ridiculous” but you pushed through. When you faced felling the first large hemlocks, you enlisted your neighbor’s help from the start.
What was the difference in your internal assessment of those two challenges? What made one feel like a “ridiculous but possible” test of your limits, while the other felt truly “beyond your pay grade” and required immediate collaboration?
ME:
One simple explanation is an intuitive calculation about injury to myself or my property. I guess fear is the barometer there. If it goes beyond a certain threshold, I seek help.
The initial hemlock trees are a great example. I had never cut down a tree before, and I felt a lot of fear about hurting myself or my first temporary shed. Compare that to one of the later episodes where I brought down three big hemlocks myself. Those hemlocks were every bit as big as the first three that I sought help for, but the difference is that in the interim, I had spent hours cutting down smaller trees and building my confidence with a chainsaw and the physics of tree felling. So even though those latter three hemlocks were still a bit scary, that fear was not over my threshold, but instead sat directly in my challenge zone, and so I did it myself.
I guess one way to put it is that I set my challenge threshold to “anything that’s unlikely to cause permanent injury” – I mean, that is way beyond the threshold that most people would set. It absolutely was a more risky way to operate, but also much higher payoff. I would not recommend that strategy for anyone unless they have spent a lot of time refining their intuition on this particular type of assessment, which I had.
AI:
This high-risk, high-reward strategy is the engine behind your growth in confidence and capacity. But I’m curious about the other side of that equation. What is the sustained mental or emotional cost of operating with a challenge threshold set so high? Does living in that state of heightened personal risk, day in and day out, require a different kind of background vigilance that you didn’t need in your more insulated life?
ME:
I would frame it a bit different than that. Just living in the woods generally requires more vigilance ;) And yes, when I’m engaged, for example, in felling a large tree, it absolutely requires more vigilance in the moment. The fear gets repurposed into presence, which really helps me not ‘fall asleep at the wheel’ and do something stupid where I could get hurt.
This kind of vigilance is different from the more background increase in my awareness that has come from living in the woods, like noticing subtle changes in my environment day to day, week to week, etc. But they also work together, I think the capacities contribute to each other.
You are spot on to ask about the cost of so much challenge: despite my greater capacity, the stress of constant challenge has been difficult on my body, and I’m aware that it’s time for me to move into a period of integration, rest, and recovery.
AI:
Let’s talk about that background awareness. How has that constant, low-level attunement to the world around you—the weather, the seasons, the way water flows—changed your perception of time? Did it speed things up, slow them down, or alter your relationship with time in another way?
ME:
Sure, but first, there’s something quite interesting about my relationship with time and how I’ve chosen to challenge myself, which is more related to the first kind of vigilance.
I think it’s common knowledge that these kinds of ‘danger challenges’ can induce a flow state in people, a feeling of aliveness and being fully in the moment. This seems like the core reason that adrenaline junkies jump out of planes, climb mountains, etc. I get the same thing when I’m balanced high up on a ladder, or bringing down a big tree, with the added convenience of it being right outside my front door ;)
The other, and I think equally interesting effect on time, is what happens when I stack a lot of challenge or change in my life. Are you familiar with the cliche of an older person looking back and remarking how fast the time went by? I’ve had almost the polar opposite experience my entire life. A week can feel like months, a month like a year, a year so long I’m not even the same person any more. I’ve always felt quite grateful that I experience the passage of time this way, as the other way sounds depressing. I suspect a key component to my experience of time has been how jam packed most of my life has been with challenge.
As for the background awareness, and how that impacts me: I think it also contributes to the experience of time I just described. It also has me feel more grounded, I think it tends towards the experience of being a ‘gentle animal’.
AI:
What does this new person, this “gentle animal” that you became after the first year, perceive or notice about the world that the insulated person living in a condo simply couldn’t see?
ME:
It took me more than a year to get to gentle animal phase :)
I think I notice more of the kinds of things our ancestors needed to notice in order to survive. And I doubt I notice anywhere near what a pre-agricultural human would notice.
I recently had this extremely novel emotional experience, so novel that I wonder how many other modern people have experienced it: I re-gained just enough of my ancestor’s natural abilities that I was aware how much I had lost being raised in a modern environment, and how I may never be able to get it all back because of the way my nervous system was wired from such an early age. It was a moment of deep anger, a feeling that I had been robbed of a basic human birthright. And this is not to say I would wish away my modern upbringing, because it came with so many gifts. But I still sense that loss now, and I feel more complete for sensing it.
AI:
We’ve talked about the physical challenges and the philosophical shifts, but your original intuition had two core components: to build something from nothing, and to film the process. You mentioned that one of your biggest fears starting out was making these videos.
How did the act of constantly documenting your journey—turning your life into a story for others—change the experience itself? Did having a camera present create pressure, or did it help you clarify your own thoughts and lessons in the moment?
ME:
Having a camera running did create pressure. The shots of me talking directly to the camera were the most stressful, and although I did get better over time, I’ve never considered it a strength. I just beat that portion of the art down with volume – sometimes it would be thirty takes to get a one minute shot I could use.
It was much less stressful filming the work itself. Filming an experience definitely changes the experience itself – I had to develop a parallel awareness to all of my actions. I couldn’t just ‘do the thing’, I had to ‘frame the thing’, meaning consider how it would look on video, pick a camera spot and angle, set the width of view, etc., then do the thing. It made any activity take about three times longer than normal.
Filming my journey was definitely my biggest fear when I started, which probably sounds weird. It was a massive change in my lifestyle, and I didn’t really know what I was doing, but that only created stress, not fear. Filming was scary because it was the first time in my life that I did an art project that was entirely my vision. I’ve always been creative, but in the past I would bring my creativity to others’ visions, whereas bringing it to my own vision felt incredibly vulnerable. I had no idea if I would be any good at it, or if anyone would have any interest at all in the work. That was a bigger emotional leap of faith than the homesteading work itself, and I got over that fear by just forcing myself to do it until I felt some degree of competence and success, and then I wasn’t afraid any more.
AI:
Did this act of constantly observing yourself as a character in a story change how you experienced the physical journey in real-time? Did being both the ‘doer’ and the ‘documenter’ give you a different kind of insight into your own progress and struggles as they were happening?
ME:
I wouldn’t say it changed my experience, but added another kind of experience in parallel, very similar to tracking the camera setup.
In a way I became two people in one. I remember once I had set up a shot for putting a big post into a hole I had dug. I turned on the camera, picked up the post and started towards the hole, then tripped and fell over, dropping the pole on the ground. In that instant there were two completely distinct experiences: the homesteader me, who was frustrated, and the director me, who was thrilled to have a perfect shot showing how hard the work is.
AI:
Over time, did the director’s perspective start to influence the homesteader’s emotional state? In other words, did knowing that a struggle or a mistake could make for a “good shot” help you reframe or even find value in the frustration of the moment itself?
ME:
If it did, it wasn’t something I was aware of. Those two personalities always felt distinct to me.
AI:
Let’s shift focus and talk about the concept of the “Satisfaction Investment”—the idea that the more effort you poured into a homesteading project, the deeper and more lasting the feeling of warmth and connection you get from it.
Let’s compare this to your previous life. You’ve successfully completed complex software projects. That also provides satisfaction. Is the feeling you get from finishing a woodshed you built with your own hands a different kind of satisfaction than the feeling of shipping a complex software project, or is it simply a more intense version of the same feeling?
ME:
So maybe we’d call these two types of projects ‘physical’ and ‘conceptual’. They share a lot of the same properties: with both, there can be a lot of foundational work that doesn’t show tangible progress, and then progress and functionality appear at the end. Both result in some more permanent, external thing that I made that is separate from me, which I have some kind of relationship with. And both have a different level of ‘payout’ of satisfaction in the project’s completion depending on the scope and difficulty.
There is a special, additional quality to the homesteading projects, though, and I think it has to do with how they tap into a basic survival instinct, and have so much more ‘input data’ like I mentioned before.
I remember the night I finished building my bed frame, and lay on the mattress before my first night of sleep in my new home. I could feel my awareness move through the mattress, into the frame I had built with my hands, into the floor and sub-floor I had laid, into the deck frame I had screwed together, into the giant rocks holding up the frame that I had placed, into the gravel that I had exhaustedly packed with a hand tamper, and then through the ground into the earth. I had never felt so connected to the earth in my life – it was like the awareness I had poured into building each of those pieces was accessible right inside the pieces themselves, and they were all connected through my effort, and I could feel it all through my body. It was a feeling way beyond ‘satisfied’, but included deep satisfaction, which was multiplied because what I had built was meeting my basic humans needs for shelter and sleep.
AI:
How has this new, felt understanding changed your relationship with the manufactured, impersonal objects that fill the modern world? When you interact with something you haven’t poured your awareness into—your car, a power tool, a store-bought item—do those objects feel different to you now?
ME:
They do feel different, but it’s because I have a new reference point for how it’s possible to feel in relationship to an object in the physical world.
I would say, in general, that the things I buy are tools – I may feel satisfaction as a result of using them, but I get no satisfaction directly from them. Contrast this with how I feel about my bow roof shed. Every morning as I shower outside, I glance over at the towering arches and feel a tingle of giddiness and disbelief. I made that, wow. It’s been two and a half years since I built that shed, and I still get that feeling.
AI:
Is that feeling a static memory of the accomplishment, or is the shed actively giving something back to you—radiating that satisfaction—in a way a store-bought tool never could?
ME:
If I put on my mystical hat, I’d say that I invest awareness into the thing, then the thing radiates awareness. That seems biologically unlikely, but I do like holding it that way.
AI:
Let’s pivot from the created world to the natural one. You’ve had to fell many trees on your land—some were a threat, some were a resource, some were simply in the way.
Did your relationship with the living forest change as you went from seeing it as a beautiful backdrop to seeing it as something you had to actively manage, shape, and sometimes destroy?
ME:
Definitely. As I mentioned multiple times in my videos, my relationship with trees has changed dramatically, because I encountered a brand new way to experience them – on the ground.
Standing trees can be wispy or majestic. A felled tree is a tangled hunk of biomass. The big ones weigh thousands of pounds, and can easily kill you if you’re standing in the wrong place when they come down. Even a tree on the ground can be dangerous, a coiled physics puzzle waiting to blast you if you miscalculate where the tension is held. And even if you cut it up safely, it can be a bitch to separate everything and move it around. I don’t cut them without a reason.
AI:
This new understanding of trees—as dangerous, physically demanding, and requiring a valid reason to be cut—seems to have fostered a new kind of respect.
Is this respect born purely out of pragmatism—a calculated awareness of the danger and the sheer amount of labor involved? Or has it evolved into something more, like a form of reverence?
ME:
It’s more humility than reverence, although I feel reverence, too.
This goes beyond just the trees, I feel much smaller in relationship with nature and the universe now, and I think it’s not a diminished view of myself, but instead a more accurate view. I really like this exercise of seeing myself more accurately, I hold it as a core metric for personal development, and living closer to the land has only amplified the process.
AI:
Your journey has been about embracing physical, often dirty, hands-on work. Yet, one of your food production experiments was a high-tech, soil-free hydroponic system set up in your office.
What did it feel like to nurture life in such a controlled, almost clinical environment, and how did that feeling contrast with the “gentle animal” part of yourself that was learning to read the seasons and the forest floor?
ME:
Of all the things in a ‘classic homesteading’ journey, I struggled most with my relationship with food. Trying to figure that out while doing all the other survival stuff just felt overwhelming, so I punted on it for a long time.
Last year I finally had everything else under control enough that I wanted to try and bring in a more natural relationship with food. I spent a growing season working a half-bed in a local community garden, and got about four or five salad’s worth of greens for my efforts. Afterwards I better understood why people loved outdoor gardening, but I didn’t feel called to continue – I think it was because I already did so much other outside work.
So the hydroponic garden was my second attempt at improving my relationship with food, and it works much better for me. While it’s certainly more controlled, I’ve never experienced it as clinical – it certainly seems less antiseptic to me than buying food from the store! While I got closer to nature with things like wood and waste, the hydroponic garden sits in the ‘sweet spot’ for my relationship with food. I feel more connected to it versus store shopping, but I get a good bit of help from the modern tooling. I also think it represents the way I want to relate to modern living – I’m not against modern implements, I just want to be conscious about how I let them into my life.
AI:
I want to contrast this with another modern tool you use: the mini-excavator. You’ve described it as a “sledgehammer,” a machine that requires vigilance and can be dangerous.
How do you reconcile these two very different relationships with modern technology? One is about automated precision and control, while the other is about managing brute force and risk. Do they teach you different lessons about finding that “sweet spot”?
ME:
The answer to this is very simple: go and try digging in the woods of Western Maine without a machine, then come back and tell me if you want one or not ;)
Buying the mini is an admission that I’m not a superhero, and that I absolutely need some modern support out there. It’s hard to even imagine completing much of the work I’ve done out there without it – I certainly would have paid a heavy price in my physical health otherwise.
So yes, I guess that’s its own kind of sweet spot, balancing physical labor with machine labor to optimize both the work and wellness. There is a common thread between the excavator and the hydroponic garden: both are a decision to be partially in contact with nature, to ease the contact with modern tools.
AI:
Let’s shift focus.
You credit your father’s “ninja parenting” for giving you “plenty of room to shine.” How was that different from a more common parenting style that might actively teach or push a child toward a specific goal? And how did that ‘room to shine’ uniquely prepare you for an endeavor where there was no one to teach you or push you?
ME:
My dad had a couple of maxims that well describe his approach to parenting.
The first was “respect your kids”. He never treated us like second-class citizens, but we always felt his authority, which meant we respected him, too. Part of the respect was giving us lots of room to explore and fail.
My most extreme personal example: at age 17, I was awakened in the middle of the night by one of his best friends. This friend was clearly on drugs, and he asked me to borrow money. I had no idea what to do, and the situation was a little scary – this was an authority figure of a sort, but he clearly wasn’t well. I ended up giving him the money. The next day I told my dad about it, and he told me he heard the entire exchange – he had woken up when his friend came in. While his initial impulse was to jump up and protect me, he held that back, knowing there was no real danger, and whatever decision I made I could handle it myself.
I’m guessing there are very few parents that would operate with that level of in-the-moment awareness and discipline.
The second maxim was “you should be able to outsmart your kids”. On the surface this might not sound so hot, but I know what he meant when he said it. It was more about him thinking far enough ahead that he didn’t find himself in a difficult parenting situation very often, which he could do because he paid attention and had a lot more years on us. This allowed him to parent very subtly, the opposite of a heavy-handed parent disciplining their kid. As a result, we didn’t feel like we were being parented, even though we were.
This entire parenting style was great for building both confidence and competence – I’m very clear that my father is largely responsible for me operating in a way that life rarely intimidates me, and I carried that with me into the woods.
AI:
When you were alone in the woods and faced a problem that triggered that “spin-out” cycle we discussed earlier, did you ever feel that same principle at play? Was there a part of you that had learned to “hold back” your own impulse to panic, trusting that the person you had become could handle the situation?
ME:
I’ve never thought of it that way. It certainly doesn’t feel like that in the moment of spin out :P
What I can say is that his influence was present in what happened next, which is that I didn’t quit. The stress and spin out did not result in a drastic loss of confidence. Under the ‘chop’ of the moment’s stress, there was a steady reserve, and it would eventually bubble up.
What I find curious is that the initial spin out feeling has been so persistent, even though I demonstrate to myself over and over again that I’ll find a way out of the problem. You’d think my subconscious would get it after awhile ;) It’s getting better for sure, I guess that’s an indication of the emotional pattern running very deep.
AI:
This “steady reserve” you describe—the foundational confidence that bubbles up after the initial stress—sounds like it was instilled in you long before you ever went to the woods. We’ve also talked about the confidence you earned through your own hard-won successes on the land.
How do those two types of confidence feel different? Is the earned confidence a new layer built on top of that foundational reserve, or did it change the nature of the reserve itself?
ME:
Yes, that’s a good way to put it. My dad gifted me with the foundation of confidence and competence, and then I’ve extended it quite a bit during my life, particularly with the challenge of the last four years.
One way to describe their difference is that my foundational confidence just seems ‘normal’ – like, doesn’t everybody have this? I have to remind myself that’s not true, and I was very lucky. The earned confidence and competence, I can really feel the investment and the payout – the relationship is clear.
AI:
As you look back on the entire four-year journey, what is the single most important lesson or value your father instilled in you that was most present during your toughest moments in the woods?
ME:
This was really the last gift my father gave me, and it’s a bit spooky.
I mentioned above that life rarely intimidates me, but it wasn’t always that way. When I was younger, I was much more intimidated, particularly by other people. I always looked up to my dad in this way, he was just so fully himself, so completely unintimidated by anyone, and I remember wishing that I had that kind of courage.
He died in 2003, which meant I lost the most important person in my life. It took me a full year to get back to feeling any kind of normal. But shortly after he died, within days, I felt this shift happen…it was as if, as my dad was leaving, he took that gift of being unintimidable and pushed it inside me. And ever since then I carry inside myself what I saw in him all those years.