I rest my back on an ironwood tree. I choose to voluntarily split my attention between the weight of my suspended body and the fur dampened sound of a cottontail’s padded feet on the snow. It’s very crisp with the wind coming from the northwest, straight into face, pouring into slivers of space between layers of wool. The snow is whipping, and everything about this moment would appear cold. But I am very warm. I am flooded with heat as I thank the world for the opportunity to split my attention in the first place. I thank myself too, for experiencing the very moment I decided to pay attention to something other than the conditioned drone of my mind. I chose to listen to a yearning voice inside and reroute an old cycle on repeat. This cycle was repeating itself until the thoughts were no longer clear anyways, just muddy moving layers. It’s 7 am and I’m up in a tree stand with my loaded bow, and eyelashes catching snowflakes. This is not the time or place to entertain muddy thoughts. I’m not doing to stay the same. I want to change. This is a time and place for a clear, sharp, and listening mind. I thank my teachers too without naming anyone. I radiate in the feeling of open attention and thankfulness.

A few minutes go by in a timeless way and suddenly my body is frigid. I am immersed in the layers of muddy thought, clinging to a feeling of loss as my mind projects a rerun of a conflicting conversation. Life feels amorphous like a big billowy cloud engulfing my attention span.  I quickly snap my head to look south hoping to something and stir warm blood into my trembling limbs. I have forgotten about paying attention and listening. I have also forgotten, quickly, about how being thankful makes me feel warm.

Learning how to listen in and out is a survival skill that human beings bring with them through the womb and into this world. Listening is a given, though it is an exercise in privilege and safety to be able to choose when, how, and what we listen for. The introverted child with a vivid imagination living in an abusive home is an example. I say this is a survival skill but really I think it’s magic power. We are wired to avoid pain and threat. When the world inside feels too complex, fraught with sensation and anxiety, we fix our attention onto other things. Or we numb ourselves. The same goes for when the outer world is deemed unsafe or too difficult to navigate. The power of imagination becomes an asset in creating illusions. We separate the inner and outer world with illusory perspective and often this is very successful. What is true for me is different for what is true for you, and what is true for the cottontail. I can’t say it’s possible to hold everything, to be aware of everything, to be open to all truth and not lose your sense of self and space. Deep listening inside and out also calls for willingness to enter unknown territory and suspend the belief of failure. It’s a practice.  Failure doesn’t actually exist in the dance of deep listening between the inner and outer wilderness. I am out here, 20 feet above the crunchy, frozen ground, practicing.

Something very magical occurs in the precise moment when dawn becomes the morning. The precise moment has nothing to do with time, it is all feeling, and light. What happens is this: it gets brighter and instantly darker all at once. In the instant when everything becomes brighter, there is also an unfolding of shadow. What was dense and dark before now becomes exposed and spread out. The contrast expands to cover the minute shadow detail of dried grass and the dim gaps between pine needles. Seeing this feels like being hand fed divine candy. I receive this on behalf of life and I savour it, the way life savours itself sometimes. It really has nothing to do with me and here I am, consuming the cosmic delicacies of lightplay at 7:30 am, remembering.

A heat wave rockets up from my core throughout my chest, down my arms, into my throat. I didn’t go anywhere, nothing actually happened, and somehow my reality is altered. Everything makes sense, I am clear, bright and sharp again. I forget I was every muddy. I look down in perfect timing to see a red squirrel shoot out from between two cedar fronds. Squirrel frantically pauses with legs wide spread; tiny muscle spasms make the fur move. All is deemed safe and he makes a bolt toward a fallen apple. This kicks up a pile of snow that falls back down as individual flakes. He leaps on the apple digging his front claws in and uses his back legs to bury his face into the fresh bite. All of this pushing, and the round bottom of the apple resting on snow, makes the entire scene spin in circles. Squirrel and apple are in the ecstatic cyclone of a feeding frenzy. The corners of my mouth lift, push my cheeks up, and my eyes smile. I harvest this joy and promise to share it with myself the next time I forget about such a world where squirrels dive into apples and nothing is scary.

Vhooshh. A grouse glides right past my face and lands 3 trees over. If I was not so enthralled in feeling at peace I would have jumped. But for now, the timing of the grouse made such serendipitously good sense that I couldn’t bother feeling surprised. The squirrel however, felt differently. I know this to be true because in the fractional moment when sound and shadow appeared the apple was abandoned. Squirrel was turned, face towards the place where the sound of wings was first registered, backed into a closet of shadows under small pine.

A few things are happening inside of my body right now as my exterior remains as formless and invisible as the ironwood bark. Mostly, I feel like I am on all fours, laughing. Then, I feel the watchful panic of the squirrel. I feel the oblivious nature of the grouse, blinking in the snow. I feel the intrusive imprint of the wanted and then abandoned apple. And I feel the desire to kill from the hawk that never existed. And I feel myself hopelessly in love and relating to every piece of the scene that I have projected meaning into.

It’s time to go. The wind is picking up and I really have no business being up in a tree on a windy morning. I slide the arrow out from the flight groove in the crossbow. I hear Corey’s voice in my mind. He has taught me alot by incessantly repeating important things that admittedly I don’t always think I am listening to. But I am. “Remember when you’re loading or unloading to always keep the broadhead facing away from your bow string. You can wreck a great bow with one stupid mistake” I don’t want to make stupid mistakes like slicing a tense bow string. So just for now, his voice in my mind is all I am paying attention to. I stand up and snow spills from the folds in my sweater. I hang the bow from a welded hook, close to the ladder. I swing one leg around the tree place my foot on the rung third from the top. My right hand curls around the base of a branch and pulls me further around the tree. Now I’m near doing the splits so I take my left hand and place it on a metal hand-hold mounted for just this reason. It’s very cold to the touch. I push my palm into it to give myself the space I need to get my left foot free and beside my right. Both feet on the ladder now, this feels steady and I relax a bit. I take my left hand onto the top rung. My right hand let’s go of the branch and claps my bow, lifting it off the hook. The weight of it makes me suddenly pay much more attention. Right. I can still fuck up here. I could fall. I swing the bow to face down and begin my descent. I’ve taken off my gloves to ensure a good grip and in doing so I’ve lost all of the feeling in my fingers. I’m not sure the trade off was worth it.

The wind seems to pick up the moment my feet touch the ground like an elemental affirmation that it was indeed time to go. It takes me a few steps before I allow myself to really impose my presence onto the world around me. If you’ve ever participated in a day of silence you understand there is transitional feeling from silence back to spoken voices again. The moment when you decide to stop hunting feels a lot like that shift . And, I also think that stopping and starting is reserved for the beginners mind only.

Truthfully, I don’t know if it’s possible for a hunter to stop and start an extension of their being with the world. For me though, I feel too new to call myself a hunter, although I do figure I have been hunting beauty and moments my entire life. In this moment my mind was already steeping in the warm cup of tea I was going to be sipping soon, signifying an end to one activity and the beginning of another. Clearly, there is a lot more to learn.