Opening
Freer's mind is almost always running.
Ideas. Problems. Questions. Things that could work better. Things that don't make sense yet.
But somewhere during a walk into the woods, something changes.
It doesn't happen at a trail marker. There isn't a particular distance he has to walk. At some point he simply notices that the rest of the world has become less important.
And he has become more aware of where he is.
Off the trail
The feeling gets stronger away from the trail.
Leaves. Weeds. Fallen branches. Bugs. Uneven ground.
The smell of things growing and things decaying. Light moving through the trees.
A squirrel somewhere off to one side. Birds farther away. Something small rustling through leaves behind him.
The woods aren't silent. They are full of sound. They just aren't asking anything from him.
Listening
Eventually Freer stops walking.
Sometimes he closes his eyes.
Not to shut the woods out.
Almost the opposite.
Without seeing, the other senses seem to get a little louder. He can hear where something moved. Feel the direction of the breeze. Notice the coolness under the trees.
For someone whose mind rarely stops working, there is something remarkable about simply standing there and listening.
Expanding the edges
There is something else Freer does while he stands there.
It's a meditation technique he learned a long time ago.
He imagines the invisible fields around him—the way magnetic or electrical fields might extend beyond an object—and mentally allows his own boundaries to move outward.
Past his body. Into the space around him. Around the trees. The rocks. The ground.
Freer doesn't know that anything outside his imagination is actually happening. That's not really the point. Because something inside him definitely is.
His mind becomes quiet.
For a little while, the boundary between standing in the woods and being part of the woods seems less important. His edges tend to blur into the scene.
Then he opens his eyes.
Eventually Freer opens his eyes.
Slowly.
He gets his bearings again and starts walking.
Sometimes the feeling follows him for days.
Sometimes it's gone before he gets back to the car.
Either way, for those twenty minutes or so, the noise stopped.
Sometimes the woods are just beyond the fence.
Freer doesn't always need to disappear into a national forest.
There is a small patch of woods behind his house.
During the workday, sometimes he walks across the yard to the back fence and stands there for a while.
It isn't quite the same.
The house is still behind him. Work is still nearby. Civilization hasn't disappeared very far.
But sometimes a smaller escape is enough.
His father was always in the woods.
Freer's biological father loved the woods.
He hunted. He talked about being in the woods throughout Freer's life. After retiring, he bought property where he could spend even more time there.
Freer always knew this about him.
What came later was the realization that perhaps his father had been telling Freer his entire life that they were the same in this way.
Freer just hadn't known enough about himself yet to recognize what he was hearing.
Did the woods feel like this to you, too?
Freer can't ask him now.
His father died years ago.
But when Freer pictures him, he often sees him sitting on a five-gallon bucket he used as a stool, looking over a little pasture, waiting for deer to appear.
There are worse places to imagine someone you love.
Freer doesn't know what any of this is.
Maybe there is a perfectly ordinary explanation. Temperament. Attention. Memory. Learned behavior. The neurological effect of being away from noise and distraction.
Maybe some people simply feel more comfortable among trees.
Freer doesn't particularly need to decide. He only knows what he has observed.
The woods quiet his mind. The boundaries seem a little less important.
And for a while he doesn't feel like someone standing outside nature looking in. He feels like he is in the middle of it.
Sometimes, perhaps, noticing the experience is enough.
A question to carry forward
Where do you feel less separate from everything around you?