Men, Women, and Wildness

Being in the out-of-doors has away of bringing us into our instinctual selves, the part of us that responds naturally to life in an intuitive way. After a long walk in the woods, or even more so, after an extended camping trip in a wilderness environment relatively free of the day-to-day demands and craziness of our usual lives, we tend to settle into an interior space that is relaxed, open, and responsive. Our minds calm down and our capacity for insight becomes sharper. We inhabit our bodies more fully. The senses of sight, hearing, touch, and taste are heightened. We experience a stronger connection to our essential male- ness and femaleness, to our sexuality, to our wildness, and to the body of wilderness. We feel ourselves to be animals amongst other animals living in response to the natural currents that move inside and outside of us.

This experience, as I have witnessed leading wilderness retreats with men and backpacking with male friends, is amplified when we spend long periods of time in the outdoors surrounded by the company of our own gender. The commonality of having been born in a male body and the awareness of the absurd and oppressive conditioning that comes with this fate forms an inherent and understood bond between us. Men understand what it is like to be men in a way that women can never really know, and vice versa. Being in the woods, without women present, men feel less inhibited about certain things. A kind of playfulness, roughness, and an honesty of being find release and expression in the company of our own gender. I have no doubt that women experience the same sense of camaraderie and freedom when alone with other women in the sanctuary of the woods.

As much as I believe we need to celebrate and relish our differences, we also need to embrace the mystery of the mixing of the sexes, and of our naturally given sexuality. The contributions in this section begin with pieces that are more gender specific and then move toward writings that reflect the beauty, joy, and magnetism of the meeting of man and woman within the context of wildness. And while wilderness brings forth and highlights the differences between the genders, it also serves to make clearer our common humanness.

However—with all of this said —I believe, that in the deepest ground of our beingness, we are joined in a way that cuts completely across the boundaries of our sexuality. The inherent wakefulness that we all share has nothing to do with our bodies or our gender; this presence is far deeper — without limits or constraints—already established in an unbreakable intimacy with the body of trees, rivers, oceans and with the unfathomable body of the cosmos. If we are fortunate, we drift freely past our conditioning and past the nearsighted view of identifying ourselves as being only our bodies, our sexuality, our thoughts and our experiences in the phenomenal world. Our longing returns us to the realization that we are the quiet, radiant, and empty presence that pervades all of life. Then, wherever we turn, we see ourselves in all things and in all circumstances. We reach the center of our aliveness and live our lives freshly from this pulse.