
Five of us—fully grown adults—stood in a line blindfolded. We were told to walk in the woods toward the sound of a beating drum. In this sudden total darkness, I took my first step. The soles of my feet awakened to a leafy, crunchy sensation. I was completely unsure if the next step would land on a jagged rock, a slippery log, a muddy pit, or some other ankle-twisting hazard.
Meanwhile, the rest of my body was exposed to seemingly constant and infinite threats. Protruding branches were ready to scratch my face, arms, and legs. As I cautiously moved forward, I slowly started to wave my hands around to sense these branches. Then, my other senses came online. My hearing became attuned to each snap of a twig; my sense of touch anticipated each impending branch and the gentle winds, which I hadn’t noticed until then; and my usually dim sense of smell began to pick up on the autumnal scents of pine, dried oak leaves, and a distant campfire. My sense of sight, unexpectedly, awakened too. It was almost like I was internalizing a landscape, perhaps activating my pituitary gland (or third eye), or maybe it was the blindsight phenomenon, where people can distinguish objects despite being blind.
I remember that in this lush darkness, I could walk more intentionally, reaching with my heel and rolling the rest of my foot forward. This was the Native American fox walk method that my Wild Earth teachers had taught the five of us several months prior. Fox walking also entailed bent knees and lowered hips, so my attention drew closer to the Earth beneath me. My confidence began to grow. I found my hands making circles in the air, detecting and deflecting branches and helping me avoid a face-plant on a tree trunk. I’d never done Tai Chi, but I started to feel the way an old Chinese man practicing in a park might. This method of slow, high stepping and circular arm waving felt highly effective as I tuned into the drumbeat. Thud, it went. I marched toward it. Thud. I heard it again but from a different direction. “Wait,” I thought. “Did that sound just move?” Something strange was happening. I could have sworn that the drummer was slinking through the woods. Thud, I heard to my upper right. Was the wind carrying the sound? Thud. Or maybe the sound was deflecting off of the small postglacial hills around us, mounds of quartzite fragments strewn around these Shawangunk Mountain foothills.
Thud. I started feeling the drumbeat in my heart. Thud. Was I getting closer? Thud. It shifted again! Were our teachers messing with us? I presumed they’d be waiting in one place. Thud. I was getting excited. Thud. I took another step closer, gaining more confidence. Crack! I stepped on a fallen tree limb. Thud. A few steps closer. Whoa Nelly, that was a big boulder. My fingers touched the cool spongy moss living on the rock. I went around the rock. The ground felt flatter. Thud. The variation in sound movement got smaller. I wanted to accelerate, but I knew I shouldn’t. I was still in the woods, and another tree was inevitable. Yep, I brushed by a jagged-barked trunk to my left. Man, this forest was full of trees! Thud. I reached a slight incline and was certain I was close, shifting sound be damned. Thud. I could almost see the leather on the drum vibrating and feel its timbre and texture. I could picture the deerskin leather of the hand drum stretched out on a wooden circle, vibrating with each slap of our teacher Dustin’s, hand. Thud! It was loud and clear. I was close, maybe ten or twenty feet away. Thud! I visualized Dustin. I walked toward him slowly as I smiled ear to ear and listened for a sign of his presence or for the ambient sound to swirl around his nearby body. Last, a very certain and clear Thud. I had reached the drummer.
~ ~ ~
The blindfolding activity was to prepare us for the culminating step of the Hudson Valley–based Wild Earth outdoor education organization: build and keep a fire going overnight, alone. How exactly it’d prepare us, I didn’t yet know. This “fire solo” was considered a rite of passage for us five teacher apprentices, the event for which the twelve previous months of education prepared us. In the preceding twelve months, we had met one weekend a month, walked through the woods, and become attuned to flora and fauna. I say attuned because we didn’t just learn their names. We were encouraged to understand the histories of local plants and animals, their interdependence, their relationships with the land, and how humans have used them throughout history, especially Indigenous people. We twined natural grasses, wove baskets from strips of black ash, built shelters using leaves and branches, processed plants for food and dyes, and even embodied different animals, walking softly like a coyote or cautiously like a field mouse. Throughout, we gathered around the fire to share our gratitude. We opened up to reveal what had brought us there. For most, a common desire was to connect with the land. Or, as Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses in her fantastic Braiding Sweetgrass, a remembering with the land. Remembering who we really are, our collective ancestral history with the land, the natural world. Most of us wanted to feel this connection, to rekindle it. I was curious how the land would heal me and how I could heal it.
Over the course of the twelve months, subtle teachings wended their way into my consciousness. Lessons from our teachers and from the natural processes in which we took part became part of my day-to-day life, the way I looked at the world and the way I taught students of my own. Wild Earth called this subtle method, popularized by Tom Brown Jr. and Jon Young, coyote teaching after the notoriously clever and sometimes sneaky dog. What I didn’t expect was how fire would become so central to my learning. It was central as a source of warmth on snowy and rainy days (we went out in all weather and were only temporarily stopped by Covid), a beacon of light on our overnight trips, and a grounding source as we sat on stumps surrounding the fire sharing stories, with emotions sparking up like flames. What really surprised me was how much fire itself would become a teacher.
The day after the fire solo was a glorious October day with the trees colored like a Crayola box of greens, yellows, reds, and oranges. We five gathered on a hillside looking out to the Catskill Mountains. As we ate warm home-cooked chili, cornbread, and cookies, we were joined by Wild Earth staff, all of whom had done their own fire solos in the past. Wild Earth founder and executive director David Brownstein joined us as well. David had started Wild Earth twenty years prior, first as a kids’ summer camp in his backyard in New Paltz, New York, on land he had bought from my family in 2000. That land had been healing to my great uncle, who had been on the front lines in World War II. This felt like a moment when one flame caught another, burning for generations.
As we wrapped up lunch, David shared a few words with us about the experience and suggestions on how to go forward. One thing he said struck me and continued to resonate for many months after. It actually prompted me to write this book. “Be tender with yourselves,” he advised. My first reaction to this was that he meant “be gentle with yourselves” because many of us had thoughts, feelings, and emotions arise during our hours alone in the woods. Maybe David said this because he knew that we all had to transition from the fire solo to a world where fire was rare, and instead of being solo, we’d be back at work and with our friends and families. We’d be with lots of people but no longer surrounded by trees—the Standing People, as Native Americans called them.
But maybe it wasn’t just gentleness that David was getting at. After all, I’d seen him give a talk a year before at the Idealist organization in New York City, where he shared some of his own life journey. He spoke about being a successful Wall Street guy who felt disconnected and had a spiritual crisis that led him to live in the presence of the Shawangunk Ridge, a billion-year-old quartzite that stretched along the Eastern Seaboard, beginning in Birmingham, Alabama, and ending in his backyard. In the talk, he described how he had to unlearn years of conditioning to be a certain model of success, of toughness. How he had to “take off the armor” that many of us straight, white, American males are expected to wear. David teared up in that talk, as did many of us in the room. He was vulnerable and tender yet strong. So maybe that’s what he meant.
But maybe he was coyote teaching. About a year later, when I was back at home in New York City—away from the fires and the Standing People, back in the milieu of noise, dirt, and disorder—I looked up the word tender in the dictionary and got sent down an etymological rabbit hole. I was amazed when I read how the word comes from the Old French word tendre, which means “to stretch, to incline, to move in a certain direction. To stretch out, hold forth, hand over, offer.” Which is exactly what I had done for twelve hours, reaching forward to tend to the fire.
Did David want us to be tender to ourselves as in to tend to our own fire? “Wow,” I thought. I looked up the word’s etymology and family tree on my iPhone and saw examples of how the word tend was the root of so many familiar words. As I scrolled, the words rushed down like a waterfall:
Abstain
Attend
Attenuate
Contain
Continue
Distend
Entertain
Extenuate
Hypotenuse
Maintain
Ostensible
Pertain
Pretend
Rein
Retain
Sustain
Temple
Tenacious
Tenacity
Tendon
Tendril
Tensile
Tension
Tenure
Tone
Some of these words’ connection to tendre seemed obvious, like tendon. Some connections were hidden in plain sight, like tent. Unpacking this one word went in so many directions, from the musical, to the mathematical, to the mundane. To me, every word feels like a little present. It is an art form I can always carry with me. I can unpack a word suitcase and see how it became a colorful wardrobe, with garments going back centuries. Maybe the word has the same root; maybe it rhymes; maybe its homonym means its exact opposite. I love how each word is laden with meaning and has a history stretched to more mysterious, less documented times, evolving like a strand of DNA, each generation internalizing it, reshaping it, mutating it. Each word is a history lesson. Maybe David meant it a certain way, like the primary usage of the word, and I interpreted it and internalized it in a different, secondary, or event tertiary way, kind of like how looking at a piece of art creates new layers of meaning for the viewer that the creator didn’t event intend on creating. (There it is again, in intend. Tend: hiding everywhere in plain sight.)
To be tender with and to oneself is a reaching forward into something, just like I’d done for the past twelve hours. I leaned in and reached to adjust the logs to keep them hot. It was an effort, and it wasn’t necessarily gentle. If I leaned in too much, I’d get burned or would inhale smoke. If left unattended, the fire would just burn out. It took intention to keep the fire burning and alive. My mind continued to unpack this little word: tend. I not only started seeing tend and its roots everywhere but also started to see the fire-building process everywhere—in my mindfulness practices and, even more surprisingly, in my work in politics and advocacy. In this book, fire is the teacher, and I’ll attempt to be the tender. The fire-building process is the metaphor to provide a theme and structure to connect stories and learnings. But fire is more than that. It is life itself, a process whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
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