Into the Wild…2
Posted by tm3497 on March 10, 2010
I have recently been enjoying the outdoors for the first time in my life starting last Fall semester. Before, growing up with a single mom from a different country and living in the city never afforded me the opportunity to venture out. In my adventures, I first visited Lost Maples where I did very light backpacking. I then went out to West Texas to go caving. I was so hooked to how being outdoors made me feel that I immediately signed up for a week long trip back packing through rought desert terrain at Big Bend State Park in west Texas.
During these trips I had no distinction between those who were “outdoorsy”–I didn’t even have a personal perception of nature in either the classical or romantic sense. However, after learning about these different views and reflecting back on my experiences I found myself enthralled by nature similarly to that of the romantic’s relationship with nature.
I was captivated by the essense of its natural beauty untouched by man. So often in the city, I was bombarded with no understanding of the world without man, but these trips soon reorganized my molecules, so to speak. Like the romantic, I contrasted my experiences with the profanity of the city with that of the purity of nature. There was a universal sense of the origin of all of mankind, that we weren’t so divided as society would have us to believe.
At times, when it was completely dark, I thought I would be scared of the wilderness. My first time leaving the campsite in the middle of the night to do my business was an exhilarating experience. I was initially scared, staring into the depths of the night, but as I ventured out, surprisingly, I felt overwhelmingly safe. I was relieved of the anxieties that the city had cast on me. Though there was the reasonable fear of dangerous wildlife, I felt I could hear anything and everything, and that the complete isolation was the safest place on earth.
Through this experience I found the “individual salvation” that exposed the repressed elements of my mind.
The end.