Life in the Wilderness a Practice of Mindfulness

Life in the wilderness is a marvelous exercise in mindfulness: the spiritual practice of purposely bringing one’s attention to the present-moment experience without evaluation. To my way of thinking, the more mindful one can become, the more existentially one can live life, focused on the moment, the here and now, rather than worrying over the past or fretting about the future. 

 

The wilderness is a wonderful lab for practicing mindfulness! First, as I mentioned in my last post, life in the wilderness focuses you intensely on the basics: providing shelter, food, security. One of your first tasks in the Boundary Waters Wilderness is to find a campsite. You do not have to thrash about to do this. You must camp on designated campsites. This minimizes the impact of human presence and activity on the wilderness. A designated site has a fire grate and a latrine box. They are clearly marked on the maps, though you might have to search a little to identify some of them.

 

Once at a site your focus becomes setting up camp, which is securing shelter. This involves unloading all your gear from the canoe. Identifying the most comfortable tent pad (a relatively flat area with as few roots and rocks as possible on which to place your tent); set up the tent. Then it is best to hang a rain fly to protect your gear from the elements. Finally, you must hang a rope assembly with a pully, from two trees. This is where you will hang your food pack to protect it overnight from bears and other critters desiring to share in your good smelling provisions. This is easier to describe than it usually is to execute. Some trips I have spent hours attempting to get the two ropes up over limbs of trees high enough to have the pack hang 10 feet off the ground and at least 10 feet from any other tree. This trip we completed the task in relatively short order.

 

Once camp is established, you have taken care of shelter and security. The other basic need is food. In the wilderness this involves cooking over a wood fire (which means you need to gather some firewood, preferably dry branches up to an inch in diameter) or cooking over a propane stove. We enjoyed steaks the first night in camp, so we cooked over a fire, but all the other nights we cooked over propane. It is easier, faster, and you don’t have to protect your pots and pans from soot by coating them with Fels-Naptha soap. (We also did not have any of that soap, as the Outfitter forget to provide it in our supplies!) It is also easier to cook over propane as most of the food is freeze dried and primarily involves boiling water. Not a lot of need for that smoky, woodsy flavor that comes from open fire grilling!

 

The second way life in the wilderness helps in the practice of mindfulness is by providing an abundance of life to observe all around you! From the beautiful vistas of the lakes, sky, clouds and weather on the macro level to the micro level of butterflies, moths, dragonflies, mushrooms, mosses, and all manners of plant life. Add in the larger birds and waterfowl, and other mammals, and there is just so much to observe. I will write more about this in my next post, but if one is not paying attention to all the life around you then you are missing an amazing smorgasbord of wonder and beauty.

 

Finally, the wilderness assists you with the practice of mindfulness because there are far fewer distractions than we normally surround ourselves with in our daily life. In the wilderness you do not have electricity (other than battery power); that means you don’t have TV, computers, Cell phones; no phone calls can reach you there. (I will admit this trip we discovered that we were still on the grid where we camped. Testament to improved cellular service, most likely influenced by the demand of the Outfitter to be connected to the wider world for their business needs, and to the fact that we were not very far into the BWCA. We did explore a couple lakes and rivers further north of our campsite one day and discovered that we quickly lost all cellular service, so most of the wilderness is still off the grid.) I did take my journal and my camera but writing in my journal and taking photographs help me be more fully present in the moment.