The anniversary of adventure

A song from the wild, of course. Pic by Riima Daher

Twelve months to the day today, ten humans of dubious sanity were individually dropped onto palawa country, on a lake in lutruwita for a documentary TV show. They were to self-film their adventures surviving in the middle of winter in brutal conditions, completely solo.

I can’t quite believe it’s a year ago. Breath steamed in my lungs as I waved goodbye to each of my Alone family as they were driven away, until it was my turn, belly churning, saying goodbye to everything I knew.

Would there be fish, eels, building materials, sunshine? Would I be able to light a fire, boil water, make a shelter? Did I choose the right ten items? Only time would tell, and time was a close-lipped holdout at that point, keeping her secrets tightly buried behind an opaque mask and a whole lotta rain.

Now, looking backwards, the entire adventure feels completely surreal, but also fated. Lives are funny like that. When we gaze backward it’s easy to find the through-line, the threads of meaning weaving separate strands into a basket of sense. Looking forward, every step is a leap into the unknown.

I love that leap, the frisson of fear that shudders me tingling and awake at the precipice, just before I jump. The utterly alive, belly-dropping ‘holy shit, what if I fuck this up’ feeling.

Running toward fear isn’t a strategy for the faint-hearted. Many say it’s not the smartest way to live, although I’d argue otherwise. Mistakes hurt, which is why I try to learn my lessons the first time around, and learn them well. Scars are life's tattoos.

Risk-taking runs in my genes, thank you dad, who passed on his natural ability of finding out where the edge is by leaning right up to (and sometimes falling over) it. Dancing open eyed with risk provides the opportunity to learn in real time, so we make wiser choices and grow to rely on our internal guidance systems and instincts, which learn by doing, rather than out-sourcing our authority. When instincts are deeply embedded from years of practice, bodies take over, responding with reflex, bypassing thought altogether. Which is one way to end up with wallaby for dinner.

I was out in lutruwita for almost ten weeks, surviving completely on my wits and instincts. I’m still shaking my head that it happened at all. It’s been an eyeblink and eternity.

It seems like this morning I first gazed across the tangled dark Myrtle Beech forests, searching for signs of a sunny glade, and finding only mud. Watching the boat pull away, leaving me dissolving into the roaring silence of the lake. Dancing barefoot on verdant moss after kicking off my boots, saying hello to palawa country in the only way I know, with my whole body and cold bare feet. I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake by refusing to bring a sleeping bag, if my stubbornness would see me flee with my tail between my legs. This morning, yes, but it’s also an eternity since I realised on that sodden shore: this is real, I am alone, and, like childbirth, the only way through this thing is through it.

And then I won, but couldn’t tell anyone. I kept that secret swallowed so deep I almost forgot it existed at all, but it itched and griped at me like a sharp stone in a shoe. Every step a slight limp, a hitch of heart. I don’t do secrets, and am totally crap at lying. It gave me spiritual indigestion.

I’m still detoxing from the nine months of keeping that all in, and feel queasy when I think about it. It was one of the most challenging parts of the whole experience. What a relief to be able to finally speak. In a way, I still can’t quite believe I won.

There’s a lot going on for me now, most of which I’m not ready to talk about, because new shoots require careful tending and one careless boot can kill a sprouting sapling. So I’ll hold these seedlings close for now, and tend my little garden.

I miss lutruwita. More each day. I miss the simple elegance of a life based around meeting my needs in the moment, never thinking about tomorrow. Waking in my nest as light danced across the woven walls and my sleep-blurred eyes, procrastinating before the inevitable moment I’d wriggle from the possum coat to shiver into clothes and get a fire going, teeth chattering. The heavenly morning pot of steaming, salted fish head soup, sucking every skerrick of meat from the bones of trout and eels and wallaby, then crunching on those bones to suck the delicious marrow. Lady larila the platypus, scruffling her way through mud, turning in circles to use the electroreceptors on her body to listen for submerged crawling things. Rare days of glorious sunshine. I even miss the rain and the mud, which I never thought I’d say.

Adventures are funny like that. At the time they can be enormously challenging, yet afterward we often gloss over the hardest parts and fuzz the lens so the whole thing becomes mythical.

My life is so busy now. I sleep in walls, stare at screens, juggle meetings and schedules and calendar entries my assistant has to prod me to look at. My hands are soft and clean, I don’t recognise these pink feet. I’ve been wearing shoes, well, flip flops, because some places won’t let me in barefoot. I walked out of a cinema last night because the music was too loud. This modern jungle has so many blessings, but the deeper song of nature has my heart and she sings louder each day: come home, come home.

The jagged thorn of the wild pulls inexorably at my insides, calling me back out to the infinite edge of winter horizons on mornings so cold my breath steams and my eyes water. I wake from dreams of firesmoke and belonging to a cacophony of garbage trucks and sirens. I yearn to shed skins into the dirt and scratch off my carapace and pull myself through the chrysalis and let new air burn fresh skin. I need to slough.

There’s something in this, a greater learning. How do we stitch our worlds together, meld the glorious chaos of wild nature with the ordered reality of schedules and roads and walls? To be our own psychopomp, spreading dark wings feathered with ancient stories to fly us between realms, gathering wisdom from each, and weaving those strands into nets to catch us when we fall.

We are born in this time, so must find ways to be with our capitalist, post-industrialist culture, but our instincts are alive from millenia ago, when we lived in small roving bands, reliant on the rhythms of nature for survival. Can we straddle both worlds, connecting with the ancient heartbeat of this planet, while paying the bills and dreaming nourishing lives for our children, lives that work?

For me it means going bush when the city noise gets so loud I stop noticing the silent siren song of the moon. When I start to take comfort for granted. Then it’s time to spend a day or two around a fire, bare feet kissed by dirt, remembering the wild woman in my belly and bones, waking into her furry wisdom, keeping her alive and fed with fresh caught meat and foraged greens and aimless wanderings.

She isn’t polite, or obedient. She says no as much as yes. She listens to the whisperings of wind and wave, the startling explosion of birds announcing brother fox in the bracken, the shivering gooseflesh before a storm. She lets her skin get wet and her eyes soft. She sleeps when the sun fades and wakes with the dawn, unless it’s time to prowl when the land turns silver, sniffing down nameless paths, following the squeaks of tiny creatures. Darkness is her friend.

If I go offline in the next few weeks, just know I’ve made the break, have snatched a scant few days in the wild places, remembering who and what I really am, so I can stitch a smidge more wisdom into this coat of modernity, learning a little better how to be alive, now.

With eternal gratitude to the palawa of lutruwita, and for all our aboriginal custodians, for their caretaking of this incredible, rich, ancient land for such a staggering amount of years. Thank you for leaving those footprints for me to follow. I only hope more of us will kick off our shoes and dance in the moss and listen to the stories of wind and bird and wave, and realise that the deepest melodies happen not in the notes, but in the spaces between, in the whirling silence of stars.