Silence, Solitude, Sanctuary
On the fundamental importance of being alone in nature By Jake Hogan A professor of mine once gave my class a straightforward prompt: write about a place that looms large in your memory. My thoughts quickly settled on the memory of a summer day in Bolonia, but it was not the stone columns left by Romans nor the rugged hills of Morocco across the strait that called my mind back. It was not the great dune of sand we walked up that “loomed large.” Rather, the part of that day that has remained vivid in my mind is the moment that I descended from the dune into a patch of juniper trees. Sitting under a low ceiling of swaying branches over a bed of sand and fallen needles, I was greeted with silence. I recall family camping trips where an uncle of mine would take walks at night. Rather than take a flashlight to guide him through Groton State Forest, he would look directly up as he walked, using gaps in the dark canopy to avoid walking into trees. He could have done the same thing in the daytime. His evening walks, though, offered him a degree of solitude as he connected to the landscape by letting it guide him. Reflecting on these personal stories, it appears to me that there is something that draws people to spend time by themselves in the natural world. This trend extends far beyond my own observations, though. The 2021 film “Land”, in which a woman seeks to overcome tragedy by isolating herself in a remote cabin, is only a recent example of this idea in a long history of similar stories. From classic novels like “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakaurer, to the writing of transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau, to the sublime landscapes of romantic painters like Caspar David Freidrich, a similar theme is revealed: to be alone in nature is a profoundly transformative experience. Dwelling on this realization led me to wonder: where does this phenomenon come from? What is it about human nature that begs us to seek solitude in nature? In order to answer these questions, I have felt that I must consider how human relationships with the environment have evolved over time. Throughout the course of human history, our perceived place within the greater context of the natural world has radically changed. As soon as humans began forming permanent settlements, a disparity between
15 Headwaters Magazine
what is natural and what is human was created. Technological advancements and the development of ideologies emphasizing the uniqueness of humans, among other things, exacerbated this gap and created the concept of “wilderness”. In many ancient accounts, perhaps most noticeably in biblical stories, wilderness refers to dangerous, barren lands that lay beyond sedentary human settlements. In his article “The Trouble with Wilderness”, however, historian William Cronon details a radical change in this relationship. Attitudes toward nature, specifically in the United States, were transformed by romanticism and frontier-ideologies. By the 19th century, attitudes toward the wilderness focused on the beauty and God-evoking landscapes to be seen beyond human settlements, and a collective idealization of nature fueled the early conservationist movement. It is easy to understand how these sentiments would promote solo nature experiences as a way to experience something sublime. Because of this, I was quick to suspect that the trope of a person going out into nature alone was fueled by a desire to discover truths about themselves or the larger world. Surely, I assumed, it is a symptom of the modern continuation of this nation’s sense of place. If this were true, it would be reasonable to expect that there are cultures very different from our own in which this phenomenon cannot be observed. Across cultural and historical context, though, there are examples of people having transformative experiences in nature. From the same biblical societies which Cronon notes thought of the wilderness as a dangerous, godless place, there are stories in which solitude and nature are central. The Bible teaches that Jesus overcame temptation while alone in the Judaean desert and that before him, God spoke to Moses various times when he was alone on mountains. Beyond this, many of the religions that are foundational to billions of people’s lives and ideologies include similar stories. To name a few, it is said that the prophet Muhammad recieved his first revelations while meditating alone in a cave, and that the Buddha reached enlightenment sitting under a pipal tree. Spending time independently in the wilderness is also
