#7 Ecstasy on the John Muir Trail

Ok, actually it was magic mushrooms

The voices in my head

Last week I spent seven straight days solitarily hiking the middle section of the John Muir Trail. As I started off at the Bishop Pass trailhead, 10,000’ above sea level, I was full of endorphins and excitement. And my mind was crowded with voices: processing recent conversations with friends, resolving problems related to my work, replaying resentments from my past, and fantasizing about the future. The voices wouldn’t stop. I was surrounded by natural beauty, but my attention was distracted by the babble in my brain.

All writers hear voices in their head. Those voices become characters with personalities, dialogue, and monologue. You could describe someone who hears voices as having a “rich interiority,” or depending on their self-control, mental illness. I plead guilty to possessing a rich interiority, and it’s something that distracts me from attending to the present.

On my drive up from Los Angeles to Bishop, I was delighted to hear Ezra Klein interview Ruth Ozeki about Learning to Listen to the Voices Only You Hear. “I felt seen,” you could say, when Ezra Klein observed how a daily meditation practice has taught him just how little he controls what he thinks:

You hear this line in Buddhist circles sometimes: thoughts think themselves. I’ve found it a little unnerving to realize how little control I have over the voices in my head. There’s a way in which meditation suggests the voices we hear on a spectrum. Even those of us who don’t always think of ourselves as hearing voices, are hearing more that we don’t control than we think.

These hyperactive voices continued their psycho-babble over the first three days of the trail. I fantasized about confronting my supposed enemies. I planned the next year of my work. I psychoanalyzed my friends. And never once did I feel like I was in control of what I was thinking. But then around day four something happened: the voices stopped and my mind was empty. It was the moment I had been waiting for. As I wrote after reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind:

The price of a sense of self with the ability to shape an individual identity is also a sense of separation from others and nature. Self-reflection can lead to great intellectual and artistic achievement but also to destructive forms of self-regard and unhappiness. We need to get outside of our analytical heads, tune into our senses, and just observe without judgement.

The last time I felt this sense of clarity was backpacking with my friend Pablo, when I recalled an observation by Robert Wright: “Once you empty your mind of its constant analyzing, worrying, and desire for social prestige, you realize that at its foundation, the default state of being is one of appreciation.”

That’s right. I was filled with overwhelming gratitude as I boiled water for my Top Ramen noodles, as the setting sun projected peach onto the surrounding granite peaks with their doppelgängers reflected over the still alpine lake. I once tried a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat in North Fork, where I sat cross-legged in silence for 8+ hours a day. Eventually around day 6 or 7 my mind did empty, but here in the mountains after miles of walking I better understood an observation by Ruth Ozeki from the podcast:

Meditation is something that we think of as being done with the mind. And I actually experience it somewhat differently. I experience it as something that starts in the body and is really rooted in the body.

Ultralight Thru Hiking Gear?

I remember backpacking in my 20s and seeing people in their 40s and 50s with laughably outdated gear from the 1970s and 80s. Now in my 40s, I realize, I’m that dude! Most of my backpacking gear is now 15-20 years old. I was amazed by some of the stuff I saw on the trail. I saw people who were hiking all three weeks of the John Muir Trail with 20-pound packs while mine was at least 40 pounds for just a week. And so while I poke fun at those who spend more time at REI than in nature, it’s time for me to upgrade. So far, I’ve been checking out Greenbelly’s helpful guide to keeping your total weight to below 20 pounds. And I’ve been looking through Gear Lab and Garage Grown Gear. Let me know if you have some recommendations for lightweight backpacking gear.

Suffering together to overcome social polarization

Just when my mind emptied, an afternoon thunderstorm arrived. I figured that it would stop a couple of hours later, and I was very wrong. I was hit by a 24-hour flash flood, soaking my tent, food, gear, and leaving me stranded between two raging rivers. Fortunately, I was rescued the next morning by a gun-selling Republican from rural North Dakota. I wrote a rather long essay describing how the experience convinced me that the US needs a mandatory year of national service if we’re not going to come apart at the seams. While previous attempts to legislate a mandatory service year haven’t been successful, nor has it polled well, support seems to be building.

Kudos

Kudos to Uncle Steve, who took me backpacking every summer growing up and gave me me a birthday gift each year to grow my collection of mountain gear.

Kudos to Outdoor Afro for being the Uncle Steve to many people in the Bay Area who don’t have one.

Kudos to my wife for knowing me better than I know myself and encouraging me to get away for a week of solitude in the mountains

A Trippy Song

After the 24-hour flash flood on Thursday night and most of Friday, I woke up on Saturday morning to the smell of pine needles and impossibly blue skies. I ate a massive breakfast burrito and had two cups of real coffee — my first coffee in days. I brought a stash of magic mushrooms with me, but the right vibe hadn’t presented itself … until now.

It’s impossible to describe a psychadelic experience. It’s not something that can be conveyed in words (though Michael Pollan gets close in How To Change Your Mind). As Steve Jobs once observed, psychedelics “show you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

I had a big goofy smile the whole day. I cried for the first time in years. At one point I pulled over to listen to a track by the Italian electronic composer Caterina Barbieri and became so overwhelmed by the beauty of the mountains in front of me that it was hardly bearable. Barbieri writes on her website that she “focuses on the creative use of computation and complex sequencing techniques to trigger temporal and spatial hallucinations, often exploring states of trance and emotional focus.” Yup, sure worked for me.

400 miles of Bay Area Trails

I’d like to hike all 400 miles of the the Bay Area Ridge Trail over the next year. Hit me up if you’re in the mood!

And have a great week,

David