Near death experiences lose their salience rapidly.
Exactly a week ago, I met God. God, unironically. God with a capital G. I met God in a stream, while I sputtered for breath, desperate to stall my rapidly climbing body temperature.
Let me be clear: I did not meet God in the religious sense of the word. (My soul belongs to no organized group.) I met the center of myself, the essential fibers holding me all together. I accessed some sort of primordial thread—the sheer will to live, I supposed—amidst the unwavering apathy of the mountains and trees.
Because that’s the thing about experiencing true danger in nature. For one flickering moment, I was able to see two things with complete clarity:
The trees and the snow and the mountains will continue to be trees and snow and mountains, with or without me. They’re uncaring in the most fabulously comforting way, once you wrap your head around it.
In a world led by “I,” where one can easily waste an afternoon—or perhaps even a lifetime—fretting over small gaffes, compulsively rewatching one’s own Instagram story, and pinching arm fat. How lovely a spectator as the uncaring wilds?
How novel to truly feel one’s smallness, one’s insignificance. For all intents and purposes, I could loaf around the backwoods for eternity. Kicking stones and watching glaciers melt; and what? The mountains won’t love me any more for it. There’s no approval to be won. There just is.
This brings me to my second point. This lack of approval to be won is not for lack of life, or even sentience. Who am I to say? I’m a girl who almost perished because I backpacked in more bourbon than water. The sentience of mountains is certainly beyond my place of philosophical dominion.
What I can say is this: Anybody who has spent any significant amount of time in the wilds will tell you that they’re alive, or buzzing with life. And eventually, when a mountain range is so teeming with life—rustling, chirping, squawking, swaying, crunching life—the semantics of who or what is doing the buzzing versus what is being buzzed begins to feel quite trivial.
When I’m swimming, I don’t need to know water’s molecular structure to know I’m in water. Similarly, when I’m in the wilds, I don’t feel the need to know the mechanics of that single, unstoppable thrum that the mountains sing, just to know that I hear it.
In fact, I prefer to allow myself a break from the relentless demands of rationality. I don’t question it if I hear the sound of dirt drying, or of a leaf growing older.
I do, however, wake up to watch the sun drag heavy shadows across the mountains, with the ease of a conductor flicking their baton. At night, I fall asleep to starlight bleeding through the netting of my tent, and feel myself yoked to its hum. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I cry.
Just a week after our near death experience, my mind has glossed over the memory so many times that it already feels like a smooth, warm pebble. And here I lay. Freshly showered, cradled by a memory foam topper, longing to restore the stone’s jagged edges—if only to lay them on paper, like only a fool can.
I love u you beautiful soul