The wilderness journey is part of life. We all experience it at some time whether we recognize it or not.  Maybe even more than one time.  In fact, while I couldn’t have said this early on, the wilderness is a very sweet, special place.  In the wilderness, I encountered and wrestled with the Divine and I am not the same person.

What Is The Wilderness Journey?

We experience the wilderness as we leave or lose life as we’ve known it.

In the wilderness, the way life was working, changes. Or things we once were certain of, we no longer are.  Some people also call this a dark night of the soul.

Sometimes on the outside things look just the same, but we feel it internally. We know the truth. Things aren’t the same and hard as we try, we can’t seem to recapture the old. We grasp and claw for what we’ve always known, for what has been familiar because there, in the land of the familiar, we feel safe. But hard as we try, the familiar simply slips through our fingers.  It’s disorienting and unnerving. In the wilderness you feel lost, uncertain and somewhat off-balance emotionally and or psychologically.

What Causes A Wilderness Journey?

A Loss.

Maybe the loss of a job or vocation, close relationship or friendship, home, or community.

Change.

Even good change is disorienting at times.  Change usually means that something is lost.  With change, we are not as certain of things as we once were and so we’re back to the experience of loss.

A Voice From the Wilderness.

Sometimes the wilderness itself calls to us, invites us to dare to journey into the depths of it, to risk all for the possibility of new discoveries about life, about oneself, about purpose and meaning. We can listen to the voice or ignore it to our own peril.

My most significant wilderness season was a combination of the above.  Changes in vocation, relationships, and community all at once meant a great deal of loss.  I also sensed an undeniable inner voice that was inviting me to dare to journey into places unknown.

Over the next several posts, I want to unpack further clues and insights that I have gained from the wilderness journey. For my benefit, so that I don’t forget, but hopefully for someone else that is either entering into a wilderness journey or in the midst of it. Maybe that person is you.  Or a friend of yours.  Please feel free to share this if it seems like it could be helpful.

Wilderness experiences don’t get shared often enough and so when we go through it, we think we’re all alone. To some degree that’s true; it’s the nature of the wilderness experience. But we can learn from each other how to make the most of wilderness experiences. In the next post, I will talk about some of the things I learned about how to not only survive in the wilderness but to thrive.

 “Wilderness is….a necessity of the human spirit.” Edward Abbey

 

Get Part 2 here