… I was dying.

My skin was on fire. My breath came in short gasps, inhaling air that burned my nostrils and throat. My eyes stung from searing steam. My cramped body, unable to relax, forced me to pay agonizing attention to its every discomfort. Every moment was sheer hell.

It was my first true sweat lodge.

Two hours later, I was born again. I emerged into a world I had left long ago, but one that had always been there. It was dusk when we entered the lodge; we came out into the night. Time literally hung in the air, made solemn by the quiet solitude that the surrounding woods gave us. As I embraced each of my companions, who had shared the lodge with me, I was closer to them, closer to the earth, and closer to myself than I had ever been before.

I had traveled to a dark edge, and had come back alive.

It marked the end of my summer at Teaching Drum, in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. It was a good way to send me off, but also a reminder of the horizons that were yet to be explored and experienced, the many teachers I had yet to encounter.

I had absorbed much. I know that there is far more unknown than can possibly be known. I know that there are beings who live in spite of us, who hide or fly within house walls, who travel our paved roads when we are not looking. I learned that there are weird wonders and magical happenings that can reveal themselves in a single moment, and then vanish forever. I know that all of this can occur in anyone’s backyard. The wilderness is everywhere.

We are part of a pattern — patterns — far larger than ourselves. We are energy, in more ways than one. Begin anywhere — a breath, perhaps — and watch as it leads you into endless worlds of wonder. Scientists follow it into the body; into every organ and every hormone, into cells and proteins, into genes, and beyond, into the building blocks of the universe. Athletes, yoga practitioners, and martial artists mold the breath, use it to shape their performance, their bodies as tools and as art forms; an athlete wouldn’t get very far without proper breathing. Mystics control the breath, allow it to guide them beyond themselves or into themselves, into peace.

The breath cannot exist apart from those who breathe. But follow the breath from the body, and it merges, becomes the wind; and being wind, it becomes rain and clouds, storms and lightning; and being these things, it becomes the trees, the grasses, the birds, the insects, the deer and foxes and snakes. It is all one cloth, one pattern, but diversified into all the things that live, and all the intricate relationships that exist.

Only we have the audacity to believe that things and people and events occur independently.

Being in nature is the beginning of experiencing the oneness of all things. Living in boxes and driving around in boxes, separate from the awareness of our constant interactions with the world, we can easily forget that. But if there are no real doors between inside and outside, if one step away from indoors are the songs of birds and the smell of moist earth from the previous night’s rain, then it becomes far easier to sense the unity of humankind with the circle of existence. We are prodigal children of the earth mother.

But nature is not found only in the woods, cut off from civilization. The experience of oneness can be sought in all places. The edge is my guide. To experience fear and pain, to ride along what I call the edge of grace: there is the stuff of life — not to suffer, but to be in the midst of chaos without succumbing, and in so doing, to live fully. It can be difficult, and missteps are always made to either side: either we make ourselves too comfortable, or we make ourselves suffer too much. But walking that edge is where the miracles happen; and when, one day, I destroy that edge and realize that it exists everywhere, in all places and in all things, perhaps I will glimpse the oneness of all things.

That is a lesson I hope to live and to learn in my year at Teaching Drum, where I will test my wits, my body, and my sanity in the Northwoods. To live in the wilderness is a dream come true for me. It’s also a very scary prospect, and a huge challenge. It will not be easy or painless. But in the woods lie important lessons in the ways of survival and awareness, in walking the edge of grace and following the path with heart. The teachers out there — the mosquitoes and the cold and the people and everything else — will have difficult but valuable lessons to teach. I will live in a crucible, and I will sweat. In the end, I think, I will be reborn. The world will not change, but I will have, and in the end, there is no difference.