I love night time walks in the woods…especially on a quiet, foggy night in a place where I feel safe. The smell of wood burning reminds me of late night campfires with friends. The sound of light rain is falling on the ground and I hear running water in the distance. It stills me internally and total clarity begins to take over my mental state. I fully embrace the respite away from cars and people. Faint memories begin to come up of the eleven consecutive years I spent going to a music festival spending all night wandering fields and playing music until the break of dawn. Or buying a whole gallon of ice cream and sharing them with friends I’d see only once per year on the campgrounds as we walked in the rain. Sometimes we’d brave more intense thunderstorms as we packed in a van and sang songs together or hid in one of the nearby buildings after salvaging as much as we could of our campsites.
It’s these moments where you learn reconnect to a deeper part of yourself — you become more grounded by re-establishing a close sense of community with no true need to go anywhere, do anything, impress anyone, etc. Just wandering freely and playing for days…every day brought a new adventure that we would make for ourselves, and at night we’d all fall asleep in our tents satisfied.
After a while you even lose your sense of time as you reconnect with nature and become the silence within that we so often lack, even if for a moment.