Yeah, bush souls. Ever met up with yours?

If you have, you’re lucky. Truth is, the modern world has forgotten how. Never mind St. Anthony’s cave; we only get about 20 minutes to ourselves a day if BLS numbers are to be believed. Meanwhile, we spend several hours daily staring at magic rectangles.

As a result, ours is a culture full of people who are not quite themselves.

Let’s try to define that, then get back to Sisoes. He might be able to help us fix this.

Seclusion & Society

Steely-eyed Patrick would rise alone before dawn and greet the day “come hail, rain or snow.” His monks would climb mountains barefoot, traipse through old-growth forests and kneel on the moss beneath ancient rowans to recite the psalms. They’d row to the Hebrides and the Faroes and spend hours, days, weeks at a time in total withdrawal. Theirs was a life of constant shifting between the shoulder-tight claustrophobia of communal living and the remote seclusion of the wild.

I’d like to make a case for how important this is as a practice. In particular, there are three things we can find out there that are hard to come by in our apartments, houses, offices and coffee shops.

Psyche, Spirit and the Bush Soul

The first is our psyche. I mean the internal stuff: following the downward path toward memory, shame, identity, grief and regret. Psyche is all about confrontation.

I think most of us would rather get a root canal from a rusty knife than make that trip. It’s part of why we reach for our phones at night, turn on the Bluetooth speaker in the shower and fire up our favorite podcasts on our commute—any distraction to keep from “dwelling on things.”

Even worse, sometimes we treat what we find down there as embarrassing. The past was the past, we were stupid back then and there’s no point in dragging it back out again.

None of that is healthy. It’s very important to hear our psyche out and be brave enough to regularly square up with her. If we don’t, she’s just going to come back later with Mid-Life Crisis, Grief or some other unwanted houseguest, and we’re not going to be able to get rid of them so easily. Far better we set aside time and space outside our routines to give her our due attention.

The second thing we can find out there is spirit. In some ways, spirit is psyche’s opposite. While psyche leads us inward and downward, spirit goes up and out. Where psyche brings confrontation, spirit brings connection. The unity you feel staring into early morning dewdrops. The fleeting understanding between you and the doe you meet in a spring forest. We can’t participate in these things just by talking about them.

The third, “bush soul,” is a term I’m borrowing from John Moriarty. In American culture, we know who we are in the office (even if some of us don’t like that version of ourselves very much). We also know who we are among our friends, and which part of us comes home to our families. But who shows up after several days of having the trees and the bugs as our only companions? Who are we and what are we like when really, truly, no one is watching?

Sisoes the Great knew who exactly who he was. But that came from knowing who he was on the mountain, and on his bed. He spent 72 years getting to know the former; I don’t think we can claim the same level of self-knowledge if we’re investing only 20 minutes a day. That’s not nearly enough time to confront psyche, reconnect with spirit and rekindle our bush souls. For that, we need a lot of space, silence and stillness.

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