Walk Around

Hello,

Welcome to Walk Around. This is Hudson Gardner. It's been a little while.

I've been out and about, traveling, hiking, running, doing things that I love, spending time with wonderful people, seeing beautiful things, having really beautiful conversations—learning about myself, learning about others, and by that, learning about this world we all co-create and exist in together

I'm back in Port Townsend, where I live, and sitting in the pasture near a stand of trees on the edge of the field.

It was my birthday a couple of days ago, actually, a week ago, and I have been coming back into some kind of personal awareness and depth inside of my own body and mind recently, thinking about things I've left behind for too long, things I've been incapable of doing, reflecting on life in general.

Read more here at walkaround.run

Transcript (includes errors)

Hello.

Welcome to Walk Around.

This is Hudson Gardner.

I am sitting at the edge of a field where the trees come out a little bit into the grass.

And there's a little secret spot surrounded by hawthorn trees, there's an aspen that has a lot of young aspen around it.

And down beneath the willow tree is a place that I come and make a little fire and have tea.

I want to tell you a story today.

Something that happened 10 summers ago, which feels like a different life, completely different time. A different world, a different person who was living and somehow that person was me and it was the same life in the same world.

A hummingbird just landed on a twig of this little snag and he's just watching me.

I almost feel like he's listening.

So I'll tell him the story too.

Ten years ago,

I was living in southeast Nebraska in the town that I more or less grew up in called Lincoln.

And I was getting ready to do something.

I had been there a long time.

My luck was running out.

There was a general feeling of uncertainty, major change coming that I sensed.

I had gotten out of a relationship that was,

had been about three years long and it was a messy breakup and it was a hard time.

My mom was living on a farm outside of town.

And so I was staying in one of the guest rooms as I figured out what I was going to do with my 25-year-old life.

And back then I felt that I didn't really have a conviction yet about who I was or what I had to offer I had the beginnings of it, but it was more like just a question and it's safe to say that I now know what that answer is but how to do it is still elusive.

But back then I'doften go out to this zendo

outside of town on a farm called Branched Oak Farm.

It's a dairy farm with probably 15, 20 Jersey cows, some pigs, chickens.

Pretty sure it's still going.

And it was the best milk I've ever tasted in my life came from that place.

Deep, deep yellow.

I've never had anything like it.

There's something about the pastures in the Great Plains that are just unlike any

other place from all those millions of years of bison and care.

And one time I went out to the Zendo and I was in a strange headspace, I guess.

I mean, who doesn't go to a Zendo in a strange headspace?

And I went out there and before I went to the Zendo that day, I went out to this

little reservoir nearby.

It's the namesake of the farm, Branched Oak Reservoir, Branched Oak Lake.

And below the Branched Oak Lake, there's a series of loess hills that were blown there by the wind over millennia.

And there's grass and trees and little groves of flowers and

I pulled off on the dirt road and in Nebraska you pull off on a dirt road 20 minutes outside of town and you can sit there for an hour and you don't see anybody else.

It's a quiet place.

And it was probably one of those days like today, beautiful, sunny, big puffy cumulonimbus clouds growing on the horizon, some kind of storm forming in the distance—the wind blowing across the grass and I went into this draw and I don't know what drew me there.

I just had a feeling that I should go there and I walked up through the grass and I came to a grove of plants. And I had this intense feeling inside of me this anger at myself for being so old and so incompetent.

I felt like I didn't know anything about the world,

like I'd been wasting my life sitting around putting myself through school and

college that I didn't want to go to,

staying probably too long in a relationship that wasn't good for me or for the other person, unfortunately.

And just being too comfortable.

And so I had all those feelings when I walked into the draw and I knew I was on the brink of change.

It felt that way.

And I felt so angry and there was this plant, there's a big patch of them.

And I thought I'm going to show that I have some competence.

And I know what to do when I'm out in the wild places.

And I took out my knife, which is something I would never do now.

And I used it to dig up the root of one of these plants.

And it was a pale white root.

And it smelled like carrots.

But it was not carrot.

It was hemlock.

And I ate it.

And I didn't die.

I've been thinking about why that happened.

I've never really figured it out for all these years.

And the fact is there's so many things to learn in the world and there's so many ways to learn.

There's such an expansion of possibility, so much beauty.

so much intricacy, so much information.

And then it's also so simple.

And because of that, it's so heartrendingly elegant and it's so beautiful.

And it's taken me 10 years to find out what the simplistic, elegant message from that plant was for me.

And it happened just a few days ago.

I was harvesting hawthorn flowers with a friend.

And there's this kind of back corner of this tree.

pasture I live on and it's all overgrown with roses and blackberries and it's all

brambly and thorny and there's a bunch of hawthorn trees back there and we were

kind of going through this shadowy shady part and as I was going through there with

my orchard ladder and picking bag moving on to the next tree I suddenly realized I

was surrounded by hemlock

And it wasn't even that I saw them.

It was almost that I just sensed that they were there.

And I didn't even pause.

I just thought, well, hello.

Hello again.

It's been about 10 years.

It's definitely been 10 years since that plant showed up that intensely to me.

And there it was again.

And in this case, the hawthorn had led me there.

As the next few days went by, I thought about my discovery of that plant here.

And I thought about that time a long time ago where I nearly could have died and about my encounter with it this

time and what it might be telling me

And I believe that there's a part of life and a part of us that if a person is not

living according to their code or to something that matters to them,

we're really on the process of finding that out or being genuine and honest that

the body itself and maybe our spirit in some way will begin to

a series of self-destructive mechanisms because there's no point in living life without meaning.

And somehow our bodies know that more than our rational minds.

And at that point, 10 years ago, I was led to that plant because my body

My senses, my spirit were saying, no, you cannot stay here anymore.

You can't just live out your life in this little corner of the world.

You can't be comfortable anymore.

You need to go out and find yourself.

And so I did.

I planned to move to Oregon and then two weeks,

maybe even,

I think it was two days before that I decided to move to Vermont and I didn't know

a single person in the state.

I think a friend of mine was traveling through fortunately.

And so I connected with her and somehow I found a place to be.

But that started off this whole chain reaction,

this trajectory of where I am now,

which is someone who has an understanding of themselves and their abilities and who

feels some level of competence in the world.

I've gone from misidentifying hemlock and almost dying to having a relationship

with the plant and to knowing hundreds of plants and to being

on the path of a physician or a healer or someone who helps others.

And that's the type of competency that's hard to achieve.

But I believe that I will achieve it.

And so now I don't even need to

have my spirit endanger me in order to know that I'm at another point of departure.

All I need to do is see that plant and think, oh yes, this guy again.

I just need to pay attention.

As you all know,

or some of you,

or maybe not most,

but a few,

I have been in the process of entering school for acupuncture and Chinese medicine

this fall.

And I recently decided that it was too much.

I don't want to go into debt.

I don't want to compromise my health for three years at a program that's going to run me ragged and

I mean,

if you think about it,

it's going to possibly push me to achieve things I never thought I could,

but not on my own terms.

So I don't know what the point of that is.

I think I'm going to find my own way to practice medicine.

And, um, a friend of mine is starting a cohort that I'm going to join and we'll see where that goes.

But it won't lead to a license.

So it's going to be curious to see how it will work out for me.

But I believe in myself and in my abilities.

I believe in what I see and understand.

And I believe in living a life on my own terms as much as I can.

I believe in freedom.

And I think by living this path, my most genuine path, that I'll be saved from despair and depression.

And I will eventually find belonging.

That's the message that I've learned from Hamlock.

Thank you for listening.

This poem came to me when I was sitting on the rocks near a wharf off water street in Port Townsend. I had climbed down off the sidewalk and found a spot where kids hang out and tag. It’s a quiet place but some other person came with a notebook and started sketching. She kept looking toward at me, and I wonder if I made it in the drawing.

I’ve been out on my bike recently, and the color of the sky and water is almost unbelievable. I’ve started to notice things again, my sense of smell has begun to return, my mind feels clearer. I get headaches now and then, still sleep strangely, often feel like crying or angry out of place, and often the urges almost overcome me. But I am not going to give up.

Thank you for reading & listening.

AQUAMARINE

The water blue,

As spring has gotten into gear around here, I've been noticing the general abundance of plant life, and weather, and birds, and social engagements—and it's got me reflecting on different kinds of abundance, overabundance, scarcity, relationships, community... From that corner of the human experience of consuming and creating the dynamic between those two aspects of our nature, you could say...

Listen & Read More

This podcast covers the issue of addiction.

If you are in need of help, call the national hotline, 988.

Transcript (may contain errors)

There's a bell that I've taken around with me wherever I've lived

I can't remember where I got it, maybe in Portland at the Japanese Garden

And I've often hung it up outside and the sound has become familiar, even as all the places I've lived have changed for so long

And that familiar feeling just hit me as I rode up this little hill through an orchard towards the cabin that I'm living in these days

I never really realized I'd developed a familiarity with it until that moment

Now I'm standing out kind of more towards the field behind the cabin looking at a willow that's flowering and the first bumblebees I've seen this year are collecting nectar and pollen from the flowers

That's pretty hopeful

Back in the forest behind the edge of the woods there's a giant ant nest, the biggest I've ever seen actually

It's probably home to hundreds of thousands of ants

It's probably four or five feet wide, a couple feet tall

It's been there who knows how long

Old growth ant nest, ant pile

Read more or listen here: https://www.walkaround.run/p/thank-you-for-listening

A week ago I sent my friend Jen a poem I wrote called Selfheal. They told me that they too have a meaningful connection with the plant, and then sent the above image back. When I saw it, for some reason these words came: "Believe in your next steppingstone."

Jim Harrison interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L3STymsjeg&t=932s

Listen and read more: https://www.walkaround.run/p/the-most-important-thing-about-life

Jen's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chthoneural_/

Recorded near Port Townsend, Washington. A short rumination on movement, landscapes, and people—how they all connect. I read a poem called By Firelight, and discuss a run I took on Christmas Eve.

Transcript

(Includes typos and run on sentences)

Welcome to Walk Around. This is Hudson Gardner.

I've always been attracted to edges.

And I feel like I've written about it.

About edges, I guess, many times, trying to understand

Why I'm always kind of going along to edges and right now I'm sitting right at the edge of light in open oak woodland in western Oregon in the Willamette Valley.

It's a really rare type of place these days, actually, in this area.

It used to be the dominant ecotone or guild, kind of a mix of sedges and grasses, reeds in the more marshy areas, madrone, old standing doug fir.

and kind of some open meadows and kind of like a prairie savanna.

I think they call it an oak savanna.

And it's one of the most beautiful types of environment that I think exists in the world.

You have these huge gnarled oak trees that have branches going every different direction and they're so articulate and so complicated and so beautiful and so stable it seems, so strong.

And then you have the grasses in between them and younger oaks coming up and flowers when it's raining in the spring and all these insects that you can hear.

Stellar’s Jays going from dead trees, from a snag to a snag looking around for things to eat.

Woodpeckers and hawks.

And then you have this forest edge here that's just a solid wall of big doug fir and some elderberries and young ash trees.

And here I am sitting right at the edge and the edge of the light thinking about how I'm so attracted to spots like this once again.

I was once talking to a friend who was an ecology major in college, and she was mentioning that when we were stopped somewhere, we were standing with some trees behind us looking out on an open space—and she said “it feels good to be here.” And we both started talking about: why is that?

Why does it feel good to be in a spot like this?

With the trees behind and open space in front and I think it's a very old feeling.

It's a feeling of possibility and openness in front and then behind safety and shelter and places to hide and get out of the elements and stuff and also another different type of food and resource available.

And I think that's why standing on the edges of forests and fields has always felt good to me.

Maybe it's this very old kind of a feeling.

And then there's all these edges in life, like transition, which I feel like in a weird way for the last 10 years or something, I've been in some state of transition where I haven't ever really touched down and stayed wherever I've been.

I feel like there's many people who listen to this podcast who've met me in one of the many places that I've lived and then moved on from.

And transition is really hard, actually, because everything's up in the air.

You have to find all the things.

Whenever you get to the next place you're going, you're constantly considering about what you need.

Friends aren't just a given.

Community isn't just a given.

It's this thing you're having to build actively every time you move somewhere else.

Being on the edge like that for so long, like I have, I feel like has been really hard.

And it makes me wonder why I prolonged this kind of lifestyle, endlessly moving around.

I feel like I've talked about this before,

It's all led me to where I am now which is I think been an essential and really important and extremely I guess extremely necessary path

It's like the more situations I've found myself in and moved on from, the more I've learned.

And not just touching down and staying somewhere has really opened my world to a massive possibility of people and interactions and ways of life and ways of thought and it's really cleaned my brain out and my body I think in many ways.

and kind of detoxified me from some of my harsher tendencies towards judgment and criticism and things like that.

To set out into the world really makes a person realize how insignificant they are.

Especially if you go somewhere and you're always having to rebuild your life wherever you stop.

You're new to everyone.

You have to explain your story.

After a while it starts to get old and you want to just rest and be somewhere and have community and it's hard.

I guess I would call that an edge too.

Edges are important because it's where interchange happens.

If you look at the edges of a cell or

A bioregion or the ocean or a field in a forest, that's where all the activity is happening.

Or a lot of it.

A lot of the biodiversity, for example, in ecology is in the edges of places like estuaries or where rivers meet the sea or the edges of forests, as I was mentioning.

because the light penetrates and allows different things to grow and it brings creatures there and then they have interactions with the plants and other creatures and if you often look around on the edges of fields and you see old trees cut back in the forest there will almost always be a hawk in them if you look long enough because the hawks are watching the edge of the field for mice where the mice come to get the fallen grains and seeds from the grass

And so it's this great interchange.

It's this place of turbidity and interaction and commotion.

The edges are where it's really unsettled, which is, I guess, why it feels unsettled in some ways to be there, but maybe also why I relate to the edges of places so much.

The center, on the other hand, represents, if you think about it, it represents home, it seems.

The center, the middle, the place that we move outwards from.

It seems like it represents some kind of potential point.

And then the edges are where we reach out to, where I found myself reaching out to in my journeys.

I think I have a lot of home trauma because I

I haven't really had much of a sense of home since I was eight or nine years old.

I kind of had to build it over the years and then deconstruct it and build it again and it's been pretty hard.

Wow, I just saw a pileated woodpecker.

I wonder if you can hear that.

They're huge.

They're almost as big as a hawk.

That's special.

So this beautiful oak woodland is part of a Catholic Abbey.

It's a monastery for monks, actually.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Franciscan Monastery, I think.

Or Trappist.

It's a Trappist Abbey.

Not a monastery.

Trappist Abbey.

But it's a beautiful place and I've come here in many seasons.

I haven't come here in late summer in the evening though and it's just so beautiful, the light and the lack of people and all the animals are going about their evening business and could ask for nothing more.

I've been working I'd say 10 to 12 hour days, maybe sometimes 13.

Six days a week at a winery and it's been really hard.

I think partially because I see it as very much a dead end kind of a job.

I'm not intending to go into wine nor do I really like wine.

It was just the only job that I could find around here without having to drive into Portland and get a job there because I'm living at my mom's house.

because my plans to go to college fell through for my acupuncture degree.

So I'm in this weird purgatory at the moment of not being able to go to school but kind of waiting for an entire year, which isn't really very much fun.

So I'm working at this winery and the only thing that's really keeping me sane has been getting to know the people that I'm working with and getting to know their struggles and listening to them and talking with them and trying to kind of get to know how to be a temporary ephemeral friend to them because for the most part maybe totally I won't see any of them after

the work is over most none of them really live anywhere near me and we don't really have that much in common though there's a couple people that I feel like I could be friends with but they don't really live around here well they don't live here at all they live in a bus we have a lot in common but um it's been rough because I haven't really had any time to do something like come to this woodland and

Just sit and think and reflect and kind of puzzle out what my next step is.

Some of the things I've been thinking about a lot are how my art and creativity is such a solitary kind of a practice.

I mean, I don't really interview people that much, which I guess I could do more.

um but my writing and photography i mean all of it's done alone for the most part or i guess sometimes kind of with you know walking around with a friend or a significant other or something but um it's not like i do something for people two of the people i work with are tattooers and so their art is very much

The art that they choose to turn into tattoos is very much something for others.

And that's very useful.

It's a very applicable kind of art.

Flexible, mobile, you can get paid for it.

Especially if you're as skilled as they are.

But for writing, it's like nobody even reads anymore.

I mean there's these statistics which I feel like are just booked that have been coaxed by publishers that are like, well actually more people read than ever before.

That's gotta be nonsense.

I feel like, unless it's people that I don't know about or something, I feel like less people must be reading than ever before.

Or at least they're not reading with much attention.

They're more like skimming stuff or something.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Who knows?

But it's a weird time to be a writer.

And that's why I have this podcast.

Because being a writer is like

Wow.

Good luck.

Um, so I've been thinking, you know, I would really like to offer medicine to people.

Um, once I get licensed and stuff and that's going to take four years.

So boy,what a process I found myself in.

I think purgatory is a pretty good word for it.

At least it feels that way.

And there's this other thing, I don't know if it's just my age or it's my social group or what's going on, but I just feel like more than ever before my social connections and ability to kind of make friends is really lacking.

There's a couple people I've reached out to that I feel like are maybe going to work out as somebody to meet up with and become friends with, but I feel like as people get older, it's like most people don't do the thing I've done, where I've moved around so much, and they've just stayed somewhere for the ten years or whatever it's been that I've been wandering around, or at least for like five, or at least like two.

And in that time they found their set of people, their relationships, their job, and their stability more or less. And they have a hell of a lot more stability than I do, that's for sure.

Like for the most part, I feel like people of my socioeconomic class and race likely have a lot more stability than I have at the moment.

Very privileged, you know, and me as well.

So when I come around or am kind of lurking around the edges of social groups or whatever, it's like, well, you know, who's this guy?

Maybe if he lives here a year, I'll like run into him enough to be friends with him, but it just takes forever.

And, uh, it's really like I'm striking out.

In fact, I feel like to be a lone male of my age, it's almost just like suspicious because I'm single now.

So, it's like, well, what happened to you?

Oh, boy.

Today, there was a rare wind event that was really not that dramatic, but it happens from time to time when the dry sometimes cool but sometimes warm air blows from the interior of the state towards the ocean. The normal flow of the winds blowing from the west reverses and the winds blows from the east. And so today we had kind of a hot dry wind blowing all day. And now there's one kind of playing around through the grasses. And these scrub jays nearby seem to be having a discussion and the winds moving around and

I am walking around trying to figure my life out.

It's just been a lot that's been going on and this is really the only place I can talk about it without feeling like I'm burdening people. Because if you don't want to listen to it, you can just press pause and move on with your life.

So thanks for listening this far if you have.

It's really kind of you.

And I think things will get better.

This is quite the self-absorbed episode but you know honesty is important.

I have a friend who's a psychiatrist in residence and he always tells me that he really appreciates my honesty, and maybe more people do too.

I don't know.

I think honesty is really, really, really important.

And I think that if there's any type of resistance in a person about being honest, that is really a good place to start looking and kind of being curious about.

I just watched this Stellar's Jay fly out from this Ponderosa and grab a moth that was flying through the air and chomp it.

That was pretty cool.

It's nice to be in a natural area rather than just surrounded by tens of thousands of pounds of grapes.

As my friend Cedar calls it, the sticky job site.

Thanks for listening.

Click the tab above for a full transcript

If receiving this as an email, or reading show notes, click here.

🔘 Daily Notes chronicles my unedited thoughts at the moment, from day to day. This series will end at 1.0, or 10 total posts 🍵

This is Hudson Gardner. Welcome to Walk Around.

Right now I am sitting in the shade. It's really hot today. So I’m sitting next to a guest house I'm living in, looking out across an unmowed, untended field. It's kind of like a little pasture. This is actually a place I've been coming since I was four or five years old. The first time I came here, I can't even remember. But it's my aunt's house.And it's such a beautiful place. It's one of the only places that has stayed the same for my whole life in terms of something that I returned to, which is really neat and rare for me.

I've been walking around a lot recently. Surveying for what some people call invasive weeds, walking the prairies in northeastern Oregon....

For full transcription & beautiful images, please visit the Walkaround.run website: https://www.walkaround.run/p/dont-worry