Last night, about an hour before sunset, I walked down the road to a piece of wetland on the neighboring farm and watched a blue heron hunt frogs for about twenty minutes before it finally detected me and flew away. Herons are very skittish, so I approached slowly, careful to conceal myself behind the trees and shrubs that line the road and listening for any change in the birdsong or frog chorus that might alert the bird to my presence. At the first clearing, I didn’t see anything, and I thought perhaps it was the wrong time of day. I’d seen the bird feeding in the same area every morning and afternoon for a week as I drove back and forth to the farm, sometimes several times a day, but I rarely travel the same road in the evenings, so I didn’t know if it would still be around. But as I took another step forward, I realized that part of a shrub had been blocking my view of a whole other portion of the wetland, and there was the heron, knee deep in the water with its back to me, tilting its head to one side to better view its prey with its dominant eye. Then it very slowly lowered its body, curled its neck, and struck!

I stood still for as long as I could, only moving six inches at a time when necessary to adjust my view. The heron would take a step and then freeze. Ten seconds later, it would take another step. Tilt its head. Freeze. Five seconds later, it would lower its body. Curl its neck. Freeze.

Observing at a heron’s pace cultivates a special clarity of mind, a space free of the virtual reality of language. The heron is not a concept. The sunlight on the water, the frogs booming, the shadows in the grass are all simple, blatant reality. The damp air coats my skin and the inside of my nostrils and lungs as I breath. Everything is here, and time doesn’t exist. And, for a little while, neither do I.

It’s easy to see how contemporary culture distracts us from these kinds of experiences, cutting us off from a more visceral experience of reality, but what may be less obvious is that this is not, in fact, a new problem for humans. Advanced technology has given us unlimited access to distractions of every kind, but the Internet and my iPhone aren’t really the problem; the problem is my mind. Since the moment of my birth, I’ve been scanning the world via hearing, sight, taste, touch, and smell, downloading as much information about the environment as I could to maintain security and survival. As a human, the most important information turns out to be anything that helps me navigate the abstract world of society, and all of my initial experience here comes from family. Through my father and mother and sister and cousins and uncles and aunts and grandparents, I’m exposed to a multitude of political, religious, and philosophical concepts with which to build my personal worldview. And this mostly happens unconsciously, until, perhaps, teenage years, when I more deliberately attempt to construct an identity separate from all that. I meet friends, read books, discover new kinds of music and art, absorbing and rejecting ideas along the way. As an adult, my opinions begin to congeal. They become a filter through which all my experiences are interpreted: this is good, that’s bad; those people are idiots.

But then, I begin to perceive that my particular worldview doesn’t fully overlap even with those of the people I admire and consider my friends. It might start with something as simple as a disagreement over the inherent quality of a musical genre or a movie or TV show, but even people of the same religion or political affiliation often disagree on the details. Sometimes a tragic misunderstanding between friends hinges entirely on the personal interpretation of a single word. Shared language doesn’t guarantee shared meaning, so we spend most of our time analyzing and qualifying the gaps between our virtual realities. This is the challenge of all human relationships, the source of all conflict.

A few egrets have arrived on the wetland without my noticing until, finally distracted by my monkey mind, I startle the heron with my movement, and it flies silently away. I watch the egrets stalking the frogs for a while, but the moment is lost, and I start to walk home.

The afterglow of the experience stays with me, though, even as I begin thinking of other things, inviting the virtual problems back into my mind, and I stop briefly to visit a walnut tree or watch a sparrow or butterfly, but I’m lost in thought, again, by the time I get home.

I think a lot about people and the state of the world and how we each live in a conceptual bubble of our own manufacture; so fragile and insecure, we’re willing to defend it with violence or, at minimum, fierce hatred, and I wonder if it makes more sense, rather than blaming each other, or trying to find places our illusions overlap, to focus, instead, on dismantling the illusions at their root, in our own minds, and then we can come back together and ask ourselves, where on the Venn diagram of you and me is reality?

The other evening, while checking on the rain from my window, I noticed a black garden ant crawling down the trunk of a maple sapling growing in the neglected landscaping next to the house and was immediately transported forty years into the past where I lay face down, my head hanging over the edge of a plastic chaise lounge in the backyard of my childhood home, watching ants work in the grass. This is something I did often as a kid, but what struck me most about this particular memory was my visceral experience in the present of the sheer absence of the concept of time in the mind of the child I once was. There was no ego-filter between the observing consciousness and the activity of the ants: no schedule, no agenda, no politics or religion, no I.

On New Year’s Eve, 2019, I took a flight to California, where I would ultimately spend five days hiking and camping through the backcountry in Joshua Tree National Park. En route, I happened upon a National Geographic article online about how, due to climate change, Joshua trees are on course for extinction in the next fifty years or so. The yucca moth, with which the trees share a symbiotic relationship, is disappearing from the park. In order to backpack among these trees, I had driven my car from Kalamazoo, MI, to Michigan City, IN, so I could ride the South Shore Line into Chicago, where I took the EL from downtown to O’Hare, flying then to Las Vegas and finally Oakland, CA, where I booked a Lyft to my friend’s house twenty-two miles away in Lafayette. In the morning we drove all day to reach the park, spent five days in the backcountry, then I repeated that itinerary almost exactly in reverse to arrive home ten days later. That’s a lot of fossil fuel. And a lot of dead trees.

Nothing breaks down that ego-filter like an extended stay in the wilderness, though. And, as countless writers from Whitman and Thoreau to Gary Snyder and Wendell Barry attest, there is much more to the experience than simple recuperation from the frenetic pace of our consumer culture. To be so nakedly conscious in the face of such glorious and frightening reality is to disengage from your socially cultivated sense of a self. It is to become, in a very real sense, the sky, the forest, the mountain, the river.

John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Barry Lopez are among the best writers for conveying this sense of connection to place, but reading their work today is like reading eulogies for the landscapes they describe. Muir’s California, Abbey’s Southwest, and Lopez’s Arctic literally no longer exist, and, of course, countless species of fauna and flora in those regions face ever growing threats to their existence each day. Wildfires and extreme weather occurrences are increasing at an exponential rate, and, in terms of climate catastrophes, apparently, we’re only just getting started. (Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction or Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist for a forecast of more unavoidable loss yet to come.) The future for the planet looks grim, indeed.

And, yet, as any good student of history can tell you, we humans have been more or less living through continual apocalypse since the dawn of our existence. Disease, famine, and war have been mainstays from the beginning. We can build bigger, faster, more efficient means of distraction, but suffering and death are not going away, and there’s no legislating our way out of that. So whether the world burns or I’m hit by a truck, the outcome is ultimately the same: I cease, perhaps painfully, to exist.

Still, returning home from Joshua Tree was depressing. I’ve always felt acutely estranged from the culture at large, but that feeling has sharpened since the advent of social media and streaming TV. Not to say those aren’t useful tools, but what I see mostly happening is that the filter through which people perceive reality is becoming increasingly opaque. This is most obvious in the polarization of political views in recent years, but more subtly, and perhaps most insidiously, it strengthens the barrier between the observing consciousness and the natural world; that is to say, it strengthens the ego, which is, after all, an illusion.

One of the first signs of civilization on the road home was a strip-mining project, and I felt, for the first time, real pain for what I’d previously considered to be inanimate earth and rock, and, simultaneously, I realized I’d only ever appreciated indigenous people’s attachment to sacred lands intellectually, that’s to say, through the filter of ego. Five days of naked awareness in the desert can unify one with the landscape, which sounds beautiful, but coming back was disorienting, and living here since has, at times, felt like being trapped at the fringes of a virtual reality nightmare; the world that I love, that loves me, being tortured and dying.

But here’s the thing: the universe, the earth, has always been changing, been dying, and, so, too, every moment of my life is my death. To paraphrase Heraclitus, I can never be alive in the same body/mind twice. Anger, fear, hope are all transitory. Certainly, there’s a lot of hate and ugliness in the world, but there’s a lot of ineffable beauty and tenderness, too. There’s music and art, and, occasionally, true poetry. And we really all only have just barely a second here to enjoy it, if we’re lucky. Yes, the history of the world is the story of humans destroying the earth—and each other—while trying to make it a better place, so we lose desert trees, river valleys, white rhinos, and coral reefs, but as Claude Lévi-Strauss writes, “While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment […]. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.”

I’ve spent so much time in the virtual world of my ego, hoping to recover the past or to improve the future, to achieve something close to perfection, to attain enlightenment, justice, success, to cheat death for as long as possible, but I have no time left for any of that. I’m giving up on the strategy of accumulation—of knowledge, experience, money, and gear—and I’m going outside with a bottle of water and, maybe, a snack, and if Death comes tomorrow, I’ll be waiting out here in reality watching the ants.