The art of informed passion is all around us. It’s evident in those who follow through, stick with the boring, and act courageously when modern scourges infect our perceptions. Boredom, failure, jealousy, and fear eventually muddy the mind of one taken by naive passion. [I discovered this distinction in Bayles and Orland’s excellent book, Art & Fear]
What was once a joy, a hopeful pursuit ignorant of the realities of obstacles, morphs into disappointment, confusion, and overwhelm. We’ve not reached the mountaintop, but a false summit. Our choice is to either keep climbing to the summit of informed passion or descend to find another foothill to climb.
Tree of Life
Step outside and look at a tree. Try not to look up. After The Old Way, I began to think differently about humans’ relationship with trees. The relationships have always been strong, and I’ve always felt connected to them. For much of the fall, I’ll spend a lot of my free time up in a tree.
Hunting from trees isn’t really new; tree stands have existed for many years.
We started in trees. We left them, and some of us are going back. A tree protects us, and we can look down on the predators below. This afternoon, when I’m hanging in a tree saddle, I’ll look for prey below.
My eyes rotate up; an unclimbable spruce or a monstrous yellow birch. I keep looking up, no matter where I go in these woods.
A tragedy…
Which will I become? [each of us will succumb to at least one].
Of Polti’s thirty-six options, I think the one about passion…
All sacrificed for passion.
Hello! I am Jesse’s prefrontal cortex. We are experiencing a shutdown. I’ll be out of the office until next Tuesday [bullshit], and upon my return, I’ll get back to you [also bullshit]. Have a nice day!1
There’s the seasonal pull of not writing; word retrieval goes out the door, and my day is consumed with the wind, finding new spots in a finger of woods that reaches into a publicly-accessible corn field.
I inconsistently kill deer during archery season. See how I say “kill”? That’s because that’s what it is; it’s not harvesting: that’s what we do with potatoes. Harvesting a deer is trying to make this pursuit like farming, agriculture, like a science.
I am Jesse’s amygdala. I tell him things like, “You’re spending too much time hunting, wandering the woods.” Get a real job. Without a supportive spouse, you’d be living in a shed in Alaska, working seasonally in the fish-canning factory.
[This is true.]
I consistently try despite my inconsistency. How great would it be to approach the season like a scientist: the woods are my lab, and by changing the inputs over time, I could refine my deer-hunting formula. Eventually, my season would approach, and I’d have “my” deer on camera, then slay it a few hours into the season. “It went according to script,” I’d say afterward.
Variables honed, conditions mastered, struggle…eliminated.
Year after year, I do the opposite, often maximizing the struggle. Day after day, hunt after hunt, I return with hope and new ideas for an unvisited place to try. You see, I hunt like an artist; where am I drawn, what do I smell, what excites me? What’s practical? What’s the Hail Mary option?
I bounce between these mindsets, hoping and striving to hunt a different way, that of the scientist in a lab who methodically studies, plans, and executes consistently. Or the agronomist with the perfect balance of fertilizer. Hunters who operate this way are more successful than I am. The pinnacle of this trajectory is the canned hunt, where you can swap money for a shortcut to borrowed glory, where the guide or ranch owner bides their time, their investment growing in the form of antlers on the head of a cervid.
In the heat of the struggle, I dream of a large, private lot I could manage and control, my own deer lab, where I could monitor conditions and pull the strings of these meat puppets, nudging them toward my treestand with bait piles and fences.
It’s a daydream that trades struggle for ease, and it makes me sleepy, eyes glossed over like weekly sitting in the pews of a house of worship.
Make the deer docile in their micromanaged zones for the TV hunting celebrities’ panopticon.
I am Jesse’s restless attention span. I want more stimulation. Give me meds. Satiate me. We can regulate him, keep his impulses in check. Give in.
I want him docile.
What about market hunting? Piles of game, killed in abundance, hunter-mercenaries. The pictures say it all, and I, at first, ogled. Hunt for a job?! But it wasn’t hunting, it was exterminating. No thanks.
The frustration, anger, and hopelessness of the struggle of the hunt are what make it a hunt. And in much of the northeast, hunting like an artist — adapting, deciding based on your gut, trying out the illogical — is sound practice.
The hero’s journey appeals (as it does for everyone), but passion resonates, and I feel that especially now: I want to throw my computer in the trash and only be in the woods, at the field edge, or in a tree, refining the strategy and the next hunt. To improve? I can’t help but think there’s another factor at play —a force—the moon, the seasonality, the photoperiod, a scientific explanation for the blind restlessness and uncompromising desire that’s within us.
See why and when I write:
See the movie, Fight Club.
I am not a hunter but a lover of the outdoors - hiking, skiing and more. When I am planning an adventure.....sometimes I get overwhelmed with too much information, too much planning. Too much work when I was just want to get out there.
Years ago, we did not have digital maps, just paper maps. Maybe not even a paper map but just a sense of getting out there - following a somewhat marked trail. Life was so much simpler back then....seeing a trail and wondering - where will that trail take me? Let's go!
Good writing, Jesse. Your frustrated desire to be more “scientific” in your hunting made me think of Atul Gawande’s comment that “(Science) isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive.” We humans are messy beings, relying largely on habit and emotion and short-term rewards. It takes an enormous amount of energy to push against our nature, and so we get tired and revert back. Oh well. Shifting our approach even a little can produce good results.
And may I join you in your tribute to supportive spouses whose good efforts provide us more space to play. I am also grateful for such a partner!