My blood sings in the breeze;
The mountains are a part of me,
I'm fellow to the trees.
My golden youth I'm squandering,
Sun-libertine am I;
A-wandering, a-wandering,
Until the day I die.
I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,
And I roomed in the cool of a cave;
I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,
The fret and the sweat of a slave:
For far over all that folks hold worth,
There lives and there leaps in me
A love of the lowly things of earth,
And a passion to be free.
To pitch my tent with no prosy plan,
To range and to change at will;
To mock at the mastership of man,
To seek Adventure's thrill.
Carefree to be, as a bird that sings;
To go my own sweet way;
To reck not at all what may befall,
But to live and to love each day.
To make my body a temple pure
Wherein I dwell serene;
To care for the things that shall endure,
The simple, sweet and clean.
To oust out envy and hate and rage,
To breathe with no alarm;
For Nature shall be my anchorage,
And none shall do me harm.
To shun all lures that debauch the soul,
The orgied rites of the rich;
To eat my crust as a rover must
With the rough-neck down in the ditch.
To trudge by his side whate'er betide;
To share his fire at night;
To call him friend to the long trail-end,
And to read his heart aright.
To scorn all strife, and to view all life
With the curious eyes of a child;
From the plangent sea to the prairie,
From the slum to the heart of the Wild.
From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,
From the vast to the greatly small;
For I know that the whole for good is planned,
And I want to see it all.
To see it all, the wide world-way,
From the fig-leaf belt to the Pole;
With never a one to say me nay,
And none to cramp my soul.
In belly-pinch I will pay the price,
But God! let me be free;
For once I know in the long ago,
They made a slave of me.
In a flannel shirt from earth's clean dirt,
Here, pal, is my calloused hand!
Oh, I love each day as a rover may,
Nor seek to understand.
To enjoy is good enough for me;
The gipsy of God am I;
Then here's a hail to each flaring dawn!
And here's a cheer to the night that's gone!
And may I go a-roaming on
Until the day I die!
Then every star shall sing to me
Its song of liberty;
And every morn shall bring to me
Its mandate to be free.
In every throbbing vein of me
I'll feel the vast Earth-call;
O body, heart and brain of me
Praise Him who made it all!
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
“ Tell me, what is it you plan to dowith your onewildand preciouslife?" ~Mary Oliver
GET UP GET OUT GET WILD INTO THE WILD
Our Future | Narrated by Morgan Freeman
Whether your graduating, working or somewhere in between, take time to connect with the natural world. Let it inspire you and guide you become an advocate for change.
Current ITW President, for 1 more day, Tom Wheeler here with some final words of wisdom and a farewell to all! I wish to begin with a few thank yous to the Center for Student Leadership who have provided us with support throughout Into the Wild's early stages of growth and all who have come on our trips, spent time in the office, rented gear, partnered, supported or loved Into the Wild. Our growing community shines as we work to fulfill our mission commitment to "provide outdoor adventure trips available to all ability levels while maintaining leadership in sustainability education and operations at Santa Clara." We've made it far, but much works lies ahead.
Lets take a moment to look at what we've done together. Another year has passed and while our weekend adventures may be over now, I'm excited and invigorated for Matt Pierson, Tessa Moore, and Sam Kennard to take the reigns next year. Here's a few milestones from our inception to today:
Since 2011 we've taken over 3,000students, faculty, and staff all over the western United States
We've created a hub in lower Benson for the Santa Clara community to rent gear for Into the Wild trips, andtheir own adventures
We've partnered on-campus with Campus Ministry, BLEJIT, Green Club, ASG and look forward to scaling our impact through future partners
We'veestablished orientation trips for incoming first years to feel welcomed, supported, and wild
We've established a scholarship fund to ensure everyone in the SCU community can get wild
We've medically trained over 15 Into the Wild leaders to empower them with the skills to needed to make sure our trips are safe for everyone
We've established a fund to offset our CO2 emissions as we seek to reduce our environmental impact
We've traveled high into the Sierras on skis and scubaed under the sea, places we've never been before
We'vestarted a surf division, with 6 club owned surfboards we can shred Santa Cruz like never before
We've planted trees with Our City Forest, working to improve our local community
We've built, upgraded and improved our website,to serve as a launching pad for engagement
With little time left until I graduate, I've been reflecting on the many ups and downs that the last 4 years have brought. Among the 52 classes, 40 professors, and thousands of hours studying, I'm brought back to a single moment my first week as a first year, one I believe many of us can relate to. It's me, walking through Benson, a bit bewildered and overwhelmed by my new home, but excited. Suddenly, I hear someone calling out, "hey! do you like to go outside?" Well, you can't really say no, so I meandered over and was quickly met by excited voices and opportunities to go to places like Tahoe, Yosemite, Big Sur and beyond. "But I've only gone camping or backpacking once or twice before, is that ok?" I replied. "That's what we're all about" the tablers replied in unison.
So I signed up, and made one of the best decisions of my college career. A decision that has lead me to many of you and is why the leadership team loves what we do, because we've all been there in one way or another and know that feeling of inclusive excitement.
Four years later I look back on my best memories at SCU. Its not the tests, parties, or studying we most often associate with college'that stand out. For me its been hiking through the Grand Canyon or Zion, rafting down the American river, and skiing with some of my best friends at Kirkwood. It was coming face to face with El Capitan and dancing on the dunes in Death Valley, forgetting who and where I was, in these moments I learned a bit more about the joy of life and the responsibility we have to protect our only home. These checkpoints of personal growth also gave me a chance to share my education with other members of the Santa Clara community. Late nights under the stars, deep talk on hikes, debates in the car, here I learned that my education is not about gathering knowledge, but how you put it into perspective with your own life experience and use it to help others grow their understanding of our incredible world.
Now I look ahead, to a future of uncertainty and excitement. A future of more exploration and learning, guided by a single a word. Love. Love for our Earth. Love for learning. Love for the wild. It's this word that keeps me moving, curious, searching for the unknown unknowns that lies just beyond the next mountain range, over the sea, or in a park nearby. It's here we find what we couldn't conceive, and are reminded why the wild is more that just a place to see, an experience no one can take from us, and part of the kindling that ignites our passion for life.Keep learning and loving. I'll see you out there.
Sincerely, Tom & The Into the Wild Leadership Team
P.S. If anyone's headed to the PCT this summer feel free to message me on Facebook to meet up!
In the past year, despite hundreds of people asking me, I’m proud to say that I’ve managed to avoid all temptation to write an article about Donald Trump or the slow motion, 20-car pileup that is this year’s US presidential election.
Until now.
Before, I stayed out of the gravitational pull of Trump’s narcissistic publicity machine for a few reasons:
There’s already so much stuff out there about him and how terrifying he is as a presidential candidate, I never felt like there was anything I could say that wasn’t already being said by somebody smarter or more informed than me.
The guy doesn’t need any more attention or publicity. Seriously, fuck him.
But most importantly:
Trump is an effect, not a cause. You don’t get a major party nomination off your own merits; you get there because you’re able to represent and channel millions of people’s thoughts and feelings. There is a putrid stench fermenting just beneath the surface of 21st-century society, and it birthed Trump, not the other way around. Nothing about the man himself is particularly unique or noteworthy, in my opinion.1
So I just avoided the topic altogether. I try to stay away from politics on this site and write about more universal themes.
But then the other night, I dabbled in watching the Republican National Convention the same way a child might dabble with trying out mom’s cigarettes or a college girlfriend might dabble in trying out anal sex — with an innocent curiosity that was quickly overwhelmed by shock, horror, and intense pain.
What struck me the most was this constant narrative that somehow the world has become this insane and dangerous place and we need somebody to take charge and make everything “safe” and “secure” for us again. At one point there was even a gigantic projection of the words, “Make America Safe Again” at the back of the stage.
I’m not just shitting on Republicans here, either. This sense of insecurity seems to be universal, even if couched in different language. Hillary has talked about the need to escalate the war on terror in order to protect us — an oxymoron for anyone who has been awake the last 15 years.2 In a recent 60 Minutes interview, Lesley Stahl, while interviewing Trump and Mike Pence, said, “I don’t remember the last time we’ve seen a world in this much chaos,” to which both candidates quickly agreed.
So wait, just in my lifetime, I’ve seen: two foreign invasions and four wars, half a dozen Middle Eastern governments toppled, 9/11, two stock market crashes and the worst global recession in the last 85 years, a genocide in Europe, the Berlin wall falling, the end of the Soviet bloc, and one OJ Simpson car chase — yet these people think now is the most chaotic and dangerous time in recent memory?
And this is coming from one of the highest profile journalists on the planet.
It seems these days that there is this omnipresent feeling that the world is going fucking crazy. Yet, by every objective measurement, it’s arguably the sanest and safest it’s been in recorded history.3
Because, like you, like seemingly everybody, I have also felt as though the world is spinning out of control and there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m exhausted from all the stories of shootings and attacks and bombs and the constant stream of awful stuff that is happening out there. I, too, feel desensitized and dejected from the seemingly constant carnage raging across the planet.
And because this feeling is new and unique to me, my first assumption is that the world must be more fucked than it’s ever been before. After all, I never felt this way 10 years ago or 20 years ago. So things must be worse, right?
But the world isn’t worse. It’s just that we’re more aware of all of the bad things than ever before. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it: “The violence is not new; it’s the cameras that are new.”
Cameras, the internet, and most importantly, social media. This is what’s new. This is what’s different. How we’re getting information, what information is reaching us, and most importantly, what information and views we are most rewarded for sharing.
In the attention economy, people are rewarded for extremism. They are rewarded for indulging their worst biases and stoking other people’s worst fears. They are rewarded for portraying the world as a place that is burning to the ground, whether it’s because of gay marriage, or police violence, or Islamic terrorism, or low interest rates. The internet has generated a platform where apocalyptic beliefs are celebrated and spread, and moderation and reason is something that becomes too arduous and boring to stand.
And this constant awareness of every fault and flaw of our humanity, combined with an inundation of doomsayers and narcissistic nihilists commanding our attention space, is what is causing this constant feeling of a chaotic and insecure world that doesn’t actually exist.
And then: it’s this feeling that is the cause of the renewed xenophobia and nationalism across the western world. It’s this feeling of insecurity and chaos that is igniting the platforms of divisive strong-men like Trump, Erdogan, and Putin. It’s this feeling that has consumed the consciousness of millions of people, and caused them to look at their country through the lens of a fun-house mirror: exaggerating all that is wrong and minimizing all that is right.
And this is what disturbs me: the fact that people today, despite living with more safety and wealth and access to information than anyone in human history, feel as though the world is going crazy and something drastic must be changed.
But really it’s not just them. It’s us. We are going crazy. Each one of us, individually, capsized in the flood of negativity, we are ready to burn down the very structures on which the most successful civilizations in human history have been built.
But why? How did this happen? And how can we stop it?
THE HIDDEN DANGERS OF A ‘GLOBAL COMMUNITY’
By now, we’re all familiar with the tech world circle-jerk about how we’re connecting the planet and the world is getting smaller and we’re all becoming one big kumbaya global community and how this is amazing because starving babies in Mozambique and Suriname can each have their own iPad, and blah, blah, blah, the internet is cool.
And don’t get me wrong, the rise of the internet and social media has accelerated social progress in many ways. It’s helped herald a breakthrough in LGBT rights, it’s raised awareness about discrimination against women and minorities, and fomented the populist overthrow of a number of repressive governments worldwide.4
In one sense, we are becoming a global community by the sheer fact that so much information can be instantly connected to everyone else across the globe. And one benefit of this connectivity that we’ve seen is that if a black man is unjustly killed in Baltimore or if a rapist gets off with no punishment in Ohio, activists and concerned citizens can quickly mobilize to spread the word and hold the appropriate authorities accountable for change.
The fuel of this mobilization, of course, is outrage.
Outrageous news and information spread faster and further than any other form of information, dominating our daily attention. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, we become aware of some of the grossest injustices in our society as soon as they happen. On the other hand, all we hear about are the grossest injustices in our society as soon as they happen.
I don’t know the name of the governor of my state, but I know all about the false claims and lies of the Brexit ‘Leave’ campaign. I couldn’t tell you what the latest breakthrough in cancer research is or what the education system in my community is doing to improve life here, but I know what the Orlando shooter’s neighbors and wife thought about him. I couldn’t tell you who is running for congress in my district, but I do know that some gun rights activist in Texas murdered two of her own daughters in the street over a petty family argument.
This is our brave new world. When all information is freely available at the click of a mouse, our attention naturally nosedives in the sickest and most grotesque we can find. And the sickest and most grotesque similarly finds its way to the top of the nation’s consciousness, dominating our attention and the news cycle, dividing and recruiting us into its ever more polarized camps.
We become only exposed to the most extreme negative aspects of certain groups of people, giving us a skewed view of how other people in the world really think, act, and live. When we are exposed to police, we only see the worst 0.1% of police. When we are exposed to poor African Americans, we’re only exposed to the worst 0.1% of poor African Americans. When we’re exposed to Muslim immigrants, we only hear about the worst 0.1% of Muslim immigrants. When we are exposed to chauvinist, shitty white men, we’re only exposed to the worst 0.1%, and when we’re exposed to angry and entitled social justice warriors, we’re only exposed to the worst 0.1%.
We’ve all seen dozens of photos like this on the internet, while people like this probably make up 1/10000th of the population.As a result, it feels as though everyone is an angry fucking extremist and is full of hate and violence and the world is coming undone thread by thread, when the truth is that most of the population occupies a silent middle ground and is actually probably not in so much disagreement with one another.5
We demonize each other. We judge groups of people by their weakest and most depraved members. And to protect ourselves from the overreaching judgments of others, we consolidate into our own clans and tribes, we take refuge in our own precious identity politics and we buy more and more into a worldview that is disconnected from cold data and hard facts.
It’s for this reason that I’ve started to remove myself from digesting news and information through social media. I’ve refrained from the small petty arguments and “gotcha” pieces and “Ohmigerd, did you see what this random guy in California did?”
The only way to beat the attention economy is to opt out of it. This is no longer about wasting time on Pokemon Go or refreshing Facebook 12 times a day. It’s no longer about email killing productivity at work or kids not being able to pay attention at school. It’s now creeping into our political system, and I fear there could be irreparable damage done to it.
Instead, I am attempting to go back to learning about the world only through long-form journalism that has been thoroughly researched and vetted before being published. I’m exercising the muscles in my brain responsible for focus, depth, and concentration. I’m stretching out my logic, trying to challenge my own beliefs and always holding on to ahealthy amount of doubt.
Is this far less convenient and way more time consuming? Yes, it is. Does it make me feel like a cranky old man to all my friends? Yeah, it does.
But it’s the only way.
It’s the only way I can prevent myself from going crazy, to keep myself tethered to reality as it is, not to reality how it feels.
FREEDOM IS NOT FREE
There’s a common saying in the US that “Freedom is not free.” The saying is usually used in reference to the wars fought and won (or lost) to protect the values of the country. It’s a way of reminding people that, hey, this didn’t just magically happen; thousands of people were killed and/or died for us to sit here and sip over-priced mocha frappuccinos and say whatever the fuck we want.
The idea is that the basic human rights we enjoy — free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press — were earned through the sacrifice against some external force, some evil threat.
But people have seemed to conveniently forget that freedom is earned through internal sacrifices as well. Freedom can only exist when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you’re willing to give up some of your desires for the sake of a safe and healthy community, when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way and that’s fine.
In a weird sense, true freedom doesn’t exist. Because the only way for human rights to persist is for everyone to collectively agree to accept that things don’t have to go their way 100% of the time.
But the last couple decades, I fear that people have confused freedom with a lack of discomfort. They have forgotten about that necessary internal struggle.
They want a freedom to express themselves but they don’t want to have to deal with views that may upset or offend them in some way. They want a freedom to enterprise but they don’t want to pay taxes to support the legal machinery that makes it possible. They want a freedom to elect representatives to government but they don’t want to compromise when they’re on the losing side.
A free and functioning democracy demands a populace that is able to sustain discomfort, that is able to tolerate dissatisfaction, that is able to be charitable and forgiving of groups whose views stand in contrast to one’s own, and most importantly, that is able to remain unswayed in the face of some violent threat.
What I fear we’re seeing now is a loss of that ability to handle discomfort and dissatisfaction. We’re seeing a lazy entitlement wash over the world where everyone feels as though they deserve what they want from their government the second they want it, without thought of repercussions or the rest of the population.
Or as one Reddit comment sadly put it recently, “It seems like people don’t actually want democracy anymore, they want a dictator who agrees with them.”
But this constant state of mild dissatisfaction — this is what freedom actually tastes like. And if people continue to lose their ability to stomach it, then I fear one day it will be gone.
