Archery Journal – November 18

It’s counterintuitive, but focusing inward to quiet yourself opens your mind and senses more fully to the world around you.

I’m reminded of this each time I sit a treestand while hunting. I’ve isolated myself from human connection by retreating into a secluded spot in the woods. I’ve taken pains to enter the “space” of my treestand in a very slow and quiet manner, blending with the space around me as best I can. I’ve taken up a still and quiet posture in the treestand. I’ve focused a good deal of energy inward, on making myself as unobtrusive as possible. I want to become part of the space around me – to blend – rather than standing out as anything individual.

My body quiets and cools. I always need to dress warm for this, as my heartbeat drops to 50 or 55 as I focus inward on stillness. Vision and human language are the inputs our brain depends on the most these days in our evolutionary journey, and in the treestand, I’ve eliminated both of them. Even when the light is good, my vision is generally limited to a couple of shooting lanes close to my stand.

In this state, I tune much more keenly to the sounds in the space around me. As the pre-dawn darkness gives way to faint light in the east, the sound of tires on the highway several miles away becomes more common. I hear the squirrels roust from their nests, and hear their claws on the bark as they move through the trees around me. When they’re on the ground, I can tell exactly how many are down and where they are as they disturb the leaves they dig through.

I hear the beat of my heart in my chest, and the whoosh in my ears soon after each beat. Thu-whoosh, thu-whoosh. A slow and steady beat.

I hear a small flock of songbirds as they fly overhead, the sound of the air under their wingbeats giving me a good guess as to what birds they might be by how they’re beating their wings. A large flock of 30 or 40 birds sounds as loud as thunder as they thump past 50 feet above me – I hear the sound of their wings for 100 yards before they reach me, and 100 yards after they pass.

Mid-day on a nice day I hear a tiny scraping in the leaves not far away. I watch intently but see no movement. A mouse maybe? Training my binoculars on the spot, I eventually make out a small garter snake pulling himself out of the leaf litter into the warm sun.

The footsteps of deer around me tell me a good deal about what they’re doing even when I can’t see them. Are they nervously poking about, or calmly grazing? Are they talking to each other softly, or snorting a warning?

The movement of air becomes something my ears perceive in a way my eyes can’t. I map the movement of tiny gusts of air through the bare branches of the woods around me by the path of its sound, and am able to predict when I’ll feel it in my tree based on how my brain perceives the arms and reach of the pockets moving about.

I hear individual dry leaves bounce off branches as they flutter to the ground.

I smell the shift in the wind. The smell is damp and musty when the air moves across the creek and the forest floor before it gets to me, while it changes dramatically to grassy and dusty when it comes to me from the open field on the other side of me.

There’s a Chickadee who comes around in the evening, about the same time each day. I can hear Chickadees throughout the woods around me, flitting and buzzing, but this one seems to follow the same pattern on the same branches around the same time each afternoon. He’s very curious about me, often stopping on branches only a couple feet away from me and watching me before moving to another branch.

After a few days, I come to be able to recognize what kind of bird is fluttering through the woods by the sound of the air beneath it’s wings – the wingbeats of birds are sometimes quite distinctive.

Of course, when deer that might be prey come close, my senses zero in completely on the prey. But 99%+ of the time, I’m focused on remaining quiet and unobtrusive. Doing so opens me completely to the input of the world I’ve immersed myself into.

As my mind absorbs the space where I sit, my heart and soul become part of the Place where I sit.

Author: Neil Hanson

Neil administers this site and manages content. View all posts by Neil Hanson