Living in the Forest
What is the best thing you've ever done?
Was there any experience that changed your life, more than any other?
For me, it was the time I spent four months living in the forest.
I was 20 and full of optimism and values. I had been connected to nature for years, since I was a small boy, when my parents used to take me to an amazing local river, that was surrounded by forests. And the desire to be in nature was only increasing with every year. It was in nature, but more specifically, in the forest, that I felt happiest and most alive, and that it was where the most meaning was. For me, at the time, God wasn't in man-made cathedrals and temples. He was in nature and in the forest, and there His spirit, or some sort of spirit, could be found.
But still, every time I would go to walk in the forest, feeling loved, connected, feeling calm and at peace, and then, I would leave, usually at the end of the day, and would go back to four walls and low ceilings, and electricity bills, taxes, comforts, nothingness. And I felt that I was betraying myself. It didn’t feel right that I kept going back to a house.
So I got to the point where I'd had enough. I thought, if I love being in nature so much, why do I keep leaving it and going back to the city? So, I didn’t go back. In February, I took a small two-man tent, a camping stove, a rucksack and a thin sleeping bag, and I got a train up to Fort William in the Highlands. I roamed the forested Glens, along the hillsides and mountains, through thick woods, until I found my place. It was in an old birch wood, with a few big oak trees. I liked the feeling there, and there was something about the beautiful small trees with their white bark that was very comforting, and homely.
It was winter then. I lay down my tent, and the snow was thick and the air was cold. I heard a gurgling stream nearby. Good for fresh water. And the place I positioned my tent on, was on a slope for the runoff rain. If I looked directly from my door, through the gaps in the trees in front, I could see the glacier sculpted shape of a mountain. A mountain that was once the size of the Himalayas, though I didn't know that then. All I saw was the utter beauty of the spectacular landscape. It looked like Braveheart. And I was mesmerised. It felt adventurous. Fun. And would be a challenge. And I was so excited to just spend time there.
The first few weeks I spent adjusting. The first few nights were the worst. It was hard. It was tough. The temperature was minus I don’t know what, but it was so cold and my sleeping bag so thin, that I wore three jumpers and still woke up freezing in the middle of the night. I would pour soup or hot chocolate into a pot and cook it up on my little camping stove inside the tent, watching the blue gas burn and hiss, until my liquid meal bubbled and I could drink of its warmth. But that warmth only lasted ten minutes, and before long I would be outside, doing push-ups and running on the spot to try and get some heat. And while I jumped and sprinted and tried to get my heart pumping, the trees and grass around me glistened in the night, covered in a white diamond frost.
But that all stopped when I got a proper sleeping bag. A proper, 4-season, Mummy sleeping bag. I bought it in a half-price sale from an outdoor retail store in town. From then on, I slept like a baby. No more cold. I lay in the middle of the tent, my cosy new home, my bag and equipment spread down the sides of it. I adored the feeling that nothing was separating me from the sky and the elements, other than this paper-thin piece of tarp. It felt magical. It was magical. And I felt proud. Of both me, and the tent. I had had previous feelings of accomplishment up to then in my life, but these new ones were something else, and they just kept coming, filling me with a sense of independence, freedom, and a deep inner peace. It was amongst the most satisfied I had ever felt in my life.
The snow melted, and I made trips into the town to get some supplies- bread, rice, jam, and drink sachets - to take back. I also got a job, as a trolley guy, based in Fort William, the nearby town. Working on the “Harry Potter train,” selling snacks in the carriages as it rolled through the Highlands. I would work five days a week, for a few hours, doing a couple runs up and down the train, then sitting down and staring out of the windows in awe.
The Highland scenery totally mesmerised me. And to this day has made me who I am. It heightened the way I felt about nature. And tightened my close connection with it. Almost every single second I was in awe of what was around me and what I was seeing. The little clouds that clung to the mountain sides were maybe the most special- slowly drifting along like ghosts or supernatural beings. They hid the mountains in foggy magic and wonder, and made me desperate to know what was behind them. I would later learn that John Lennon had said this too, and that these kinds of landscapes had really inspired him, and his creativity. Later, I also learned that Lord Byron’s imagination (the best ever poet), had been shaped by this too, and Mary Shelley’s, and Walter Scott’s, and that this kind of scenery effectively created the whole romantic movement in art and literature. But back then, I didn’t know much of this. I was just in awe.
And I was a writer then too. I always carried a notebook in my backpack. I was constantly taking it out and writing whatever was coming into my mind. Whatever was coming through me. Poems, poetic thoughts, and strange sentences, were streaming into me and I tried to jot them all down. Sometimes my arm couldn't keep up with the teeming information, and it would get tired and I’d have to reluctantly slow my hand down, and try to hold on to the thoughts. Months and years after that time, I would read and hear famous philosophers and writers, that had said the exact same things that I had wrote, except that they had just worded them a little differently. Like one time, when I was lying still in the tent, listening to the sweet songs and happy chirps of the birds as it got dark and the night drew in and they too were getting ready for sleep, when it randomly popped into my head, “Wisdom doesn’t come from age, it comes from experience.” Which seemed bizarre at the time, and I had nothing else to connect it to, but it did seem to make sense to me. I felt then, at 20, that I had already experienced a lot, and more than many 60-year-olds who had hardly ever left the town they were born in. Then, years later, I was reading an Anton Chekhov book, (the brilliant Russian writer), and in it a character said something pretty much the same, “Wisdom doesn’t come with age… it comes.. from learning.”
That train I worked on ran from Fort William, the town, to Mallaig, a little coastal fishing village, on a route that some travel magazines had dubbed at the time “One of the most beautiful journeys in the world.” I was seeing it in the off-tourist season, sometimes in half-empty carriages that were quite old and didn’t seem to have changed much since the 90s. The glass windows, as the world rolled by outside, revealed views that were perfectly clear, with no leaves yet on the trees, and so crystal visions of the best wild lochs and valleys and glens and mountains, all of which were some of the best in the world (and I now know this is true because I have since travelled all over the world and very few places can compare).
The train stopped at the last station at Mallaig village, and everyone would get off to have a delicious fish and chips, or to relax and walk on the beach, then we all jumped back on two hours later, to go back to Fort William.
I had spent a few years before that one, reading lots of philosophy, and the classics. But when I was in the forest, and around those places, I had zero desire to read anything. Instead, I was communicating, or was being communicated with, by nature. I was having dialogue with the trees. I would sit, on the slope, outside my tent, the soft grass cosy like a blanket under me as I sat still, the birds singing so happily that they too sounded delighted, and I would focus my gaze on the spot between my eyes, or on one of the trees. And I would let it happen. I was exchanging thoughts with them. I was wide open in my spirit, and the trees in turn, were transferring something into me. I felt so connected. And to this day have rarely felt as connected. To nature. To life. And to the Earth. And everything made sense. Everything was just as it should be. And every moment was perfect. I felt full of energy and was constantly being recharged. Many times I was full of bliss, and ecstatic.
But now, I also know, what the science has been oh so slow to catch up with, that trees are intelligent. They talk to each other, through their roots and in chemical messages they send through the air. They share resources with each other, helping each other out like families and friends. They can even sense solar eclipses and change their bodies before they happen. There are many different forms of intelligence in life, and if one of them is being street smart, and staying alive, then trees have outdone us by hundreds of millions of years.
I was never lonely then. Never. And I realised, I couldn't be lonely. It was impossible. Because this spirit and this connection and this energy, was all around me. The trees were my friends, and the forest was alive.
After a month or so, when I was settled in, I was bathing in the cold fresh river nearby, and drinking the pure clean water from the stream, and collecting my cooking water from there too. As for fire, I taught myself how to perfect the art of it. And it was an art. I learned it was best to put flat stones on the bottom, to contain the heat, and to stop the embers from spreading underground, and then to build up the walls with other stones and rocks. It was all trial and error, and I was making good progress. But still, it was Scotland, and often soaking wet, and sometimes difficult.
But I remember that great epiphany moment, one of the best and most powerful in my life, when one damp night I was trying everything I could and it wasn't working, my fire would not light. I looked away at the trees around me, and realised then, that the bark looked a little bit like paper, in parts where it was peeling off. So I pulled off a strip of that bark, held it above my lit match, and remember so well my joy and amazement, as the whole piece, and then the whole pile of firewood, shot up in flames. Elation washed all over me. The next few hours I sat next to my warm, crackling fire as the flames danced yellow, red and orange, the stars sparkling above me, while I ate ravenously of the wood-smoked sausages and beans on my plate, the sausages charred slightly black just the way I liked them, and dipped in the sauce. Getting that fire going and watching it, and learning, organically, about the birch bark, was one of the most satisfying feelings I have ever had.
It was birch bark I had used. White bark from the birch tree. I had no idea then what I learned after. That birch bark didn’t just look like the paper it had reminded me off, but it actually was used as some of the earliest forms of writing paper. In India, the oldest most sacred Buddhist texts, were written on birch bark paper. And for millennia, it had also been used as a Firestarter. I was ignorant then of all that knowledge, but had learned how to use the bark only through practical experience. And I think practical and lived experience, is almost always the best kind, if you can get it.
I absorbed the slow change of the seasons, as the light green buds sprouted, and shapeshifted into leaves which turned darker greens as we rolled through April and into May. Sometimes I climbed the oak trees, and watched it all from up in the forest canopy. Observed the real world as I sat deep inside of it. I climbed different trees, and different parts of the trees on different days, low, medium, and high, to get many angles and perspectives of the beautiful world all around me, and to see everything that was happening. It was always fun, and entertaining and riveting. It was a million times better than any TV. Every day was a new day. Every morning a new morning. And everything was holy.
Eventually I felt I had learned enough, and the time came to leave, partly aided by ten days of non-stop rain. I also felt, that I was so content and happy there, but what next? What now? I thought I could stay there forever. But it felt a bit selfish for me to do that. I felt that I wanted to share the world with people. To help people where I could.
But I wish every person in this world would get the chance to have a similar experience to what I did. Just four months, by themselves, sitting in the forest. Watching and living with nature. Maybe they would understand, like I came to understand, that nature is intelligent? That trees and nature have spirits. We now know, as I mentioned, that trees communicate with each other. It will be known, someday, that they also communicate with us.
But until we all learn this, I think we will continue to live in ignorance, and naivety. And will continue to shred the golden sacred places that our ancestors worshipped. Whether here in Scotland, with industrial wind and solar farms. Or in the Amazon rainforest, which, as I write this in 2025, the World Climate Change Committee are bulldozing, to pave a four-lane superhighway for their big cars.
I look back to that time, when I was 20, and knew more then than all of them. Instead of fancy meetings, scheming on how best to control humans and nature, give each of those participants a few months in a forest. Let them talk with the trees. And actually connect with nature.
Maybe things would be different.
It was definitely the best thing that I ever did.