The Fifth Element: Heart

Prior to launch, the other participants and I had the privilege of meeting and being blessed by members and elders of the Gwich’in tribe, whose people have lived on the land we were about to inhabit for generations. They spoke about their deep respect for the land, the animals, its abundance, and what they call Creator. There was something incredibly grounding about receiving that message immediately before embarking on an experience like Alone. We were about to enter this landscape with our modern equipment, cameras, ten chosen items, and whatever knowledge and skills we had accumulated throughout our lives, but we were being reminded that we were entering a place with a history far greater than any of us. This land had been understood, respected, survived upon, and celebrated long before we arrived. As we prepared to embark on this epic journey, the elders wished us well and praised our courage for attempting this thing of merit. There were four elders, three men and one woman, and we were asked to introduce ourselves and thank them for their blessing and for allowing us the opportunity to experience what their culture had witnessed and celebrated for centuries. I remember feeling as though we were walking on their shoulders, the shoulders of giants. We were walking their paths and carrying the torch of modernism into something they had respected, endured, celebrated, and admired with passion and purpose. They were not separate from their land. They were part of it. And for however long each of us remained out there, we were going to attempt to do the same.

Some of us had the opportunity to exchange a gift. While introducing myself, I knelt before each of the elders and told them who I was and how grateful I was that they had given us their respect and blessing for the journey we were about to undertake. They gifted us a curated pouch of aromatic herbs whose inhalation would provide clarity and grounding. Thankfully, we were allowed to take these tokens with us. I told them that I intended to honor not just their culture and not just the land, but Creator, something I believed both of us were in connection with even if the way we understood or expressed that connection might look a little different. In return, the woman elder locked eyes with me and told me that I had such a beautiful heart. It was a simple sentence, but it stayed with me. I carried those words into the wilderness, and as the days passed, I found myself returning to them again and again. What did she see when she looked at me? What did she mean when she said I had a beautiful heart? What does it actually mean to have heart? I started carefully examining the idea almost as if the word itself had anatomy. I wanted to understand its roots, its veins, its arteries. Heart became a theme for me before I even understood it fully.

Later, I was told in a congratulatory and spirited way by one of the advisors and consultants on the show that not only was I very knowledgeable and not only was I very skilled, but those things meant absolutely nothing without heart. Again, there was that word. Heart. I had spent years developing wilderness skills. I had trained, practiced, failed, learned, traveled, taught, and dedicated an enormous part of my life to capability. Skills had changed my life. They had given me confidence and agency and had helped me rebuild parts of myself I once thought were gone. Yet here I was being reminded that capability was still only part of the equation. You can possess knowledge. You can possess skill. You can have grit. But there is something else required to keep moving when things become difficult, and perhaps that something is heart.

I have discussed before how taking the bow allowed me to feel plugged into the pulse of the life around me. Hunting changed the way I experienced myself within the landscape. Through what I witnessed and through stretching my human capacity to experience something far beyond my normal world, I felt like I was saying hello to another body of myself. I began thinking about all the different bodies we humans get to experience. There is the physical body, the conscious body, the spiritual body, the waking body, the soul body, and perhaps countless others we do not have names for. I truly believe it sometimes takes an experience like Alone, a challenge that removes so much of the noise surrounding us, or simply enough time spent deeply in tune with nature, to fully witness those different bodies. Out there, for lack of a better word, I embodied the mammalian version of humanity. I experienced the animal that still exists beneath everything modern civilization has layered onto us. That mammalian body reminded me that I have a place in history, in nature, and on this Earth. But somewhere within that experience, I think I witnessed another body too. I met what I can only describe as the heart body.

Coming out of the experience, I realized I needed to redefine what having heart and giving heart actually meant. It is easy to align the analogy of giving heart with giving grit because grit is something we understand. Grit is the don’t quit attitude. It is pushing forward. It is leaning into capability. It is continuing to move when everything becomes uncomfortable. Grit is waking up when you are hungry, cold, exhausted, frustrated, or afraid and still doing what needs to be done. It is building the shelter, tending the fire, checking the traps, setting the net, finding food, collecting firewood, repairing what broke, and trying again after something failed. Grit is doing the work when it seems like all the odds are against you. I believe deeply in grit. But I also believe there is another layer, almost a mirrored side of grit, that is just as important, if not more important, when faced with adversity. You must also have heart.

So what is heart? I think heart is one of the secret ingredients to moving forward. It is also one of the secret ingredients to witnessing love. Heart is compassion. Heart is empathy. Heart is vulnerability. Heart is the ability to experience both sides of something without needing to deny either one. It is possible to be scared and capable. It is possible to hurt and continue. It is possible to grieve and still experience joy. It is possible to feel vulnerable without being weak. Maybe heart exists somewhere within those contradictions. Maybe having heart is our willingness to experience the full spectrum rather than choosing only the emotions we believe make us strong.

For a long time, I believed love existed on the other side of fear, that the two lived in some kind of dualism. If fear existed on one side, love must exist on the opposite side, and our job was somehow to move from one toward the other. I am starting to realize that I am not so sure that is true. Fear is something all of us experience. It can appear as fear of loss, insecurity, grief, doubt, anxiety, failure, or uncertainty. Fear exists as a reminder that we have something to lose. We do not fear losing something we do not care about. We fear because something matters. Fear is uncomfortable because it makes us want to protect what we hold onto so dearly. And if fear exists because something matters, then perhaps fear and love are not opposites at all. Perhaps fear sometimes exists because love is already there.

On the other side of fear is life. Aliveness. And I have started realizing that aliveness is not always joy. We often speak about wanting happiness as though happiness is the ultimate evidence that we are living correctly, but being fully alive means feeling all of it. Aliveness can be joy, but it can also be grief. It can be wonder, fear, pain, excitement, loneliness, connection, uncertainty, gratitude, sorrow, or awe. Joy is one of many experiences within aliveness. What matters is our willingness to feel. I think feeling and fear together may actually are the dualism that create love. We protect because we care. We grieve because we loved. We fear losing because something matters. Maybe love does not exist despite those feelings. Maybe love is woven through them.

The physical heart gives us a beautiful analogy for this. A heart cannot beat through expansion alone. It cannot beat through contraction alone. It requires both. It contracts and expands. It reaches and releases. It receives and gives. It does this again and again and again. The very thing that keeps us alive requires opposing movements working together. Without contraction, there is no beat. Without expansion, there is no beat. Without both, the heart is incapable of doing what it was designed to do. In that sense, perhaps the heart is not capable of love without its beat either. Maybe we are not meant to eliminate fear, grief, vulnerability, or pain in order to experience love. Maybe they are contractions and expansions within the same living system.

That is when I began wondering if heart might actually be the fifth element of nature, the element we rarely discuss. We speak about Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, but heart seems to exist within and between all of them. Heart exists in time moving forward. It exists within the seasons and their endless cycles of death and rebirth. It exists in a seed breaking open before it can grow. It exists in animals fighting to survive and in landscapes continually changing. It exists in the movement of stones and in how a stone traveled to arrive where it now lies, holding within it the rhythms of every tumble and collision along the way. Heart exists in the beat we sometimes hear, see, feel, and touch when we can quiet our minds enough to notice that we are part of something much larger than ourselves.

Having heart is growth. Having heart is moving forward. Having heart is giving, and having heart is receiving. It is vulnerability, but it is also capability. It is emotion, but it is also action. It is being scared while still being compassionate. It is reaching and releasing. It is protecting and surrendering. It is allowing ourselves to experience the contraction and the expansion rather than demanding that life remain permanently on one side. You have to have heart to move forward because movement itself requires both. Having heart is the ability to love, witnessing its two sides of fear and feeling.

This is where I began separating heart from grit. Giving grit is doing the work. Having heart is the reason we continue doing it. Grit is leaning into capability. Heart is the innate desire, the innate ability, maybe even the automatic response written somewhere within our DNA that tells us to continue living, connecting, loving, creating, protecting, and moving forward. Grit might build the fire, but heart gives us a reason to sit beside it. Grit might procure the food, but heart allows us to experience gratitude for the life that provided it. Grit might tell us to keep going, while heart reminds us what we are going for.

I believe true survival exists at the intersection of the two. Capability alone is not the whole story, just as vulnerability alone is not the whole story. We need both. Grit without heart can become nothing more than endurance for the sake of endurance. Heart without capability can leave us feeling deeply without knowing how to act. But when the two meet, something powerful happens. We can feel fear and still make decisions. We can experience grief and still move forward. We can admit that something hurts while continuing to do the work. We can recognize when continuing is courageous and, perhaps more importantly, recognize when stopping is courageous too. Somewhere between capability and vulnerability is what allows us not simply to endure adversity, but to remain human while we endure it.

This is the idea I now invite people to explore through the Wild Heart Wilderness Immersion. We use skill based activities to lean into what I have come to see as five elements of nature: Earth, Air, Water, Fire, and the one that connects and perhaps rules them all, Heart. It is not about abandoning capability for emotion. It is about understanding that the two belong together. We can learn to make fire while examining what ignites courage within ourselves. We can work with water while exploring our ability to move, reflect, and release. We can ground ourselves through Earth and consider what keeps us rooted. We can work with Air through intention and the person we are becoming. And then there is Heart, the place where all of those things meet. Its the place where everything chooses to move forward.

Before I went into the wilderness, an elder looked into my eyes and told me I had a beautiful heart. At the time, I accepted her words with gratitude without fully understanding what they would eventually mean to me. Then I went into the wilderness and began questioning what heart actually was. I examined its roots, veins, and arteries. I witnessed its contractions and expansions. I found it in fear and love, vulnerability and capability, giving and receiving, reaching and releasing, grit and feeling. I found it in the land, in animals, in hunting, in gratitude, in adversity, and within myself.

Maybe the elder saw something in me that I had not yet learned how to see in myself. Maybe her words simply planted a seed that needed the wilderness in order to grow. I do not know. But somewhere during that experience, heart stopped being just a word or a metaphor.

It became another way of understanding survival.

And perhaps more importantly, it became another way of understanding self love.

I went into the wilderness knowing how important it was to have grit. I came home understanding that grit is only half of the beat. Survival asks us to work, adapt, persevere, and lean into everything we are capable of. But it also asks us to feel, receive, release, connect, protect, surrender, and love.

We need the contraction and the expansion.

We need capability and vulnerability.

We need grit.

But we also need heart.