On old philosopher once said that purity of heart was the ability to do a single thing. I think about that sometimes when I am hunting and fishing. I say to myself, "One thing, one thing. Just do one thing." I find that very often when I hunt or fish that I can get caught up in thinking about too many things.
What we left behind at the house or the office has a way of going to the woods with us. We are sitting on a stand and realize that for a half hour we have been thinking about how the house payment will be made or how mother-in-law's health is or the next project at work--all the things that are part of the world and we take them to the woods with us.
Sometimes it is our equipment that distracts us. I am beginning to believe that most of our hunting is not about our relation to land and game as much as it is about our participation in the economic system of hunting hardware and technology. Never have there been so many things we are supposed to need. Virtually every outdoor activity today has been "technologized" in this way. The outing industry analyzes every component of what we do and provides multiple gadgets to meet every imaginable condition.
We would need a cart to carry what the experts tell us is "essential"--or to make us look like the pictures in the catalogs. How much of this stuff do we really need? Very little. If we have to think about where it is when we go or make lists of it or worry about its getting lost--it is already too much. Our minds cannot be quiet or pure when they are distracted with the clutter of our gear. Put on your hat and coat, drop three shells into your pocket, and slip into the woods.
Sometimes it is our idea of hunting that distracts us. We say we are going "deer hunting" as if we were going to hunt all the deer in the world. We need to make our thought and our focus much more specific: I am going to hunt that buck I keep seeing at the fork in the fire lane.
How to attain purity of heart? It begins long before the hunt. It beging when we are able to look in the mirror as we shave or as we drift off to sleep the night before the hunt and give up all our reasons, our motives for hunting. Ultimately there is no reason, no explanation, no cause, no motive that can justify what we are and do as hunters. We are hunters. We hunt. We cannot explain that to the world. We cannot justify that to ourselves. It is the way we are. We must also give up expectations: the idea of killing a limit or a ten-pointer. Hunting is not about quantity. It is a matter of quality and purity of heart begins when we forget any measure of quantity, any thing that can be counted.
Next we must simplify. We must simplify our kits, all the apparatus of assault and conquest that in our para-military mentality we have come to depend on for success. Try sitting on the ground instead of using a stand the next time you go deer hunting. Try loading only one round and leave the magazine empty. Now. As you read this. All the reasons that immediately leap to mind about why that won't work, how the tree stand gives you better view, how you might need the extra rounds for your backup shots--all those are the reasons, along with a hundred others, that stand between you and purity of heart.
We need to simplify our kits and we need to simplify our minds. Even though we may have other rounds in the magazine, we ought to try to approach the animal before us as if we were using a single shot. We need to hunt in purity--trusting in ourselves as hunters, in our unity with land and animal, rather than in our hardware and technology.
Purity of heart is a matter of few choices--of being willing to settle for one thing. It is, then, the opposite of greed where we grab for more than our share. It is also different from lust where we grab too eagerly. When the hunter has purity of heart, he can enter the forest in an even steady mind and the animal that comes to him comes always as a gift. The ultimate test of the hunter is not whether he brings home an animal; in his heart of hearts, the test is whether he can see the animal's eye, look into its soul, and not bring it home.
It is sometimes startling how much more full the woods become, how much more in touch with everything from the leaves to the sounds, we become when we close our minds to the distractions and seek purity of heart.
Gerald L. Smith
Sewanee, TN