Ain't Coming Back In Chains
A reflection on my '25 summertime wilderness Vision Fast led by Bryan Bieniek
The day was July 8th or 9th, 2025, and I was on the second solo night of my vision fast in the woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Equipped with two tarps, paracord, a sleeping bag, a pillow, a few gallons of water, electrolyte powder, a flashlight, a voice recorder, a hunting knife, a small tent, emergency food, and a few pairs of clothes, my fellow vision questers and I were charged with three days and nights alone in the wild – in total eighty-four hours solo with no food, and ideally no human contact.
“Why the hell would you want to do that?” is a similar question many friends asked me in the lead-up to the event.
Let me rewind.
In the haze of extreme adulting, as I’ll call it, the fathering of two young boys, multi-sport youth sports coaching, freelance commercial directing, building a company, taking care of a large property, and more, my inner reflective life, my soul, my spark, necessarily seems to drift and fizzle. I attempt to be more than one person, almost compulsively so – and this runaway train was reaching a manic fervor I couldn’t stop on my own. I was split into two separate men. Author John Bradshaw says all extreme shame-based individuals “either try to be more or less than human.” There was always this itch, for decades, that I had to try to do and be more than I was - or am. I was trying to be Superman in the mundane world of work duty and domesticity, and a wild, ferocious, ancient, creative being of the earth and its roots. These two seemed irreconcilable in my life, almost laughingly so.
Poet Tom Hirons, whom I consider a distant mentor of sorts, mentioned during a call that I was “ripe for a wilderness fast.”
I can’t claim that I knew what that was at the time. This must’ve been late 2024.
From the School Of Lost Border’s Website:
In the world today, we often live connected to screens and disconnected from the land. The initiation and rites of passage ceremonies practiced for centuries by our ancestors have almost been forgotten. The vision fast ceremony is a modern-day rite of passage that helps navigate the complexity of these times and mark, honor, and celebrate life transitions. This involves time out alone in nature, with minimal or no food, and leaving behind distractions and daily routines.
When we take the time to honor life's changing seasons and thoughtfully respond to the question "Who am I?" and "What do I have to offer?" we step into our true nature and a sense of belonging amongst the land and our communities. The results can be profound. Meaning and purpose can return, and life can become richer, clearer, and more full.
After much deliberation and self-condemnation for even considering doing something simply for my own well-being, I decided to book a spot on a ten-day vision fast in rural Colorado. However, after weighing all the factors, I decided to explore the possibility of attending a wilderness vision fast closer to home on the East Coast of the United States. That is when I discovered Bryan Biniek of Sourcing The Fire. Many of the other East Vision Fast ceremonies I found were thousands of dollars, and my gut didn’t agree with that. Instead, Bryan’s fast would be much closer to home and on a sliding scale of financial commitment based on what was feasible – I loved that.
Bryan and I set up a phone call to discuss my background, his background, my intentions for the fast, and what I was hoping to get out of it. Speaking to Bryan over the phone was like speaking to a wise old friend – his candor, grace, and intuitive yet down-to-earth nature were affirming and inviting. I was in if he’d have me! Bryan made sure to inform me that there was to be a bit of danger involved in this – over eighty hours total alone in the woods with no food – not exactly a Saturday afternoon by the pool.
I had never done anything remotely like this in my life. However, I was committed to experiencing something beyond myself–a deeper core of my own true nature.
Fast-forward to early morning blue hour of July 5th, 2025 - I packed up my car in Pennsylvania and began the two-and-a-half-hour drive toward Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, where I’d be attending the Vision Fast on a remote land preserve, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I arrived in the middle of the woods to a smiling Bryan – I was the first to arrive. Over the next hour, four men I had never met arrived to participate in this same unknown experience – a recokining with ourselves and nature. Very quickly, within the first six or seven hours of this first day, I felt as if I slipped into a different time and space – an indigenous time, a primitive place within myself and in this community of male Questers. Slowing down to the rhythm of nature around us was much easier and necessary than I knew or expected – and I felt a bundle of emotion soaring through my veins as if ready to make an appearance.
There were two necessary items on the agenda for the first few days together as a group: we had to go out and find a solo spot for ourselves on the land (where we’d be alone for eighty-four hours), and we had to set an intention for our fast.
Participating in the ritual within the group of setting an intention was and will remain one of the most profound experiences of my life. Over the course of a morning and afternoon, each one of the five men poured his heart out in front of one another while Bryan and Krista, our fellow leader, watched and listened intently. We each shared our life stories and named an intention to ground us in our solo time. In many ways, the intention was to claim something of ourselves that required claiming. This may sound simplistic or easy, but it was more like confronting a beast of burden within me. For me, simply saying, “I’m enough just being here,” was enough to bring me to my knees. Just accepting and attempting to own that I am worthy enough just to exist and breathe – this was, in a way, a bearing of my own cross. To not yearn for success, superiority, achievement, recognition, but to simply say, “I’m enough just to be here right now,” – this was a gargantuan load to carry. It wasn’t enough to state the intention out loud – Bryan, Krista, and the rest of the group had to affirm its resonance. If one of us couldn’t get to this place within ourselves of naked truth within our intention, there was a chance we would not be able to go out alone for our solo time. Each man had the courage to reach this place within himself, and his intention was affirmed by the group.
The morning of our departure for our solo time was like a dream: we woke up and were instructed not to speak to one another. Each of us packed our necessary materials and entered a ritual space together. Out of respect for the ritual, I will not speak exactly to its wonder. With tears rolling down our faces, one by one, we went our separate ways out into the wilderness while the sun came up. As I walked away from the group, I felt ready–alive, embracing something so unlike anything I had ever experienced. As I turned right onto what we called the power line path, about three-hundred yards from my pre-determined solo spot, I spotted a mama black bear and her cub cross my path. It made me smile – knowing I was going to embrace the fullness nature had to offer – without a tent or protection!
For half of day one, I labored on setting up my solo spot. I decided to stretch my paracord between two trees and create an A-frame roof with one of my tarps. Knowing there’d be any and every critter known to man crawling on the forest floor, I decided to use my second tarp to create a hammock, so I could at least be suspended from the ground. I’d sleep within the tarp hammock with my sleeping bag, pillow, and pocket knife in case any bears, wolves, or anything that could eat me tried to start a fight.
The following seventy-odd hours are hard to articulate. I experienced profound loneliness, boredom, anger, joy, guilt, elation, despair, wonder, shame, and nothingness–and voracious hunger.
There is something, however, that I can articulate. Often, and perhaps even in my description above, in setting up this experience, it feels like one should go into something like this Vision Fast seeking a transcendental experience of “God,” so to speak. It reminds me why many Westerners go to find a guru somewhere on a mountain – to experience an out-of-body, blissed-out experience of oneness with the universe. You know what, I don’t wish to demonize people who are going for that kind of experience–yet I do believe that if one is to go “find oneself,” it is important not to forget that we are irretrievably bound to this earth.
In these eighty-four hours, I was covered in flies, sweat, dirt, bug bites–I was trapped in thunderstorms for hours on end. I came across abandoned shoes on trails – my stomach felt like it would eat itself. I sure as hell didn’t “find God,” but what I did find was a fucking courage in me that was so strong, I barely recognized it. What I did find was a capacity to accept where I was, and where I am, and that nothing is more astonishingly sensational than the land, trees, animals, rivers that allowed me the space to experience myself, in full, perhaps for the first time in thirty-eight years of being alive.
In one of the most climactic moments on the final solo day, I felt torn up from the inside out. Each day, I would walk from sunrise to sunset, because at least in the movement, it felt like flies wouldn’t eat me alive. This particular day, and around the seventy-hour mark of no food, I was in a state of consciousness that is hard to explain. I was physically calm but obsessing over how I might turn this experience into a project, a product, or something. I was pacing up and down the power line path, praying that I could make it to the final morning without eating or falling apart. In a moment of near panic about my mind needing to control the moment, I happened upon a little path on the reserve I hadn’t taken. I turned down the path and came across the garden with statues and a bridge.
As I looked at this wooden bridge, and in my nature-induced altered consciousness, a voice said: You are the bridge of the morning sun.” In that moment, I imagined this voice could also have said: “You are the bridge of the mourning son.” Either way, I was being claimed by something quite other than myself. It was a vocational call that grabbed me and hasn’t let me go. I asked for a vision, and a vision emerged, exactly when I was at my lowest point.
I may share more about this experience in a later post, so I wish to save my continuation for then. However, if you feel like this Vision Fast experience may be something you’re called to do, I recommend visiting Bryan’s site here and having a conversation with him. I don’t have enough kind words in my vocabulary to describe Bryan and the gift of his guidance on this personal pilgrimage.
I am forever changed by this experience. I want to shout out my amazing wife, Rasha, for allowing me seven-plus days alone with our boys. I am forever grateful for you!
-David B. Godin