I Went Into the Woods and Lost My Phone

The arrival of winter can feel like a goodbye.

Not the dramatic kind, but something quieter. Like a good friend who slowly becomes an acquaintance, and then eventually just someone we used to know. The kind of loss that alters us more than we’re willing to admit.

But goodbyes don’t always mean forever. We say goodbye to the light every day, trusting that the sun will rise again. There is an element of faith in this practice of solstice: a return to darkness, trusting that one day it will be light again.

This year has asked me to practice letting go more than once.

Last night, in the woods by Wy’east, Bernie, Nacho, and I built a fire for solstice. I greeted the trees, feeling the safety of their presence. Dripping with pale green strands of lichen, the pines stood silently beneath a dark sky glittered with stars. I thanked the land for its company and beauty on this night, and offered incense and dried marigolds to the fire we hadn’t yet built.

We started small. A flame that could have disappeared if we rushed it. We took turns feeding it, fanning it, blowing gently when it needed encouragement and backing off when it didn’t. We watched it grow.

I had written wishes in my pocket, carrying what I was ready to release. I was asking a lot of this fire: to hold ritual, to carry grief, to warm our bodies, to burn what I no longer needed.

Bernie and Nacho wandered down toward the creek, rushing and loud from the atmospheric river, water bursting at its banks beneath a sky full of stars. I stayed by the fire, taking video footage.

And then the fire took my phone.

It slipped from my hands and into the flames. For several long seconds, I watched it burn.

I didn’t panic. I didn’t yell. I didn’t scramble.

I watched it. Then I asked for help pulling it out.

Nature always humbles me.

I’ve been without my phone for sixteen hours now. In that time, I’ve reached for it hundreds of times like a reflex, a phantom limb. I went to the phone store this morning. Thankfully, Bernie knows me and had a warranty plan on my device.

Still, something was taken.

Not my phone, but the illusion that I am divinely beloved by the planet, and fully in control of the rituals I attempt to hold in the natural world.

This wasn’t the only time this year that nature humbled me.

The morning before starting a backpacking trip through Yosemite in September, I ripped my pants and had to hike for days with gear tape on my ass. I ate shit more times than I can admit on that trip (and on other trails this year, too.) There was the time I yelled to Bernie, “Go on without me!” as we pushed up a steep coastal trail. There were hikes I finished out of sheer stubbornness, like Hamilton Mountain, where I pushed my body right to its edge.

And here’s the part I almost didn’t include:

An hour before writing this, I broke down crying. Full-body crying. Feeling like a complete loser, about my stupid phone, about how overwhelmed I get when my kitchen is messy. People think I’m tough, but I am deeply sensitive. When I experience a setback, my reflex is to see it as failure.

Choosing to interpret a setback as failure, instead of trusting that something better might be unfolding, is a pattern I really want to break.

Because guess who’s getting an upgraded, fancier phone thanks to the fire?

This lucky bitch.

It feels almost too on-the-nose. I lose the thing I was clinging to, and I’m handed something better, not because I earned it, but because I trusted enough not to panic. Because I accepted help. Because I didn’t fight the moment.

Each time nature humbles me, the lesson isn’t loud. It doesn’t arrive with a tidy moral. It arrives as the same reminder: you are not the only one in charge, and even so, you are held.

Solstice isn’t about conquering the dark. It’s about trusting it. About knowing when to tend the fire and when to step back. About understanding that loss and return belong to the same cycle.

I said goodbye to the light last night, knowing it would come back. I offered something to the fire, and the fire took something too.

That feels fair.

Maybe this is what practice looks like: not certainty, not control, but relationship. Paying attention. Saying thank you. Letting yourself be humbled. Trusting that even in the dark, something is still alive, still warming, still waiting to grow again.