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Robert Julian Wood has been a professional architect, a pioneering mountaineer, an organizer of ocean-to-alpine expeditions, an instructor of wilderness self reliance at Strathcona Park Lodge and a founding member of the Friends of Strathcona Park, a protest group that helped stop logging and mining in the park.
Born in 1945, Rob Wood grew up in a village on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, in north Yorkshire, where his father introduced him to hill walking as a child. He began rock climbing at age 14.
After studying architecture for five years at the Architectural Association School in London, England, he made his way to Montreal and ended up in Calgary.
During his time in Calgary, Rob Wood became a pioneer of ice climbing and posted numerous first ascents in the Rockies during the early 1970's. He was part of a two-man team that made the first British and Canadian ascents of the 'Nose of El Cap' at Yosemite.
Wood later 'opted out' by building a partially self-sufficient homestead for his family on Vancouver Island. There he became active in the Friends of Strathcona and the Strathcona Park Lodge Outdoor Education Centre.
Rob Wood's subtitled 'autobiography from the Canadian Wilderness Frontier' called Towards the Unknown Mountains focuses on winter ascents of Mount Waddington and Colonel Foster in Strathcona Park, but it also refers to his adventures in Scotland, Yosemite, Baffin Island and around B.C. With the companionship of his longtime friend and climbing veteran Doug Scott, Rob Wood recounts the development of 'survival philosophies' and his environmental awareness.
He is not to be confused with another Vancouver Island-based explorer, Gareth Wood.
Subsequently, At Home in Nature: A Life of Unknown Mountains and Deep Wilderness by Rob Wood is described by his publisher as the compelling story of one family's life among the rugged landscapes of British Columbia's Coast Mountains, "converting youthful ideals, raw land and a passion for the outdoors into a practical off-grid homestead."
After his work in corporate Alberta had proved unfulfilling, Rob Wood and his wife settled on Maurelle Island and erected an off-the-grid homestead. He developed a small house-design practice specializing in organic and wholesome building techniques.
When he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, Wood turned to his passion for nature to help him deal with his emotional and physical struggles, which he recounts in The Zone: Rediscovering Our Natural Self (RMB $15). His deep connection to the natural world, what he calls a “universal consciousness,” was crucial in allowing Wood not to heavily depend on medical intrusions while at the same time, continuing to enjoy a full life. A documentary feature of the same name, The Zone, concerning Wood’s core philosophy about the power of humans connecting to nature, is forthcoming.
BOOKS:
Towards the Unknown Mountains (Ptarmigan Press, 1991)
At Home in Nature (Rocky Mountain Books, 2017) $22 9781771602501
The Zone: Rediscovering Our Natural Self (RMB, 2022) $15 9781771605250
*
At Home in Nature: A Life of Unknown Mountains and Deep Wilderness
by Rob Wood
Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2017. $22.00 / 9781771602518
Reviewed by John Gellard
*
Rob Wood might have saved my life ... or at least my left foot. Some years ago I fell off a log bridge into Cottonwood Creek in the wildest part of the Stein valley. I broke my leg. I was alone. I swore desperately and dragged myself and my pack up onto the bank. Surely time to panic.
"If you are ever in a seemingly impossible situation in the wilderness, stop and make a cup of tea. If you can do this, you know you're going to be all right."
Rob Wood had said that to my Grade 8 students in 1984 on an excursion in Strathcona Park, a place he has protected by helping get rid of mining.
Must make a brew, then. What else was there to do? Focus. Drag out camp stove. Light it. Boil water. Put in a tea bag. I sat back, sipped my tea and calmly assessed my hopeless situation. That moment of "mindfulness," of living in the present, settled me down for my long wait. I was discovered and rescued five days later.
"Mindfulness," being "In the Zone," knowing that we are part of nature like whirlpools in the rip tide of "universal consciousness" are central themes in At Home in Nature.
Wood leaves the metaphysical discussion to the end. First he pays his dues by taking the reader on some extreme adventures. It's a story of a life lived to the fullest, from rock climbing on the crags of his native Yorkshire, to studying architecture in London, to mountaineering and ice-climbing in the Arctic and the Rockies, to starting an off-the-grid co-op, to creating a magnificent homestead on Maurelle Island.
There's a compelling structure to the book. It's rather like a long and detailed "Proust Questionnaire" -- 38 questions beginning with "What made you choose to leave the old country and come to Canada?" probing ever more deeply into breathtaking adventures, and ending with "What exactly is 'universal consciousness?'" asked by a party of young skiers at Rob's sixtieth birthday celebration.
The group had struggled through a blizzard to find a tiny cabin buried in deep snow 4,000 feet above Bute Inlet. They find the cabin, dig themselves down to it, light the wood stove, unpack the cobbler, and make a brew.
Then it's story time.
The reader is swept along by the forces that propelled Rob and his comrades on their quest for "the freedom to detach ourselves from society's umbilical cord"; and establish a relationship with nature. The quest guides him from the Yorkshire crags, "pushing internal and external limits" through to an "outer island" in the storm-tossed rip tides on the outer edge of the Salish Sea on B.C.'s West Coast.
Let's visit a couple of the adventures along the way.
With Mick Burke, he climbs the Nose of Yosemite's El Capitan in 1968. It took five days of supreme psychological and physical effort in the sweltering heat to scale the 3,000-foot granite wall. That feat inspired others to complete a climb that seemed impossible. By the way, just recently a climber was killed when a giant slab of granite fell off El Capitan.
Rob and his friend, the famous British climber Doug Scott, rope their way up Mount Waddington, the "Mystery Mountain," forty miles up the Homathko River beyond the head of Bute Inlet ("Canada's Grand Canyon, only better"), with its unpredictable violent freezing katabatic winds and snow squalls. Rob's wife Laurie and friends wait overnight at the base camp with "brew."
The homesteading idea arises in its own good time. "My woolly-headed idealism seized the moment to ask 'why don't we quit our jobs in the city and find ways to live permanently somewhere out in the wilds?'"
And so the mountaineers, including Laurie's daughter Kiersten and a founding member of Greenpeace, buy a 160-acre clear-cut on the south shore of Maurelle Island. Ten families move there and live "off the grid," helping each other build "cosmic shacks" and make gardens. They acquire animals -- chickens, pigs, and a horse. Rob builds a sturdy catamaran needed for trips up and down stormy and tide-ripped Hoskyn Channel to Heriot Bay on Quadra, their access to the wider world. The "free range" children grow up fearless and resourceful. Kiersten finds a way to get the horse onto the catamaran. They do remarkably well in the community school, a short boat ride from Maurelle.
Some of the families move away over the years, but Rob and Laurie remain. They build a magnificently "organic" house -- granite fireplace and all, generate their own hydroelectricity, and create a computer-irrigated garden that produces sixty percent of their food, with a surplus to sell in town.
Rob gets as much off-island work as he needs - carpentry and wilderness guiding, and runs a designing business from home. Their "community" is a loosely knit assortment of "boat people" who help each other through various ordeals, like being stuck in a snowstorm.
A few remarkable characters stand out. There's Kayak Bill (Billy the Bolt) who travels the B.C. coast living on the land and the sea.
There's Dean Potter, who jumped off the 9200-foot summit of Mount Bute in a wing suit, making a three-minute flight into the valley. Rob guided the filmmakers up Bute Inlet and the Homathko valley, and helped rig Dean's launching platform.
To go through the air like a flying squirrel would of course require the ultimate of the "mindfulness" that informs Rob Wood's guiding philosophy. He calls it "Relational Holism." As individuals, we cannot exist apart from our relationships with other people and with Nature any more than a whirlpool in a riptide or a bird in a gyrating flock can exist independently. We are nothing if not part of nature.
And of course it follows that that the natural world was not "put there" for us to exploit and commodify and destroy by turning "resources" into money. We are not a separate creation, so let's disabuse ourselves of that idea.
Wood ends by exploring the metaphysical underpinnings of this view. He finds clues in quantum physics. An electron can be either a wave or a particle, and it can change from one to the other. Can it choose? Who knows? What would that mean? By extension, we are made of waves and particles. The particles are our physical bodies, and the waves are our connection to the outer word.
Thus, we are truly "At Home in Nature." I have grossly oversimplified Rob's analysis, so I would urge a careful reading.
My 1994 Stein disaster ended when I was discovered by Brooks Hogya and his Wilderness First Aid team out on a long training trip. Splinted and safe, I thanked Rob Wood for his advice. How's that for "universal consciousness?"
Time for a brew. "More cobbler, anyone?"
Reviewer John Gellard spent his childhood in England and Trinidad, donated his adolescence to an English boarding school, earned an MA in Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, and taught English and Drama in London, Ontario, for seven years. In 1973, he arrived in the West Kootenay where he felled and peeled pine logs on his "wild land" property and built a log cabin. Gravitating to the city, he taught drama for thirty years at Vancouver Technical Secondary School and Kitsilano Secondary. He takes an active interest in environmental issues and travels extensively in B.C.
[BCBW 2022] "Outdoors"
+++
The Zone: Rediscovering Our Natural Self
by Rob Wood
(Rocky Mountain Books $15)
Review by Graham Chandler
Anything is possible if we put our mind to it—or, more precisely, almost anything is possible if we put a universal mind to it.” So writes author Rob Wood of Maurelle Island, BC in this short but brilliant and thought-filled book about finding “the Zone,”—a special happiness related to harmony and connection with the natural world.
Wood has lived life as he wanted—adventure, experience, challenge, creativity—while caring deeply for humanity, the environment, and the intimately connected, natural world. Then, a devastating diagnosis.
“I grew up in a picturesque English village nestled into the edge of the Yorkshire Moors,” he writes. “Roaming freely for days at a time in the nearby woods, fields and open moors gave me a deep and lasting sense of nature’s timeless flow, in which everything made sense and fit together. Ever since early childhood, I have been intuitively responsive to the ability of wild places to affect my state of mind and my emotions.”
Wood trained as an architect, in which field he despaired that humans have the “right to abuse the rest of the world without any risk to ourselves.” So he soon found himself heading for the hills every weekend with his climbing pals—ending up in a local pub singing their hearts out well past closing time. “I knew, then, that I had found something precious, though elusive, a feeling of happiness, freedom and harmony: the Zone,” he writes. “I would pursue and nurture it for the rest of my life.”
And indeed he did. From Baffin Island, Yosemite Valley, the Canadian Rockies—where he lost a close friend and climber to an avalanche—to arranging demonstrations in Strathcona Park and sailing adventures; all the while minding that power of the Zone.
Then one day on an unrelated health consultation came some shocking news from his neurologist.
“He asked a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated questions such as ‘How’s your handwriting?’
“It’s all squiggly.”
“How’s your sense of smell?”
“Non-existent. It’s completely gone!”
“I’ve got bad news and good news,” said the neurologist. “The bad news is you have Parkinson’s disease. The good news is I can give you medication that will somewhat hold off the progression for up to five years. After that, I can’t promise you anything.”
Upon getting the diagnosis, Wood dutifully took the prescribed medication—levodopa, “one of the so-called ‘wonder drugs’ of the twentieth century.” But not surprisingly for readers at this point in the book, who will have appreciated this man’s belief in the power of the Zone, he starts researching Parkinson’s.
Wood learns that the disease causes depletion of the dopamine supply to the area of the brain governing autonomous movement. It’s dopamine that transmits messages from the brain’s control centre. Less dopamine means less control of automatic, habitual, subconscious muscular activity. Dopamine is also a “feel-good” hormone that keeps us motivated and lets us enjoy what we really like, he learns. Activities that give us pleasure stimulate dopamine. On the other hand, procrastination, self-doubt and lack of enthusiasm are linked with low levels of dopamine, he writes. Because Parkinson’s depletes the supply of dopamine, it creates a vicious circle of decline in both physical and emotional function.
But Wood also learns that the placebo effect (when a person’s physical or mental health appears to improve after taking a ‘dummy’ treatment) with its associated psychological factor of feeling good about ourselves can help deliver an uninterrupted supply of dopamine. What’s more, Wood relates the placebo effect to the Zone.
“It seems to me that three components of the placebo effect—focus of conscious attention; patients’ participation in influencing their own recovery; the healing power of love—are also the main ingredients of the Zone,” he writes. “So, even as I take my medications and exercise, I am a strong advocate of the healing power of the Zone—if not for total recovery, at least for holding Parkinson’s advancement somewhat at bay.”
He admits however that the need for a consistent focus of attention is the most difficult to sustain: “Yesterday I fell down the stairs because I wasn’t paying attention.”
The power of the Zone isn’t restricted to the personal, Wood says. “If humanity, in any form resembling existing civilization, is to survive the imminent tumultuous changes to the earth’s climate that our own greed and exponential growth have created, the holistic, natural Zone state of mind will have to prevail, whether by choice or by having nature thrust it upon us.”
9781771605250
Freelance writer Graham Chandler has hiked the Rockies for decades. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease five years ago.
Born in 1945, Rob Wood grew up in a village on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors, in north Yorkshire, where his father introduced him to hill walking as a child. He began rock climbing at age 14.
After studying architecture for five years at the Architectural Association School in London, England, he made his way to Montreal and ended up in Calgary.
During his time in Calgary, Rob Wood became a pioneer of ice climbing and posted numerous first ascents in the Rockies during the early 1970's. He was part of a two-man team that made the first British and Canadian ascents of the 'Nose of El Cap' at Yosemite.
Wood later 'opted out' by building a partially self-sufficient homestead for his family on Vancouver Island. There he became active in the Friends of Strathcona and the Strathcona Park Lodge Outdoor Education Centre.
Rob Wood's subtitled 'autobiography from the Canadian Wilderness Frontier' called Towards the Unknown Mountains focuses on winter ascents of Mount Waddington and Colonel Foster in Strathcona Park, but it also refers to his adventures in Scotland, Yosemite, Baffin Island and around B.C. With the companionship of his longtime friend and climbing veteran Doug Scott, Rob Wood recounts the development of 'survival philosophies' and his environmental awareness.
He is not to be confused with another Vancouver Island-based explorer, Gareth Wood.
Subsequently, At Home in Nature: A Life of Unknown Mountains and Deep Wilderness by Rob Wood is described by his publisher as the compelling story of one family's life among the rugged landscapes of British Columbia's Coast Mountains, "converting youthful ideals, raw land and a passion for the outdoors into a practical off-grid homestead."
After his work in corporate Alberta had proved unfulfilling, Rob Wood and his wife settled on Maurelle Island and erected an off-the-grid homestead. He developed a small house-design practice specializing in organic and wholesome building techniques.
When he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, Wood turned to his passion for nature to help him deal with his emotional and physical struggles, which he recounts in The Zone: Rediscovering Our Natural Self (RMB $15). His deep connection to the natural world, what he calls a “universal consciousness,” was crucial in allowing Wood not to heavily depend on medical intrusions while at the same time, continuing to enjoy a full life. A documentary feature of the same name, The Zone, concerning Wood’s core philosophy about the power of humans connecting to nature, is forthcoming.
BOOKS:
Towards the Unknown Mountains (Ptarmigan Press, 1991)
At Home in Nature (Rocky Mountain Books, 2017) $22 9781771602501
The Zone: Rediscovering Our Natural Self (RMB, 2022) $15 9781771605250
*
REVIEW
At Home in Nature: A Life of Unknown Mountains and Deep Wilderness
by Rob Wood
Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2017. $22.00 / 9781771602518
Reviewed by John Gellard
*
Rob Wood might have saved my life ... or at least my left foot. Some years ago I fell off a log bridge into Cottonwood Creek in the wildest part of the Stein valley. I broke my leg. I was alone. I swore desperately and dragged myself and my pack up onto the bank. Surely time to panic.
"If you are ever in a seemingly impossible situation in the wilderness, stop and make a cup of tea. If you can do this, you know you're going to be all right."
Rob Wood had said that to my Grade 8 students in 1984 on an excursion in Strathcona Park, a place he has protected by helping get rid of mining.
Must make a brew, then. What else was there to do? Focus. Drag out camp stove. Light it. Boil water. Put in a tea bag. I sat back, sipped my tea and calmly assessed my hopeless situation. That moment of "mindfulness," of living in the present, settled me down for my long wait. I was discovered and rescued five days later.
"Mindfulness," being "In the Zone," knowing that we are part of nature like whirlpools in the rip tide of "universal consciousness" are central themes in At Home in Nature.
Wood leaves the metaphysical discussion to the end. First he pays his dues by taking the reader on some extreme adventures. It's a story of a life lived to the fullest, from rock climbing on the crags of his native Yorkshire, to studying architecture in London, to mountaineering and ice-climbing in the Arctic and the Rockies, to starting an off-the-grid co-op, to creating a magnificent homestead on Maurelle Island.
There's a compelling structure to the book. It's rather like a long and detailed "Proust Questionnaire" -- 38 questions beginning with "What made you choose to leave the old country and come to Canada?" probing ever more deeply into breathtaking adventures, and ending with "What exactly is 'universal consciousness?'" asked by a party of young skiers at Rob's sixtieth birthday celebration.
The group had struggled through a blizzard to find a tiny cabin buried in deep snow 4,000 feet above Bute Inlet. They find the cabin, dig themselves down to it, light the wood stove, unpack the cobbler, and make a brew.
Then it's story time.
The reader is swept along by the forces that propelled Rob and his comrades on their quest for "the freedom to detach ourselves from society's umbilical cord"; and establish a relationship with nature. The quest guides him from the Yorkshire crags, "pushing internal and external limits" through to an "outer island" in the storm-tossed rip tides on the outer edge of the Salish Sea on B.C.'s West Coast.
Let's visit a couple of the adventures along the way.
With Mick Burke, he climbs the Nose of Yosemite's El Capitan in 1968. It took five days of supreme psychological and physical effort in the sweltering heat to scale the 3,000-foot granite wall. That feat inspired others to complete a climb that seemed impossible. By the way, just recently a climber was killed when a giant slab of granite fell off El Capitan.
Rob and his friend, the famous British climber Doug Scott, rope their way up Mount Waddington, the "Mystery Mountain," forty miles up the Homathko River beyond the head of Bute Inlet ("Canada's Grand Canyon, only better"), with its unpredictable violent freezing katabatic winds and snow squalls. Rob's wife Laurie and friends wait overnight at the base camp with "brew."
The homesteading idea arises in its own good time. "My woolly-headed idealism seized the moment to ask 'why don't we quit our jobs in the city and find ways to live permanently somewhere out in the wilds?'"
And so the mountaineers, including Laurie's daughter Kiersten and a founding member of Greenpeace, buy a 160-acre clear-cut on the south shore of Maurelle Island. Ten families move there and live "off the grid," helping each other build "cosmic shacks" and make gardens. They acquire animals -- chickens, pigs, and a horse. Rob builds a sturdy catamaran needed for trips up and down stormy and tide-ripped Hoskyn Channel to Heriot Bay on Quadra, their access to the wider world. The "free range" children grow up fearless and resourceful. Kiersten finds a way to get the horse onto the catamaran. They do remarkably well in the community school, a short boat ride from Maurelle.
Some of the families move away over the years, but Rob and Laurie remain. They build a magnificently "organic" house -- granite fireplace and all, generate their own hydroelectricity, and create a computer-irrigated garden that produces sixty percent of their food, with a surplus to sell in town.
Rob gets as much off-island work as he needs - carpentry and wilderness guiding, and runs a designing business from home. Their "community" is a loosely knit assortment of "boat people" who help each other through various ordeals, like being stuck in a snowstorm.
A few remarkable characters stand out. There's Kayak Bill (Billy the Bolt) who travels the B.C. coast living on the land and the sea.
There's Dean Potter, who jumped off the 9200-foot summit of Mount Bute in a wing suit, making a three-minute flight into the valley. Rob guided the filmmakers up Bute Inlet and the Homathko valley, and helped rig Dean's launching platform.
To go through the air like a flying squirrel would of course require the ultimate of the "mindfulness" that informs Rob Wood's guiding philosophy. He calls it "Relational Holism." As individuals, we cannot exist apart from our relationships with other people and with Nature any more than a whirlpool in a riptide or a bird in a gyrating flock can exist independently. We are nothing if not part of nature.
And of course it follows that that the natural world was not "put there" for us to exploit and commodify and destroy by turning "resources" into money. We are not a separate creation, so let's disabuse ourselves of that idea.
Wood ends by exploring the metaphysical underpinnings of this view. He finds clues in quantum physics. An electron can be either a wave or a particle, and it can change from one to the other. Can it choose? Who knows? What would that mean? By extension, we are made of waves and particles. The particles are our physical bodies, and the waves are our connection to the outer word.
Thus, we are truly "At Home in Nature." I have grossly oversimplified Rob's analysis, so I would urge a careful reading.
My 1994 Stein disaster ended when I was discovered by Brooks Hogya and his Wilderness First Aid team out on a long training trip. Splinted and safe, I thanked Rob Wood for his advice. How's that for "universal consciousness?"
Time for a brew. "More cobbler, anyone?"
Reviewer John Gellard spent his childhood in England and Trinidad, donated his adolescence to an English boarding school, earned an MA in Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, and taught English and Drama in London, Ontario, for seven years. In 1973, he arrived in the West Kootenay where he felled and peeled pine logs on his "wild land" property and built a log cabin. Gravitating to the city, he taught drama for thirty years at Vancouver Technical Secondary School and Kitsilano Secondary. He takes an active interest in environmental issues and travels extensively in B.C.
[BCBW 2022] "Outdoors"
+++
The Zone: Rediscovering Our Natural Self
by Rob Wood
(Rocky Mountain Books $15)
Review by Graham Chandler
Anything is possible if we put our mind to it—or, more precisely, almost anything is possible if we put a universal mind to it.” So writes author Rob Wood of Maurelle Island, BC in this short but brilliant and thought-filled book about finding “the Zone,”—a special happiness related to harmony and connection with the natural world.
Wood has lived life as he wanted—adventure, experience, challenge, creativity—while caring deeply for humanity, the environment, and the intimately connected, natural world. Then, a devastating diagnosis.
“I grew up in a picturesque English village nestled into the edge of the Yorkshire Moors,” he writes. “Roaming freely for days at a time in the nearby woods, fields and open moors gave me a deep and lasting sense of nature’s timeless flow, in which everything made sense and fit together. Ever since early childhood, I have been intuitively responsive to the ability of wild places to affect my state of mind and my emotions.”
Wood trained as an architect, in which field he despaired that humans have the “right to abuse the rest of the world without any risk to ourselves.” So he soon found himself heading for the hills every weekend with his climbing pals—ending up in a local pub singing their hearts out well past closing time. “I knew, then, that I had found something precious, though elusive, a feeling of happiness, freedom and harmony: the Zone,” he writes. “I would pursue and nurture it for the rest of my life.”
And indeed he did. From Baffin Island, Yosemite Valley, the Canadian Rockies—where he lost a close friend and climber to an avalanche—to arranging demonstrations in Strathcona Park and sailing adventures; all the while minding that power of the Zone.
Then one day on an unrelated health consultation came some shocking news from his neurologist.
“He asked a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated questions such as ‘How’s your handwriting?’
“It’s all squiggly.”
“How’s your sense of smell?”
“Non-existent. It’s completely gone!”
“I’ve got bad news and good news,” said the neurologist. “The bad news is you have Parkinson’s disease. The good news is I can give you medication that will somewhat hold off the progression for up to five years. After that, I can’t promise you anything.”
Upon getting the diagnosis, Wood dutifully took the prescribed medication—levodopa, “one of the so-called ‘wonder drugs’ of the twentieth century.” But not surprisingly for readers at this point in the book, who will have appreciated this man’s belief in the power of the Zone, he starts researching Parkinson’s.
Wood learns that the disease causes depletion of the dopamine supply to the area of the brain governing autonomous movement. It’s dopamine that transmits messages from the brain’s control centre. Less dopamine means less control of automatic, habitual, subconscious muscular activity. Dopamine is also a “feel-good” hormone that keeps us motivated and lets us enjoy what we really like, he learns. Activities that give us pleasure stimulate dopamine. On the other hand, procrastination, self-doubt and lack of enthusiasm are linked with low levels of dopamine, he writes. Because Parkinson’s depletes the supply of dopamine, it creates a vicious circle of decline in both physical and emotional function.
But Wood also learns that the placebo effect (when a person’s physical or mental health appears to improve after taking a ‘dummy’ treatment) with its associated psychological factor of feeling good about ourselves can help deliver an uninterrupted supply of dopamine. What’s more, Wood relates the placebo effect to the Zone.
“It seems to me that three components of the placebo effect—focus of conscious attention; patients’ participation in influencing their own recovery; the healing power of love—are also the main ingredients of the Zone,” he writes. “So, even as I take my medications and exercise, I am a strong advocate of the healing power of the Zone—if not for total recovery, at least for holding Parkinson’s advancement somewhat at bay.”
He admits however that the need for a consistent focus of attention is the most difficult to sustain: “Yesterday I fell down the stairs because I wasn’t paying attention.”
The power of the Zone isn’t restricted to the personal, Wood says. “If humanity, in any form resembling existing civilization, is to survive the imminent tumultuous changes to the earth’s climate that our own greed and exponential growth have created, the holistic, natural Zone state of mind will have to prevail, whether by choice or by having nature thrust it upon us.”
9781771605250
Freelance writer Graham Chandler has hiked the Rockies for decades. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease five years ago.
