The Forest of Teeth and Legends
“Life is about nodding to the wild things that cross your path, and then walking on..” - Simon Clark
Opening: Entering Transylvania
The flight from Iceland left me with windburn on my face, a pack full of dirty gear, and a head still full of volcanoes.
Most people would have gone home. I didn’t. Instead, I pointed myself east.
Towards the Carpathian Mountains. Towards a forest older than empires.
The air changed before the landscape did.
Thicker.
Heavier.
Like the land itself was holding its breath. And as the road climbed into the mist-wrapped pines of Transylvania, I realised that this was the first time since the hospital that I’d come somewhere not to climb or to prove.
I had come here to feel something primal: to track bears.
Into the Woods
There’s a silence in those forests that isn’t empty. It’s watching.
I had learned a long time ago to place each step with care, I knew how to read the tracks, scratches high on a tree trunk, huge, fresh paw prints in soft earth, a musky smell that lingered on the cold air like a ghost.
And then, deeper in, the tracks became fresher.
Closer.
Every step forward made the hospital bed feel further behind me. There was no beeping monitor here, no sterile white ceiling.
Just mist, the rustle of leaves, and the beating of my own heart.
The Encounter
I stopped, less than fifty feet ahead a shape moved in the trees, it was massive, almost silent.
A bear. Wild. Alive.
We stared at each other. Not a sound. Not a breath of wind.
There are no words for a moment like that. In those few seconds, the entire world narrows to one truth: you are no longer at the top of the food chain. And then… something extraordinary. The bear tilted its head slightly. I did the same. A single nod, shared and just like that, we both turned and walked away, each of us leaving the other to continue our own separate journeys. No fear. No fight. Just respect.
Two survivors crossing paths.
Dracula’s Castle
The next day, still carrying that silent exchange inside me, I travelled to Bran Castle.
The walls are older than memory. You can feel the weight of every story ever told about vampires in the stones themselves and as I stood there, in the place the world knows as Dracula’s Castle, I realised how strange it was that people talk about the undead like they are fantasy.
I know what it means to come back from the dead, I have walked out of my own coffin and I am no myth.
Those walls couldn’t scare me because I have already survived something much worse.
The Next Step
When I left Transylvania, I didn’t look back, because that bear had shown me something important:
Life isn’t about standing still in awe forever - Life is about nodding to the wild things that cross your path and then walking on.
For me, that meant Morocco. Mount Toubkal. The next impossible summit. But the memory of that bear stays with me even now.
Every time I stand on the edge of fear, I remember the quiet agreement we made:
You go your way.
I’ll go mine.
"Track Your Own Bear" - A 2-Minute Wilderness Exercise
Read this slowly. Don’t rush it.
Close your eyes.
Picture the forest in the story — mist, old pine, cold air.Take one breath like you’re stepping onto the trail.
Let the noise of your real life shift to the background.Now imagine a shape moving between the trees.
What appears?
Not a bear — your bear.
The thing you’ve been avoiding, fearing, or quietly respecting from a distance.Stay with it.
Look at it without running.
Without fighting.
Just observing.Ask one silent question:
“What are you here to teach me?”Let the answer come without forcing it.
A word. A memory. A feeling. A direction.
Anything counts.Now — the nod.
You nod to it.
It nods back.
A brief, quiet agreement:
You go your way. I’ll go mine.Open your eyes.
Write down what you saw.
Not a paragraph.
Just the first sentence that arrives.
This is how you track the wild inside you:
Not by chasing it — but by acknowledging it, then walking forward.
