The Eerie, Cold, and Bleak

Taking on things that are eerie, cold,and bleak, foreign, like the silence in darkness as the ship's prow slices through the black breakers of night. Hard, biting things ; firm, solid things ; experiences on the borderlands between confusion and enlightenment. How much of the eerie can you swallow? Don't swallow too much, but swallow just enough. It makes you a man. Your ability to assimilate the vast and eerie, the windy and cold, makes you a man. It grows you up. The wilderness is there, only in part, to help mature a person, and put fibre, and grit, and ice into a man's bones, to lend sinew, and agility, and an ability to face the vast without getting swallowed up, which is not easy. It is never easy.