Hi, I’m Victoria.

For as early as I can remember, I was terrified of death.

I have a distinct memory of jolting up in bed one night at five years old, struck by the realization that I, and everyone I loved, was going to die. Raised in a staunchly secular household, I struggled to make sense of mortality. I was told that death was a state of non-existence and oblivion from which no one returned, and that life was something to be guarded with immense hypervigilance. As a child I had many transcendent experiences, but without a framework for spiritual exploration and expansion, death loomed as the ultimate eternal void.

By the time I was an adult, I found myself in a painful purgatory. I was disenchanted by the meaninglessness of life and horrified by the nothingness of death. My existential distress spiraled into chronic anxiety and intense hypochondria. Gripped by an unrelenting fear of dying, I spent the majority of my twenties cycling in and out of emergency rooms with severe panic attacks and psychosomatic symptoms. My life became dominated by obsessive thoughts and behaviors. Even though I was objectively young and healthy, every ache and pain was a horrible rare disease or terminal illness waiting to kill me. Nowhere felt safe, least of all my own body. 

Then COVID arrived. Suddenly, my fixation with death collided with an actual, imminent threat. No longer a child waking from a nightmare or a young adult with a panic attack in the emergency room, I was a human being vulnerable to an unknown virus and trying to make sense of a world in crisis. For perhaps the first time in modern memory, the collective veil had lifted, and no one was exempt from directly reckoning with their mortality. 

For someone who had spent their entire life fighting to escape the reality of death, there was nowhere left to hide. Paralyzed by fear and desperate to process my grief, I started to mindfully wander in the woods behind my house. I took no phone, had no plan, and followed no trail–I simply aimlessly walked through the trees, doing whatever I could to regulate my nervous system. I wasn’t seeking transformation or spiritual discovery; I started roaming because I was mentally unraveling and had nowhere else to turn. 

Yet, to my surprise, transformation arrived anyway. Over several years, in the company of juniper and birdsong, something whole and wild began supplanting my fear of death. Season after season, I witnessed cycles of decay and regeneration with awe and childlike wonder – mushrooms sprouting from last autumn’s leaves; scavengers feasting on animal remains; moss unfurling over fallen ponderosas; deer bones softening into soil.

Through this slow and subtle worship, I came to realize that death was not a rupture to be feared, but a rhythm to be remembered. The more deeply I listened, the clearer it became that it wasn’t dying I was afraid of–it was forgetting that I was part of something larger all along. At last, I could see that my existential dread was rooted in displacement from the magic and mystery of the Earth. My health anxiety stemmed from a fear of dissolution, but what I found through my walks was a sense of deep belonging and integration. Life and death were both part of a vast, wild, and eternal dance – and finally, I began dancing.