Boyd Varty - 40 Days and 40 Nights

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
In the midst of the worldwide quarantine, my friend Boyd Varty decided to begin an adventure he has been considering for a long time, a 40-day and 40-night stay in the African wilderness.
I'm releasing this short conversation with Boyd to pique your interest in his daily dispatches. He will be taking short audio, journal-like recordings and sharing them with the world as he goes. As of today, there are several that you can listen to by subscribing to the Track Your Life podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Please enjoy this short chat with my friend Boyd Varty and check out Track Your Life.
So Boyd, you're doing one of the most interesting things or about to set off on one of the most interesting things of anybody that I know in this strange state of quarantine that we're in in the world. I'd love for you to begin by just describing exactly what it is you're about to do. And then I want to pick apart the whys, the hows, the whens, and all the fun aspects of this because I got to admit I'm a little jealous.

**Boyd Varty** (0:52)
Sure, well, I'm about to embark on 40 days and 40 nights alone in the wilderness at Londolozi. So this is literally the last night that I'll be in the camp and then I head out early tomorrow morning.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:04)
Where are you staying?

**Boyd Varty** (1:06)
So there are two old tree houses on the property and I'm gonna be staying at one of these tree houses that happens to be next to the river. I decided it's still summer, it's pretty hot, so it's a perfect spot. It's up in a beautiful ebony tree above the river.
You could imagine it like a kind of, it's a wooden deck suspended in the tree and being on a wooden deck being up in a tree, it makes sleeping a lot more comfortable at night because you don't have the heat of being in a tent and you don't have to keep watching, worry about something dragging you away.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:34)
I know this wasn't the reason you're doing it, but I think you just found this quote. Can you share the origin of the word quarantine that you were just telling me about?

**Boyd Varty** (1:42)
Sure. I mean, it has felt like a moment in time. Originally, I've always wanted to do this. It's something, and I've done versions of it. I've spent time out there with other people. I've spent time by myself, but I've never had 40 days and 40 nights or six weeks really ever on the schedule. I haven't been able to get that time. And now with what's happened in the world, it was scheduled to start in the winter on July 6th, but it just feels like everything has now lined up for it to begin on the 1st of April. And strangely, in the midst of this really weird time we're in, the word quarantine originates from the Venetian dialect form of the Italian, and I'm going to butcher this a bit, quaranta giorni, meaning 40 days.
And there's obviously this archetypal number. It's the time that Jesus went into the desert for 40 days and 40 nights to be alone. In various literature, there are over 40,000 accounts of various people at some stage feeling a pull to go and be alone in nature. And so the kind of the core of the idea is I've always wanted to go and try and understand that experience from inside of it.
And so to go and put myself alone in the natural world and to just kind of watch what happens to my state of being, watch what happens to my thought pattern, watch what happens to my body, just be immersed and be paying attention inside of that immersion.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:07)
Can you say a little bit more about your history with this idea? You say you've always kind of wanted to do this. Where did that begin? What are some of the, you mentioned the very famous, Jesus is 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness.
What are some of the other personal inspirations that made you so interested in doing something like this?

**Boyd Varty** (3:24)
You know, I grew up around a lot of people who, to them, the natural world was church.
And there was something, from the time I was very young, I was aware that there was something in the symbology of what wilderness means. When we go into wilderness, it affects us in very fundamental and primal ways.
And I was exposed to people who would describe how that encounter with a wild place changed something inside of them. It helped them get in touch with themselves in a different way. And then if you look back through the mystical encounters, the most famous one is Jesus going into the desert. And I've been thinking a lot about what he was doing while he was out there. He was definitely having encounters with his own psyche. My teacher, Byron Katie, who is probably the person I feel spiritually the deepest affinity to, after she had her awakening experience, her shift in consciousness, she started just walking out into the desert around Barstow and just going to be alone out there. And then there's various other accounts. Another famous one that has always run really deep for me is the account of St. Francis. Here is this guy who is born to wealth in a rich merchant's family.