When Kurt Hoelting joined his friends in trekking 200 miles across southern Mexico a few years ago, encountering danger on the road felt like a real possibility.
It is that element of risk that permeates much of the lifetime of adventures that Hoelting recounts in his new book, “Apprentice to the Wild” — whether it be kayaking to an Alaskan glacier in his 20s where hypothermia was a potential threat or holding a peace vigil in Kyiv during wartime in his 70s. Running through the stories is an undercurrent of spirituality that is Hoelting’s practice of Zen.
Hoelting’s book came out earlier this month, published by Empty Bowl Press, an independent publishing company based on the Olympic Peninsula. What started as a letter to his grandchildren became so much more; his editor Holly Hughes encouraged him to broaden the scope of the book with more essays about some of his more recent experiences.
A book launch event for “Apprentice to the Wild” is set for 3 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 1 at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Whidbey Island, located at 20103 Highway 525 in Freeland.
The next day at the church, Hoelting plans to preach the sermon, which will build on themes from his book.
An ordained Protestant minister, Hoelting felt drawn to exploring Zen, which was making quite a buzz on the West Coast in the 1970s. After being a campus minister for a few years, Hoelting went to his first Zen retreat and was hooked. He loved the physical discipline of it and the mental clarity that meditation brought. Nowadays, he has a room in his home dedicated entirely to the practice, adorned with calligraphy made by Japanese Zen master Harada Roshi.
Since his freshman year of college, Hoelting has spent just about every summer in Alaska. First as a commercial fisherman, seining massive halibut, salmon and other wild fish. Later, he founded Inside Passages, which offered mindfulness-based kayaking and camping trips that incorporated meditation and an ample appreciation of wildlife.
“The whole planet was magnificent nature, not that long ago,” Hoelting said. “To get a taste of what that is like in a really wild place in Alaska can sort of help us reenvision where we live in a more holistic way and maybe see some ways toward restoration of the places that we live.”
He operated Inside Passages as the head guide from 1994 to 2021, when the last trip set float. Throughout the rest of the year he lived on Whidbey Island, in a towering home of natural materials he constructed himself in Clinton, working mostly as a carpenter.
During that time, he entered a very different domain of the wild – the basement of the VA hospital in Seattle. Hoelting started a program using techniques of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which helped veterans who were struggling with physical pain, PTSD and depression.
Though not a veteran himself and vehemently against the Vietnam War and other conflicts, Hoelting had to put aside his own abstract moral qualms to help the suffering people in front of him. It put him outside his comfort zone, and along the way he developed deep friendships.
He estimated that nearly 1,000 veterans took his eight-week course. He helped treat a wide swath of the community, people of all backgrounds who were in the military.
“It really shifted the culture of the VA, I think among veterans in some important ways,” he said of the mindfulness courses. “It became a kind of community center for them that was a place that they didn’t just have to talk about themselves but could work on themselves.”
The hardest but most powerful chapter to write, Hoelting said, was about the loss of his two sons. His older son, Alex, spent his final days at Enso House in Freeland, which formerly provided hospice services but now supports caregivers. One of the founders, David Trowbridge, was associated with the nearby Tahoma One Drop Zen Monastery, where he was a student of the aforementioned Roshi, who had a vision of starting a home for the dying to receive care at the end of their lives.
“It’s hardest to show up for the painful things in our lives, but sometimes turning toward what’s painful rather than running away from it is the kind of secret formula for finding some silver lining in it,” Hoelting said.
His adventures continued later in life, undeterred by the changes in the world brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, Hoelting walked with Zen priests Soten Lynch and Shinei Monial for a portion of their voyage through Mexico and Central America. The pilgrimage by foot was a hot and grueling journey, but a meaningful and worthwhile one.
Despite concerns of safety, the group of three friends was never attacked. They traveled between small villages, eating in local establishments whose owners offered them a place to camp and advice about which paths to avoid as they traveled.
“There were a couple of dicey times, but it always worked out really well,” Hoelting said. “And that was part of what was so life-changing about it, is that it wasn’t just a tourist experience. I never met a person who spoke English the whole time and a lot of the people we would run into hadn’t seen an American or a gringo in years, so it was really off the beaten track.”
The following year, Hoelting was invited to Kyiv to hold a peace vigil in Ukraine. He readily accepted and was astounded to discover a busy, thriving city when he arrived. The people had not stopped for anything, not even war.
The city was under missile attacks every night, and sirens could be heard often.
“Everybody had a cell phone app – this is the new face of war – that told them, alerted them in real time if there was a missile that had entered Ukranian air space and where it was headed and when it would arrive and whether we should go to a bomb shelter,” Hoelting said.
Fortunately, no peril came to him, and the group he was part of was able to successfully hold a week-long peace vigil in a theater.
Rather than avoiding them, Hoelting has embraced the many risks in his lifetime. After all, he said, we could die at any moment, and getting into a car to drive across town can hold just as much risk.
Any uncertainty in life that he faces, he also welcomes with open arms.
“A lot of people that I know feel so fatalistic about the future that they’re just sitting around, doing nothing and getting depressed,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a path forward. In that sense, the practice of mindfulness, obviously for me, is one of the refuges.”
To learn more about his new book, visit emptybowl.org/store/p/apprentice-to-the-wild.