TRANSCRIPT: (00:00)
Ernesto Marrero
My name is Ernesto Marrero, Miami-Dade College Kendall campus. And currently I’m majoring in pre vet with a track in zoology. It was like it was like the polar opposite of someone of the life of someone from the city. So it was like a complete 180. We spent seven days in a cabin in the mountains of Tennessee and living off the grid with all kinds of wildlife and forests all over us. And it was this constant immersion in nature that was unfounded for somebody from a city. In that sense, what stood out to me most was the birds waking up every morning to dozens of different bird calls all at once. And they ranged. I mean, I stood up up until like we had to do tasks. So that was like 8 a.m..

(00:58)
Ernesto Marrero
So I woke up at 6:30 a.m., till 8. I spent one and a half hours out there just listening to the birds and like picking out individual bird songs, trying to see if I could see any of them. The only one that I could see was the Red Cardinals, which isn’t the most obvious because they’re so red. But you could pick out individual bird calls all throughout the morning, and it was just beautiful. It was just beautiful in the afternoon, too. But the morning was what stood out at me. The moment I got into that house. It was like if I felt right at home, the only thing I had to adjust really was, you know, the schedule that I had used to. But I fit right into what I had to do. I did everything I had to do.

(01:39)
Ernesto Marrero
I mean, I was comfortable with I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all with anything. Not the compost toilets, not living with no, no actual air conditioning. Not living. Nothing. I mean, nothing made me uncomfortable. I was 100% comfortable. In fact, I was more comfortable than I’ve ever been here. So I was in my zone, truly. After breakfast we would have the heart to heart. So what we would do is we would sit down and Bill or Mitzie would read a piece that was significant to it to the day. And after that we would reflect on it by passing a stone to each of us. And whoever had the stone had the right of way, basically like they had the floor and they could talk for however long they wanted and they could comment on whatever happened the day prior.

(02:22)
Ernesto Marrero
However they were feeling in the moment when they would pass it on to the next person, when it reaches the end of the circle and it comes back around the person, people would actually comment on every other one of the other person’s comments. So we would have discussions basically that’s why it’s called heart to heart. After the heart to heart, we would have then we would have whatever task was delegated for the day. So it could be for us it was either gardening or it was planting trees. And the first day, which was Wednesday, when we had those first tasks, I did trees, tree planting and we were planting, I think they were cedars, and it was like we planted 50 in my team, my shift that 50 of these trees in a clearing and and then the next day, which is Thursday, we went gardening in the local garden where we actually where they actually grow the food for the for the for the people, you know, for us to eat.

(03:16)
Ernesto Marrero
After that we would have 2 hours of a long time. So what we would do there was 2 to 4 p.m. and when 2 hit you have basically free time to do whatever you want. What I did the first day was I basically explored the property of I literally went around whatever road. We had a map on us. So they gave us a map prior to alone time and they explained to us like what the property lines are what major marked mile markers you’re supposed to expect when you’re looking around and. And so I did that. I ended up going down a hill and with no trails. So I started on our trail and I didn’t go. I decided to be adventurous and get out of the trail. So since it was like a small property, I wasn’t scared of getting lost or anything like that. So I went off the trail and I ended up like a down by the creek, by a creek that was in the bottom of the hill. So we’re on top of the hill.

(04:06)
Ernesto Marrero
And I went down this way and ended up on the creek. And I followed the creek along side to a prairie or like a open field almost, and kept following it along like a almost like a road, like out of the road that led up to the cabin. And I ended up all the way up top of a hill that was a farmhouse overlooking a farmhouse. And I just sat there and they told us to find a quiet spot during our alone time, which was a place where that was actually one of the readings, one of the readings that they did that Mitzie did was about a Native American story about finding your own space, your quiet place where we would be. It would be our secret place where we would sit down and just listen to nature.

(04:48)
Ernesto Marrero
So I did that. I found the creek, went up that hill and I just sat there, you know, overlooking the whole forest, basically. And that was my first quiet place. Quiet place was from reading that we had and one of the Heart to Hearts. Mitzi read a book about a Native American story, about a young boy whose grandma had talked to him about a concept of Native American history, that they had quiet places. So the boy asked his grandma. The boy had found a quiet place just by coincidence and he had told his grandma that he she was too near his. And the boy, basically they got talking and the grandma was like, We all have quiet places. We just don’t talk about it. And and so the concept was that you find a place in nature where you are alone or you feel connected to nature, and you just sit there and listen and take in, become a part of nature without becoming, you know, because when you’re walking through the forest, you’re very loud, you’re not really part of it.

(05:49)
Ernesto Marrero
So when you’re in your quiet place, you become part of it. My first quiet place was on top of that hill that I followed along the creek, and the reason I chose it was mostly because of the view, because I could see over the entire property. And so I just sat there and, you know, I just overlook the creek and the forest and the property and and it was and it made me realize how beautiful Tennessee is. It’s such a beautiful country or state. And so I guess the next quiet place that I chose was actually when I was going down the same day, same day, I chose to the same day. So I was going down the hill trying to get back in time. It was almost late and I get back in time before six, before four.

(06:34)
Ernesto Marrero
And I was going down this hill, the hill that I was on top of from the creek. And I went down an embankment and a cliff and it was like a cliff. It was small cliff, but I had to jump down it and I crossed like a dirt gravel path and I climbed up a hill that was already there. But there was no there was no path or anything was no trail. So I climbed up that hill and I was like, I think I know where I am. I’m going, I’m following. I had my phone on me, so I had my compass on and I knew I was following North, so I knew that the cabin was north.

(07:02)
Ernesto Marrero
So I just followed in the general direction of North and I kept climbing these like really steep hills. And coming from Miami, you don’t expect super steep hills. So it was a workout in itself. But I use trees to like leverage myself, climbed up, so I got to the top and there was a clearing and there was a house. It was a random cabin there. And I was like, This is not on the map. Where am I? And I walked up to the house and I saw there was like a truck there and a road like a paved road. And I was like and I saw there was a there was a an air conditioning unit. And I was like, this is this is not part of Narrow Ridge, this connected to the grid.

(07:35)
Ernesto Marrero
So I was like, Oh, boy, where am I? So I checked the map and there was there was no basically I basically didn’t know where I was. So I took a compass. I went north, so I went east and I just walked east until I found something that I recognized. And finally I got to the paved road that led to the to the to the lodge.
One of the guys, the guy who was planting trees, he found me. He drove up behind me and he’s like, Hey, man, you lost. And I was like, Yeah, kind of. Do you know where the lodge is? And he was like, Yeah, yeah, it’s up there. And, and behind me had been his little dog, so that was irrelevant. But, you know, being was there.

(08:10)
Ernesto Marrero
So I was pretty cool. And so I walked back to the lodge and I got there with one minute to spare for before the time was called before dinner, basically. So those are quiet places. And for a long time I basically did the same thing. Sometimes I hung out with people, sometimes we went together, sometimes we explored different places that we found out about sometimes.

(08:30)
Ernesto Marrero
But one time we went to the, um, the library. It was a library that they had down there, and we went with a group of people all the time. We went to the creek and but yeah, it was, it was supposed to be alone time, but it was, it was a lot of exploring the property. After alone time, it was dinner time. So we would do the gratefulness circle again. And we would say what we were grateful for, and then the chores again for the afternoon. And then we would have dinner. And after dinner it depends on the day. But on one of the days it was, we had the night walk after. So we didn’t go immediately to do sleep or anything like that.

(09:10)
Ernesto Marrero
And so that day we had, we put on a bunch of of layers on because it was really cold. It was like 45, 50 degrees out. And we went out in a group in a truck first in the trucks. We went out and we went out to this open space on top of a hill that like you see all the stars and all that glory. Unfortunately, there was a full moon that day, so we didn’t see all the stars in all their glory. But there was way more than we would see here in Miami. And I mean, the full moon was pretty cool, anyway. But after the the looking at the stars and finding the different constellations, we walked into the woods. And the crazy part is that apparently, according to Bill and Mitzie, it was supposed to be like pure, pure, dark.

(09:50)
Ernesto Marrero
So you’re not supposed to see anything. It was just use your senses. But the fact that the full moon was out there meant that, like we could see for miles. So it was like a huge lantern in the sky. It was all blue and you could see perfectly fine. So it didn’t really serve the purpose that they wanted it to, which was to connect to your other senses apart from your sight. But that’s not cool. Nonetheless. And then after that, you know, we went to sleep, some of us. But I personally mean, some of the people personally did not really want to sleep because we wanted to take in the whole experience fully. So we stayed up really late and we just like walked around the edge of the property not far away, the edge of the property just looking at how a night life was there and just looking at the stars, reading, you know, just hanging out.

(10:32)
Ernesto Marrero
So that was that was most of my days. Truly, the heart of hearts were the biggest impact for me because it was a moment that I like a chance to express my emotions with people I didn’t know for the first time in my life. And even with people that I did know, I had a heart. I had a lot of trouble expressing my emotions. So the fact that I got to just talk for however long I wanted to and nobody interrupted me, it was it was incredible. And it changed me so much so that I don’t remember how I dealt with my emotions prior to going to this trip. So now I’m like a completely different person and it it’s incredible how much of a connection you could form with people that you didn’t know prior just by sitting down with them and having such close connections and having such close emotional ties to them in this short amount of time.

(11:20)
Ernesto Marrero
So that was an impact. Digital Detox. I forgot about that. I mean, the same way that I forgot about my phone the entire time, it was actually so instant. Like it was like if I was meant to let go of my phone in that moment I got there. There was obviously no Internet, so my brain was like, All right, you can use this or whatever. It would just put it away. Never use it again. I the only time I use it was for taking pictures and it was so relieving almost. I personally never had an addiction on my phone. I never grew up with a phone. So I like like I had a phone like when I was in eighth grade. So was we later than everybody else did.

(11:57)
Ernesto Marrero
But either way, like, I still found that I used it and I still do use it like even now as a lot as a big part of my life and just being able to let go, being able to have no worries and not having, you know, having to scroll through Instagram, wasting time and all that, all that stuff. In these seven days since, I had nothing to do in these five or six hours where I use my phone, usually used my phone, I filled up with drawing and reading and talking to people. So in these seven days, I drew more on my sketchbook than I have ever drawn in my entire life. That sketchbook got filled up more than it ever has.

(12:31)
Ernesto Marrero
It was empty before I brought it in empty, and by the end of the time it was like six pages filled with, like different sketches of different animals Finished, by the way, because I usually leave them like, empty and or like, halfway finished and I finished them later. Now, these were six finished pieces and and that’s how I spent most of my time and reading too. I got halfway through a big book, the something that I never had time to do because of school mostly. And, you know, just life doesn’t let you do that. So the digital detox, what it does is like it takes you away from this environment that your phone creates where like it’s a little bubble and it puts you, it gives you the chance to look out and listen a lot and, and yeah, man, like it.

(13:15)
Ernesto Marrero
It really does because it makes you part of it makes you realize that you’re part of this, that you’re not just a different thing, that you’re not. Because in the city, like I always say, in the city, you’re just you’re not part of this. Like, yeah, you have trees and birds, but they’re just birds and trees. They over there, you part of you, you know, and you rely on it because you are living outside of the grid. You need to be pulled by the earth. So the way that the cooling for the building does is that it’s based on soil temperature. It was like 56 degrees, so it remains 56 degrees the whole time. So we were cool. We really being kept cool by Earth. And of course, the solar panels kept the electricity going and the water was from the wells.

(13:56)
Ernesto Marrero
So it’s like we’re relying on Earth. If we didn’t have Earth here, we wouldn’t be alive. We wouldn’t have survived those seven days. So it was like it was. And again, you don’t really realize that when you’re on your phone, you don’t. So it like brings you away from that and it really takes you away. And even when I came back, even when I came back, I sometimes just sit or lower my window in my car, turn off the music and just listen to wildlife, you know, whatever wildlife, the little wildlife we have here. And ever since I’m I’ve literally learned the species of all the birds here. That’s what I spent my free time doing. I just listen and look and see and bird watch here, which I didn’t even think was possible. They didn’t think there was much birds here. There’s actually a lot actually a lot of variety. That allows you to realize, like I said, that it was that you’re part of it and that this is not what we’re meant to live in.

(14:46)
Ernesto Marrero
This is not what we’re meant to be. That what we evolved to live in or we evolved to live in was out there. And that’s why we felt so comfortable being in there. Even a city, kids our whole lives, we just fit right in. At least I did, because we’re meant to be. We’re meant to be a live life that we’re not meant to live with cars, with buildings, with skyscrapers. It’s just not natural. So, you know, like it brings you back to your humanity and makes you realize that it’s not humans and animals. It’s animals. We’re all animals. We’re all part of the natural world. Take more pictures, I think, because you’re in that mentality of I don’t want use me phone, you know. And you’re not going to because you can’t there’s no Internet.

(15:28)
Ernesto Marrero
You can you can’t do anything on your phone. So I still do take pictures because thankfully, I had a lot of people in my group that were photographers, but some people might not who might not have that experience. So be that person who takes pictures, because looking back now, that’s what brings us back to that place. And I mean, even a day after it felt like a memory, it felt like nostalgic because of the pictures. And I would not remember all the things that I did if it weren’t for the pictures that I took. So take pictures. That’s something. Bring. I did. I did the right thing. I brought things to do when I was in free time. So if you’re into sketching, bring sketchbook. If you’re in a painting. There was a guy that was in a painting, a really cool guy.

(16:10)
Ernesto Marrero
He painted like a bunch of scenery and it was really cool. Something that I do regret is I didn’t sleep. So even though I don’t regret it kind of because I did make the most of like the night life and all that and socializing. I do feel like I interrupted a lot of people’s sleep, so I didn’t. I’m not cool with that. So if you’re going to talk on the night, if you’re night owl like me, go outside of the lodge. Don’t interrupt people’s sleep. It’s not fair to them. And everyone can hear everything right next to you. So. So, yeah. And it’s not that scary. The reason we were inside is because we thought it was scary. Because you hear a raccoon once and we were like, Oh, no, inside.

(16:48)
Ernesto Marrero
But it was just a raccoon. Like, I realize that there is a raccoon. There’s nothing. There’s not really big predators or anything like bigfoots. There’s nothing like that. It’s pretty beautiful. Even at night. I talked to Bill. Bill is an awesome guy, and I feel like people will love him, but people don’t really listen as much. And that guy will talk about anything in that forest for ages. Just listen to asking questions, and you’ll notice that he’s really, really interested in talking to people about stuff. So definitely talk to Bill and also a lot of the residents, because the other residents, people like that, we kind of like pass by them, but they’re cool too, they’re cool people too, and they can even talk to you about how they’re living.

(17:34)
Ernesto Marrero
They’re sustainable house because there’s normal people that came into it not like Bill and Mitzi, which are kind of like that. The whole purpose was to build this this place. Now they came in, they bought land and they’re making it sustainable on their own. So talk to them and prepare yourself for a vegan diet. It’s not a big jump, really, because you’re still eating. There’s still proteins in there, There’s still all the things you need, but they’re going to come from something else. And I was personally I am personally a big meat eater. So coming away from eating, you know, chicken, eggs and steak, I mean, that changed me completely. And it made me realize that, damn, I eat a lot of meat, so I won’t lie.

(18:21)
Ernesto Marrero
I never got used to it. I never got used to not having meat. I did like when I came back and had that chicken breast again, I was like finally. But at the same time, it made me like step away from the fact that I thought, It made me, step away from thinking that vegan food was bad. It was all like nasty lettuce, you know, all that. It’s not actually, it’s actually really good. And you can make some great stuff with beans that like lentils are really good for. They actually really something make it taste like meat. It was crazy. We had like these oatmeal burgers and they tasted like meat. It was so weird because we had been missing meat for like four days and we were like, This is bad.

(18:54)
Ernesto Marrero
We tasted it. It tasted like a burger. This is better than a burger, actually. So I was like, Wow. So yeah, be prepared for a vegan diet. Or given that there’s been like a couple of months since it happened, I’ve had time to experiment and I want the first few days. You do want to get rid of it and you do want to say it. Be never going to use my phone again. But man, it’s like if it requires it, you’re almost required to use it. So I went right back to using my phone and to the bad habits again in like a week. But if I didn’t require it, if I was living like I want to live, I wouldn’t even have a phone.

(19:35)
Ernesto Marrero
Obviously, I would have like a landline if anything. So definitely that like I wouldn’t have a smartphone. And it made me more wary of technology in a way, because the more like even. You know about the apple. The apple headset thing that came out recently? That I was like super suspicious that because that’s taking away more from the world. I was like are like I before I was like, okay, I want to try this is really cool.

(20:02)
Ernesto Marrero
I’m like, you know, But now I’m like, nothing that takes me that much away because eventually you don’t just lead to complete completely being away from that. So it opened my eyes to that and you know, obviously now if I were to compare myself to someone who didn’t do this and somehow and me, I feel like people who didn’t do it would be more keen to be on their phone in certain situations, whereas I would be more taking it into my personal self like I would be taking in the surroundings a bit more and then maybe taking pictures.

(20:41)
Ernesto Marrero
Whereas before I would have been like, okay, I want to take pictures for the future, for memories in the future. Not like I want the memories in my actual memories, because that’s where it truly matters. You know, being able to tell stories instead of showing pictures is more. It’s something that I’m more excited to do than that. Like, I’m more excited to tell stories and show pictures.