Stark places have a way of stripping all the superfluous thoughts away. Stark realities have a way of bringing us to the places within that we spend a lot of time and energy avoiding. I have always liked stark places. Desolate places. Dry and windswept desert landscapes. Or urban wastelands of rusted indust-reality. Places no one seems to want any more, or places no one has figured out how to exploit. The hinterlands between the favorite gathering hubs of culture. These are the kinds of places that lay my own mind and soul open - they take over my senses and breath for me. With out them I am lost in a labyrinth of faces and contact of people - like a man trapped on an interstate in a traffic jamb. Alone. Surrounded. In that groove we are all stuck in a tractor beam of self and other awareness. But in a desolation - alone- there is only a self, and it is poignantly insignificant. And this draws the awareness of the keen part of the mind to the other. Which is not human. But which, I imagine, contains humans, in the manner that the skin of a beautiful woman contains a mole. And I am, at once, fragile, and incapable of survival, and expansive beyond all limitations of flesh and worrisome circumstance.
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For me, wilderness is indeed wild, something uncontrolled, but better, something natural. Ecosystems are complex, composed of interrelating parts that evolution has shaped against each other. Humanity cannot create or even recreate such; when a forest is cut, the new and raw ecology takes decades to begin to recreate the climax communitythat was before (that's why I'm against the clearing of natural forests, and instead in favor of tree farms).
However, that's only half the reason for my walks on the wild side. As social animals we need each other, and we socialize a lot. But I need solitude too, apartness. I find I can best hear my inner voices when I'm absent from the herd. Indeed, after a few days of wilderness, of speaking to no one, I find that I'm barely speaking to myself, that I'm instead listening to the void. My thoughts are no longer words (note that my experience contradicts "linguistic relativity"), even thought becomes unnecessary for long passages of time, replaced by experience. Having only recently seen http://www.pbs.org/thebuddha/, I begin to see that I'm not the first to understand this. :)
And would we really want a world such as "The Mark of Gideon"? I surely hope not, am glad when I see wilderness valued for its own sake (as well as for its untarnished "value" to humanity, a concept that I find twisted, as if nature needed to justify itself).
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