Resuscitating the Waning Taste for Life

     From Loren Eisley’s The Immense Journey and his chapter entitled “The Judgment of Birds,” we read the following:

     “It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is of the proper sort, he will return with a message. It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about.
     “The world, I have come to believe, is a very queer place, but we have been part of this queerness for so long that we tend to take it for granted. We rush to and fro like Mad Hatters upon our peculiar errands, all the time imagining our surroundings to be dull and ourselves quite ordinary creatures. Actually, there is nothing in the world to encourage this idea, but such is the mind of man, and this is why he finds it necessary from time to time to send emissaries into the wilderness in the hope of learning of great events, or plans in store for him, that will resuscitate his waning taste for life. His great news services, his world-wide radio network, he knows with a last remnant of healthy distrust will be of no use to him in this matter. No miracle can withstand a radio broadcast, and it is certain that it would be no miracle if it could. One must seek, then, what only the solitary approach can give—a natural revelation.” (pages 163-164)

     I’ve copied this passage to remind me of the following primary assumptions of my life:

•      Nature is our home, both archetypal and actual.
•      Most things in our artificial world unwittingly conspire to have us forget this.
•      And when this world is too much with us, getting and spending, we can return to nature even if is only a shadow of the wilderness it used to be. We are made better every single time we walk through woods or a prairie, stalk mushrooms across a floor of moss and fern, strain through binoculars to identify waterbirds in a marsh, or slowly pick over a rocky creekside in a small canyon. I always feel my emotions and intellect elevated by the end of such forays, and for hours afterwards I am alive. I am alive.
•      We cannot leave nature after these times unchanged for the better, and often the change can be translated into our language as some corrective to how we have been living or thinking. It is not an unhealthy thing to return to the world of people. It is perhaps necessary and what we bring back may be the boon for which the people have been waiting.
•      This is the true religion and the corrupted source for every other one.