Wild Nahani
Napapiiri
(English version)
Return to the wild
My "Walden"
Synopsis
At that lonely and wild place where
the spirit is part of nature.
To the loving memory
of my parents.
"All things near and far are secretly linked to each other and you can not touch a flower without disturbing a star"
G. Bateson
"Nature must be respected and safeguarded for its value in itself. He is the man who has to adapt to his needs and not vice versa. If it is possible, we must make sure that the wild world lives in its free continuity and its pride, that freedom and the pride that man, a prisoner and slave of his own conventions, perhaps unconsciously envies "
Wild Nahani
"Everyone has a place to listen somewhere"
Sigurd Olson
This book is my spiritual testament!
BE STRONG
Preface
"There is only hope of rejecting the tyrannical ambition
of civilization to conquer every place on earth.
This hope is the organization of the people most sensitive
to the values of the spirit,
so that they fight for the free
continuity of the wild nature ".
Robert Marshall
In this, which I define naturalistic story, deliberately developed under the personality of Larsen and in a poetic narrative style, rich in surreal components, and partly autobiographical, I narrate the events, the experiences, the existential crises and especially the reflections of one of his solitary a surreal journey, written in the metaphor of a mental, spiritual but perhaps also physical dimension (the doubt remains in the entire narration of the piece), looking for a "listening point" where to understand and reveal the deep motivations that are at basis of the dramatic conflict between man and nature. After a long pilgrimage the character will reach the Arctic polar circle, the "great north", inside the fascinating boreal hemisphere forest, the taiga, to put himself on the edge of human reality in order to be able to acquire in solitude and in fullness. autonomy, the answers that can only be learned by listening to the "wind" of the wilderness, a wilderness that is not only material but also interior. An indecipherable dream and above all a mysterious letter that Larsen will receive in his sunny place, will reveal and make him aware of all the hidden truths that in his being were in fact already evident or in any case latent. And in this dimension the narration reveals the profound sense of the wilderness of places and of the spirit. The script is then interspersed with continuous flash-backs (whose titles, to highlight them, are written with another character and the italicized text) that outline the life of the brown bear to evoke even more the obvious contrast between the free life of a a savage species that has been repeating itself in its natural environments since time immemorial, and our existence so encompassed by contradictions, splits, lives without awareness. The brown bear acts as a counterweight and is an excellent guide to help us reconstruct at least one piece of our disharmonious living in which too many pieces are scattered because "At the origin of the bear's veneration there is the female principle of birth, growth, decadence and rebirth, because the bear is the supreme model, and therefore the guiding spirit, of the theme of renewal "(Paul Shepard to Barry Sanders). The narration of the deeds of a wild animal is a clear example that helps us to focus deep down the purest spirit of wilderness. The passages on the life of the bear were written by means of a free and partial re-elaboration and adaptation to the region and to the Finnish natural environment, of many of the descriptions of the long story by Franco Zunino, "The days of the brown bear". This choice stems from my inner need to keep alive the link with Abruzzo and the animal for whose protection for many years I worked in that native Italian region.
Through the depiction of the events and the continuous metaphorical and real researches of Larsen's "listening" - prolonged during the seasons of the year - the story above all symbolizes the strenuous defense of the free continuity of the wild world, the consideration of its value in itself , the reconnection in a unitary and non-dualistic way with the nature and the true protection of the last frontier that is disappearing, so that the modern man can retrace his steps in order not to extinguish, definitively, what remains of nature and the essence of things .
It is a cry, a dejected appeal made to all men so that they become aware of the right natural way and fight to regain it and maintain it. But a sort of pessimism pervades the conclusions of the story, because, in the end, I argue that the real and concrete awareness on the part of mankind to want to radically change its way of acting, is extremely small if not paradoxically completely absent.
The story, enriched by the deep sensations that the character Larsen describes almost on every page, is in the background continuously lit by the magical and clear lights of the great north dominated by a silent and primeval forest where you can hear the magical howl of the wolf and you perceive the dynamic moving of the life of those districts.
In this way Larsen, in weaving this short canvas, reveals at the end a simple but eloquent message: before the last frontier of nature disappears it is necessary to sensitize man in his entirety because, as he mentions at the end of the text, " If we truly lose the wild world ... - paraphrasing a famous writing - pain will take hold of us. But thanks to it, after, and if a later there will be, if we were to relive the savage we will create "perhaps" finally with it an eternal relationship of truth, of union, of infinite and indissoluble respect ... ".
Wild Nahani
"Like the winds and the sunsets, wild life was considered safe until the so-called progress began to take it away. Now we are faced with the problem of whether an even higher level of life is worth its frightful cost in all that is natural, free and wild "
Aldo Leopold
Lupa blanca
FIRST PART
Napapiiri
Dear reader…,
Suddenly one day
Suddenly, one day I decided to leave, but perhaps it was more a journey of the mind and of my imagination than a physical departure, I do not know; it would have led me to new shores, to open the doors to a very different reality, partly unexpected, but unconsciously wanted by me and perhaps already known. I raised the "sails" and took off, even if the navigation could have been anything but easy. I should have composed a complicated puzzle without having a guide image.
I found iridescent lights, musical auroras, unusual voices and, in the end, a long and indecipherable listening to something hovering above the tops of the spirit.
My search had begun, a search that was without subject or characters, an ethereal search where the flow of silent and inseparable souls led to a life obituary.
I went on with difficulty at times, because what is deeply true is not always that easy. I opened my heart, opened my openings and listened in silence to what I did not hear. The lights, after their decomposition, rejoined, but seemed to escape like leaves moved by a strong wind.
I went through tree-lined dunes, outdone disharmonic boulders, walked along a path I could not see, but finally I came to a sudden and pleasant clearing: I opened my chest and let the tears leave flowing without hindrance. It was sailing without wind, but a hard, truthful reawakening of the limbs.
So it was that I started inside myself to find what was left of nature, a dying nature that was about to be buried, but that I still wanted to see and especially hear before the last handful of earth was poured on its remains. And, something not secondary, I still wanted to understand and say something. I would have to travel a long time, long to reconnect with a world now lost from which I myself, perhaps, wanted to be excluded. I had to find a place, a listening point, where I could hear a "wind" that could probably teach me something.
I was forced to travel with my mind because the silence of spring forced me to do it. Not a step, not a shudder, cut the still air and nothing, nothing seemed to want to give word.
I approached a fallen trunk, now transformed into humus, the bread of life; a thousand-year-old trunk that contained in its vanescent remains the story of a decline. Not his - that tree had only been a witness - but that of our self that slowly died out with the determination to do it.
I reached a crossroads. Two paths almost imperceptible, but clearly outlined. I chose one by chance, but the route I thought was alternative was short. Only a hundred steps and the paths suddenly overlapped. It was perhaps a warning to a false choice where the obligation to proceed seemed to offer a diversion. The sign was clear: the path had to be traveled in one direction devoid of deviations and free from corruption. Then I saw an imprint in the mud, an imprint of an ethereal, plastic, vanescent, sublime animal. It had just passed and in that daguerreotype of image I easily saw the author: a wolf. I saw in that footprint an infinite world, a world of howls, escapes, races at breakneck speed and luxuries of extinct joys. I paused, I reflected, I photographed with my thoughts and then I understood: how many meetings I could have done on my journey and what right way to follow without a guide? So I decided, in one breath, to make myself spiritually "carry" by that symbol of the wilderness of the earth. I took that guide, I mentioned it several times in my "I" and was so reassured that I would surely find my place of listening! But my listening was not only conceived as a hearing, but above all to perceive messages, symbols, ethereal understandings, deep sensations that would have transcended the spirit above a manifestly tangible mechanism.
My voyage was turned to the north, the great north of the mother earth where the cold of the physique that stung the soul was opposed to the light of clarity. I now had at least one point of reference, a clear and definite cardinal point. And above all, I had my spiritual guide.
I knew to step on my shadow, now frozen for its ineluctable vanity. I trampled my pain and my inertia before the change of the seasons of the soul. In the meantime I was following the track of the wolf, and I saw, at the edge of the path, the inevitable deviations to which the mind tended. Existential distortions, emptiness of things and, above all elements, the fleeting spirit that loses the moment to understand the meaning of the earth. The bare earth beneath my feet and, in front of the clear sight of things, the dark shadow of myself, full of selfish and centripetal hopes.
The day was long, the journey incessant, but my goal, the point of listening in the great north, had to be reached. It was only there that I perceived that I could listen to the absolute and the stainless wind of magic where every parameter would disintegrate to recompose itself in the right direction of nature in an uncompromising elective affinity.
Ignore follies, certain sadness, real hallucinations and, in the middle, my shadow now unified to that of my guide. The desire to have, to possess, slandered what was most pure in the mother earth. I, my shadow, my whole was well perched on one side and, distinct and distant, nature seemed to observe me dismayed because I "deliberately" disjoined. I had severed what was indivisible, I had removed what was immovable and had entered, classically and with bravado, in my divisive mind renouncing to that uniqueness that was the feeble but incessant wind of the origins.
I was a stone, a stone thrown into the void and I moved all my madness towards the nothingness of duality. I had divided the inseparable, I had dissolved the indissoluble and I had shouted to the world, perhaps unaware of the grave error, my success in doing all this ...
I walked a lot, days and days, leaving behind me latitudes after latitudes. He changed every element, the forests of conifers took the place of those of the hardwoods, and the animals, always new, led me to the north. A brown bear in the thick of the forest, a moose somewhere, a big dam of a beaver that implacidated the going of the waters and, my guide, the wolf, who, even if I did not see, indicated the way to me every day. I was sometimes tired, but I knew I had to do it.
Many moons passed and, day after day, I gained hundreds of miles. I did not know where I should have stopped, but I trusted in my inner sense. Meanwhile in my mind the images of mine and especially of the whole life of man with his "quiet existential desperation" and with his progress towards an undefined but very clear place: the total disintegration of the chaotic order of the mother Earth. A disintegration that carried with itself, but, even if not completely unaware, proceeded with extreme determination, like the flow of a rushing stretch of river: "the West is a ship that is sinking to the peak, whose flaw is ignored by everyone. But everyone is busy making the journey more comfortable ". Those images flowed one after the other and all had one common thread: severely severing the sense of unity with the earth. It was the same feeling that I had in myself, but on this occasion it was translated to the whole human race, at least that large part that runs after nothingness and division. But on the whole, even if I could not do it in the end, they try hard not to let me be subjugated by the thought of suffering. In this regard I recalled a beautiful passage from a book that I was fortunate enough to pass some time before: "Every unhappiness is partly, so to speak, the shadow or the reflection of itself: it is not only its own suffering, but also the need to continually think about suffering. I not only live every interminable day in pain for his death, but I live it thinking that I live every day in pain ... “.
Thick skies, golden twilights, vanescent lights and lights that brightened my thinking during the day.
The cry of the heart, the ephemeral raised, the useless enrichment and the essential ignored.
The wind on the cheeks, the rustle of the forests and, suddenly, the roar of thunder after the lightning.
My progress was slowed because I felt that my guide now progressed no more linearly, but stopped to smell the air, zigzagging to the right and left, as if to tell me that the time to stop was very close. But it would certainly not have been a static stop, but fundamentally dynamic and above all reflective and constructive because to fully understand the essence of the facts, the only way was to listen to nature. The sign would be me when I first arrived.
I was in an almost surreal setting: articulated hills in the background, a sinuous and sometimes impetuous river nearby and, everywhere, a grand, millenary primeval forest. An environment that took away the breath, which gave to being the deepest sense of wilderness of places and spirit. I had perhaps come to my place of LISTENING, where I would have probably understood the right to exist and would have breathed in my mind the air of harmonious living. Listening, understanding, reflecting ... At that point a reflection occurred to me that once did not fully agree with it, but now I could see something involving: "Life must be seen through all its shades like the colors of a prism. It is necessary to let oneself be penetrated by the thousand lights that pass through it, because then at the end of the process they return to compose themselves, it is enough not to resist; there are things that must be lived with participation, like evil and good, love and joy. It is necessary to let them cross and look at them, in a detached but present way, making it clear to anyone that you are the master of yourself, your mind and your body ".
This was my first feeling of thought now that the most arduous task touched me. Reconcile my disagreement with nature through the penetration into the innermost recesses of one's heart in order to demolish little by little all the wrong and tangible past, but completely ephemeral, of which my mind, well representative of all mankind, was so strongly set. It was like having to work in a mine to remove the superfluous and find the mother vein, the source of all riches.
I had to move again for about ten days, cross several hills and wade small rivers, but in the end I realized that my progress no longer made sense. The track of my "guide" had indeed disappeared. I had traveled a very long way and now I realized that what I was looking for could be discovered in all its entirety. I simply had, so to speak, clean up the encrustations of my being, remove the plugs from my ears and start listening …
I was therefore at my first goal
I was therefore at my first goal: I had found the very important sense of the place in the middle of the taiga, the great forest of the northern hemisphere. It was May, but I needed shelter because I did not know if I would have to stay a year, a decade or a whole life.
Moving around here and there, then, between the thick of the forest, not far from a river and an adjacent lake, I suddenly saw the features of an old hut. It was roughly built of pine trunks, but in many parts it was shabby. I knew that I would have to get to work as soon as possible to make it habitable, especially when winter would come because the bitter cold that gave the Arctic Circle did not allow for compromises. Luckily inside there was an old, big, solid cast-iron stove, a massive table, a chair, a bookshelf in front of the door, and other little practical household goods. It seemed that the austere house had been abandoned for not many years; there had probably been a solitary man in search of peace, or perhaps a naturalist sensitive to a true nature or a hermit. This did not matter, but the necessary repairs were necessary.
First of all it starts from the roof, because in some places it was practically to be redone. As luck would have it, there were several axes already cut behind the hut and, without any reflection, I took them and set myself to work. The roof was ready in less than a week. Now I had to fill in some cracks that had formed between the trunks and, as I proceeded to work, I felt more like a beaver than a human being. I cleaned the stove and the chimney well, built a long bench and set up everything else that did not seem right. A wide window looked to the south, towards a river and a lake, a second turned the view to the west, while the mattress on which to sleep was positioned not far from the stove. In the winter the forty degrees below zero would probably not have been skimped. I made small but pleasant ornaments and then went to the last task: prepare a suitable supply of wood, otherwise all the work had been just a pastime. This last task was, as is well known, extremely tiring, but I had at least the good fortune that the pitches of the roof of the dwelling were sufficiently protruding so that I could shelter, in narrow stacks, the wood cut and split. In less than a month the place was rejuvenated and everything was in the right place. Then I practiced a classic Nordic ritual, a custom to "baptize" a new hut: turn on the stove and watch the smoke coming out of the chimney from outside. At the end, chisel in the hand, engraved on a circle of wood my favorite phrase "Lathe biosas" (live hidden) and placed it right above the main entrance (another, in fact, was placed on the back). Finally I decided to name the hut and the choice came by itself "Listening point".
Now that the house had been topped up I had to do another important job: get ready to optimize a rudimentary fishing rod, make a couple of snowshoes and set up some trap to capture something that would guarantee me the right nourishment. In the end, the basic things were ready and so began my new life ...
For a few weeks
For a few weeks I wandered around the hut to become more familiar with the place, to discover the best passages, the easiest paths, the limits of the excursions and I found many signs of the presence of a rich and varied fauna. But this I would have discovered in detail in later times.
Sublime silence, eloquent silence, this was the background of my new home. The rustling of the plants moved by the wind and the leaping of the river's waters, I heard them as something harmonic structure where the counterpoint managed to creep into my "me".
When more or less I began to interpenetrate with the place, or rather with the sense of place, I decided to have a notebook of the notes on which to write down the practical things and what little words could translate from the mind and sensations. But it would have been useful to me because in carrying out the translation between mind and writing, I would certainly have had a greater impulse to the reflection ... I avoided the dates because they marked a too technical, schematic, too little expansive time. I would have written without time, out of time and above all without dogmas and paradigms otherwise I would have said many things, but certainly not the essentials.
I was integrated now
I was now integrated into my hermit and wild place and my life was perfectly shaped with a reality that had longed to become palpable. Symphonies of nature enveloped everyday life and the passing of the days continually enriched me with unusual ecstasies of beauty. An uncontested nature was a constant background and nothing seemed to creep in order to disarmonize my being. Shimmering lights, indeciphered sounds, surreal visions were my daily company. I lived breathing in the meaning of life and I moved my soul in a world of free reverie. I was in the deepest solitude, but it was a solitude full of events and contrasts that did not create in me any sense of unease, rather it gave me a continuous inner fullness. I had to reconnect my distances, long since assembled in my inner life.
Days spent like spells of adventures and the wind of spirit breathed over everything. Day after day I acquired a deep peace with myself and my path was more and more outlined and creative. The great primeval forests represented themselves as immense cathedrals in nature and the sinuous movement of the rivers and torrents seemed to describe the motion of the soul, while the placid lakes contained the calm of the spirit. Everything, in short, was a hymn to harmony and there was no time when mental exhaustion or restlessness of the limbs emerged.
Moments fleeing stole my words and senses of light closed every hole. Life was manifest in every movement of it and the change of events gave the whole a huge sense of belonging. My soul was like a world inside another world and among them there was always a solid bond of continuity.
When I found myself gathered in my hut, I felt I was not isolated from the outside but always moving at every instant in an incessant dynamics of unitary events. I had no splits and everything was incorporated into a unicum made of one element. After so many years of disharmony and opposing me, I was now almost in a deeply unitary dimension. There was no longer a nature defined and well distanced from its action and it was one thing only with the veiled traits of the human being. Mine was still a frail force because it had, in spite of everything, to integrate completely with the univocal spirit of things, but now the path had been outlined and I had nothing left but to follow it to acquire, as a sort of osmosis, the riches that once belonged to our unitary nature and that in the last millennia they had progressively dissociated.
How much beauty foamed in the innermost recesses of nature, an intact and primordial nature where the spirit had to "obligatorily" return to travel along a path that had been interrupted for too long. O gentle soul, enlighten my path and take me by the hand so that I will return, in the most absolute totality, in all that I had wanted to abandon.
A role far from secondary was carried out by being on its own, a solitude that served as a catalyst to unify the separate worlds.
A current of life winced from the wildness of things and enveloped the world, so that it seemed embedded in a living sea. The air was saturated with life and everywhere there was a breath and a movement that fed the sense of things. The rocks in their apparent immature stasis, seemed to shake to claim their irreplaceable presence and seemed to indicate the right path to follow so that, while I walked my path, I would never lose my direction.
I heard a continuous hymn to the solitary existence, more and more often, to an inevitable and unavoidable union. But the journey was anything but easy, even if the destination was close to being spotted. How could I succeed in my determined purpose? It is true, I felt it inside, but I did not perceive that it had been acquired in all its truth and awareness. In other words, I had the theoretical spirit of this connection in me, but that theory had to transform itself with the practical interiority of the profound....
* * * *
....After a few weeks at the mercy of unexpected events, I knew that it was essential that I move, otherwise I would have lived with a stasis that craved something but could not get anywhere, being only devoid of dynamic activity …
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