Wild Nahani
Napapiiri
(English version)
Return to the wild
My "Walden"
At that lonely and wild place where
the spirit is part of nature.
To the loving memory
of my parents (Vittorio Spinetti & Donatelli Elisabetta)
and in loving memory
of my partner Elzbieta Mielczarek (1963-2014).
"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 "
Mario Spineti
"Everyone has a place to listen somewhere"
Sigurd Olson
This book is my spiritual testament!
BE STRONG
ORCHID
In memory of Elzbieta Mielczarek,
by Felice Casucci
(The light of the clear stars in your eyes)
Fugacity is everything. It's in anyone's face. And we needlessly defend the position conquered! As if it belonged to us. A "trap" I defined it in my last post. I confirm. White orchid leaves the pages of the books I loved. And suicide swallows in the mouths of the cold rivers of Finland. Elizabeth did not say her name to the whirlpool that swallowed her. He no longer had a name: a woman who dies in nobody's world. Cultured directly from the plant, his life will have seemed that of a nymph of stones, eroded by elemental power. Orchis himself will come to take his passion. The death heals many wounds, cultivates many fields, even those deconsecrated. A gash in the plant on which the days grow. It betrays who governs the chapter of words to profit from it. Mario, her husband, a teacher for all of us, has traveled twenty thousand leagues around the perfection of a leaf, to the need that it be shown, not cultured. Yet it was not enough! The corpse of the woman has offered herself to the delirium of the controversial world, perhaps due to an ill-managed anger, perhaps due to a conclusive story. I do not want to, I can not even imagine the places that have accompanied her, fleeting vestal, from the shadow of the forest to that of the road with no return. I ask her only the same pity she has had for herself, a model of nights combined in the warehouses of a war of wood and fire. Nobody, my friend, can wake you up. Not even the wild beasts that eat your bones. You are earth, water and torment. In the planetarium of a moment you walk all the distances and creep with the temper of a melancholy extirpated to the blackest earth. Making love madness, conceiving the inconceivable. This I ask you, on behalf of the rebels, against the immense destiny. The orchid in the hair of the Olympia of Manet, the female nudity that defies the rules of well-meaning people. The still lifes of Heade. Emotions dilated by O'Keeffe's mental vagina. All symbols of a spectral and impulsive flourishing. What are you for me. Among your paintings, which I keep in the living room, stained with thorns and hand-woven colors, the claws lose their sight. Riaccesi now from all memories, descended from the visionary eyes of Proust, D'Annunzio and Marinetti, three favorite authors, white orchid leaves anticipate the unexpressed symbols of anger and forgiveness. They make you alive. Magically transformed, from a trickle of fresh water, into a plant.
__________
Dear Elzbieta, now Rest in peace!!
I will always remember you and I will always love you!
Your Mario
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 …
That night I went out late
That night I went out late because I felt something was calling me. I walked half an hour, it was eleven o'clock at night, but there was full light at those extreme latitudes. I gained a gentle wooded slope and looked out beyond it, and though I did not clearly distinguish the shapes I saw, my eyes or, perhaps my mind, settled on a pack of wolves that sinuously furrowed the undergrowth of the area. . They immediately vanished from my perception, but what made me wince beyond the threshold of the divine, was that a few minutes later, towards the east, already at a considerable distance, I heard clearly - or was the projection still of my mind - their howl, like indomitable music that permeated the acoustically perfect auditorium hall. My auditorium, however, was somewhat larger and expanded into every hole of that fantastic wilderness that surrounded me everywhere. There I listened for all the time that howl, maybe a few minutes, but for me that time that seemed so short, it seemed infinite because infinity and indecipherable was the true meaning of that ululare. In the hidden recesses of my ego, on that particular listening trip I had decided to undertake, the howling and the deeds of the wolf represented, an important element for my search for understanding.
A first listening then came into my mind that night, a listening that would have paved the way to other successive often indecipherable "signs" and especially to the desire to understand something that, although inside me, as mentioned, was probably present, not it still appeared in the open in all its vestiges of clarity and truth. Farley Mowat's reflection was indeed right when he wrote: "Somewhere in the east a wolf howled in a slightly questioning tone. I recognized the voice because I had heard it many times before ... But for me it was a voice that spoke of the lost world of our time, before we chose a role in contrast with it; a world of which I had a glimpse and in which it had almost entered ... only to remain excluded, in the end, from my own self "
The next day, the sun expanding in a clear sky radiated everywhere, and that divine light seemed to compose the background of a phosphorescent stage where the actors still had to present themselves to the play. I, in the last row, waited impatiently because I wanted to attend a representation that, according to the plot that I read, seemed extremely interesting and informative. I started walking along the eastern edge of the river for about ten miles and, in my progress, I watched carefully the variegated images that the place offered in a radiant form. Curvai versi right, this was the will of the course of those waters, and, suddenly, I saw that in that stretch the river opened in a wide, placid and well-delineated loop. I looked at the edges with the binoculars and immediately found the author of that work: the beaver. In fact, in addition to his den located on the opposite bank (a tangle of branches and earth well welded to each other in the shape of a pyramid), where the river narrowed, that forest engineer had accumulated together and wisely intertwined branches, sticks, fronds and even a trunk of considerable size. I remained admired and checked with curiosity and particularity all the development of that structure. A true work of fluvial hydraulics, with all the elements that, in harmonizing with each other, created a very special and functional corner. All this was obviously not the result of improvisations and randomness, but of a careful study of the environmental situation that the beaver had elaborated to create the optimum for his vital needs. I omit the descriptions and the technical motivations of that work, but the most beautiful thing was that that image, certainly really existing, represented another listening for my spirit.
I was understanding that the gifts I could receive from the wild world, favored by a particular listening point, were not represented by a single clarifying voice, but by the set of many elements that, in shaping and expanding in my interior, were then combined, probably , in a deep and tangible meaning. Meanwhile, in my go, a new comedy character was waiting for me now. As soon as I passed that placid loop a hundred yards away, I saw a male moose with its paws in the water and with its head turned towards the mountain while it chewed some delicacy that had stolen from the muddy bottom of the water. I was very circumspect, I stopped, I hid behind a big fir-tree and with spontaneous patience I began to admire the scene with all the corollary that developed around. I breathed slowly because I did not want to ruin everything for a rough and disharmonic way of doing it. After all, in that place I felt, at least in that initial phase, as a guest and a friend and, a guest who deserves such a name, maintains an extremely respectful attitude.
I calmly regained my way back home and, having returned to the hut, I began to write down the last events in the notebook, in the most detailed form possible. As I was writing I became even more aware that mine was not scientific research at all, but simply a research that flowed from the depths of being so as not to expire every new experience or emotion as a single-issue register in which direct knowledge was translated only as events to be classified in a scientific category with all the implications and concatenations attached. The interests and the geological, ethological and biological aspects had always been at the center of my work and my life, but, in this particular situation, they were out of place. In this regard, I thought of a reflection by Carl Gustav Jung that I read many years ago and which I now understood best: "Even the plants interested me, but not scientifically. I was attracted to them for a reason that escaped me, and with the feeling that they should not be eradicated and dried: they were living beings that had meaning only as they grew and flourished, a hidden, secret meaning, one of God's thoughts. They had to be considered with reverential fear and contemplate with philosophical wonder. What biology could say was interesting, but it was not the essential ".
After spending a week in quiet existence with short walks, some fish in the river and a series of reflections that did not lead to anything new. The wind knocked at the door, the river proceeded quietly and the plants, in their majesty, conveyed to me a sense of companionship and comfort, as if their presence were firmly insinuated into my state of mind.
The heat of those days was pleasant, but I knew it was ephemeral and within a few hours could change into a sudden flicker of cold, a cold not only of the air, but also of the spirit. Not in the literal sense, but purely metaphorical because each time I wondered if my sailing in the sea of nature would have taken me somewhere or, better, if he had given me an essential number of plays in order that I would understand all my "Our" human errors.
Change life, a new day arises, exudates the feeling and the change of the deep being like the leaves in autumn. And in the meantime the days were passing and in fact the autumn season was almost upon us.
I was sitting on the bank of the river and watched with "microscopic" analysis the rocks that in the distance dominated the scenery of that place. They were compact rocks that made their way through the thick vegetation that seemed to incorporate every element inside its green mantle. Some big stone boulders gave me the impression that they sat as if watching, just as I was doing at that moment, and immediately my mind was in a state of "listening" to perceive something that apparently hid to sensitiveness. I do not know why, but I remembered the idea, or rather the reflection, that our whole life was observing the surrounding world always from an irremovable point of view, without ever changing the way of looking. Perhaps the same thing seen from another angle or even the reverse could have allowed us to arrive at new and perhaps exciting discoveries, but only if our inner predisposition was placed in a critical and analytical way. Otherwise everything would be solved in a simulacrum void where what appeared different was the only fruit of a momentary thought that would soon be abandoned to put in perfect order our visual hinge and falsely speculate.
The next day
The next day I decided to write a letter (and it was the beginning of a long series), I do not know to whom addressed, perhaps to a fictitious old bear named Sigurd, however in any case for the simple pleasure of doing it. So I noted: "Dear Sigurd, I thank you for your beautiful letter you sent me. Your words have brought me the dear remembrance of you. At my age the memory often runs in search of lost time, and among the memories that are dearest to me often appears the absorbed, placid sadness, in the days when the eyes of your childhood and those of my youth were dumbfounded to the great promontory that appeared, suddenly, among the green of the trees. Alas, how many years have passed! But it is useless to regret the ineluctable passing of time, it is possible to avoid existential angst because 'ducunt fata volentem, nolentem trahunt'.
What can I say about me? Still complaints about mental health that is not good, and every day I get so much trouble, so that my motto could be 'nothing dies sine die' ... Many warm greetings, with the opportunity to see you one day, a warm hug, Larsen " .
I read the letter very well, put it in an envelope, signed it and put it in a sort of "metaphorical" mailbox, which I had actually built; in fact, I had assembled two: one to send and one to receive. Who knows, maybe I hoped that one day a wolf, a bear, a lynx or other to whom I wrote left me some answers!
Listening in the evening hours of a faint and distant howl of a wolf I took it as a question that it posed to me and then I decided to write to him an answer: "Dear Taro, the seasons are fast and our meetings are becoming more and more rare. It seems to me that your distance is not only physical; I feel that in you the bonds of your early youth are rightly cut off now. I am sure that the human features are completely extinguished in your memory and foreign to your soul. Here I relive the hypocrisy, the ambiguities and the corruptions of my past, but extraordinary events also occur in me where the ideal tension, the only redemption of the soul, reappears, unexpected, like the flash of lightning that frightens and blinds a puppy; I am referring to the universal persecution that has traveled the human race towards you. There had never been such an unanimous fury: friends and adversaries have celebrated you in the dark, in your fatal existence, and it is strange that a figure as charismatic and as impressive as yours, but at the same time shy, almost anonymous, is suddenly elevated above the general disinterestedness, revealing the true stature of the wickedness of man in whom immoral rigor had become a style of life. Not that you are not fed by uncertainties and doubts and perhaps even contradictions, but this makes you, above all, profoundly living and, in some respects, sublime.
But among many reasons of affliction there is also a consoling note, and it is the awareness of many men of this extravagant mistake. The unfolding of a new vision contains something miraculous, and appears the only possible refutation of compulsory pessimism.
With your heart, your Larsen ".
I carefully signed the letter and, as usual, "put it in the box".
"Everything in the world passes, and almost no trace leaves". How many memories are linked to the vital experiences, how many hopes, but everything in life is under the sign of transience. But while banning existentialist sadnesses, life unfolds with an incessant dialectic, and synthesis is the becoming, which is basically what counts. But I have a doubt: who was right who claims that every reality is current, for which it is a continuous change without a permanent substratum, and without stable direction?
My listening point inevitably led me to meditation, perhaps because of the hope of finding answers to my questions and my journey. I realized that there was a veil, a suffused presence of that satisfaction of the spirit, which at times was not without a sort of sloth. Everywhere one could see a sadness before the dilemmas of the destruction of the mother earth. Here too, as always happens to those who are subjected to a constructive meditation, they mix imaginary moments and characters with places and elements actually lived.
Reveries! But it took me a question that I had always asked myself: why does man want to extinguish everything, including himself? I do not know and I did not question myself on another question.
The sun was now high in the sky
The sun was now high in the sky and the snow gradually receded; the icy blanket of the lakes left, even if slowly, gradually replaced by the free flow of water, after seven months of immature winter stasis. From the edges of the snow blanket appeared the uninterrupted carpets of blueberries and the soft cushions of the mosses. Occasionally, white and fluffy lichens also emerged, an essential food for the reindeer that counted thousands of animals here.
With the passing of the days, the snow, which had covered every possible corner in the winter, had now become strongly dissolved. Only irregular stretches exposed to the north were still whitewashed or darkened by sections of dense forest, the great taiga of the northern hemisphere.
That year, ephemeral spring snow had overlapped the old snow that remained still after the long winter, but for the Brown Bear it was time to wake up from its long sleep. A new rhythm now surfaced in him and the profound lethargy that had permeated him for many months had become extinct. With the harsh Lappish climate and the constant penetrating dark winter, the Brown Bear had never left the den since it had occupied it since the last juncture of November; it, despite its narrow extension, maintained a warm and comfortable appearance with a bed of branches and grass, was hidden at the foot of a ravine under the tangle of the roots of a big fir fallen from time to earth because crashed a few years ago because of the heavy load of snow and the wind that, with his sudden impetus, I pushed him until he dropped it.
Outside, by day, the sun was already relatively warm for those latitudes, and the nights were always brighter and the Bear wanted to get out of the den.
After a free and inaccurate wander, the bear returned to its den and settled in the bedding of the winter bed. It was an instinctive fact to go back to his old wintering den even though the event progressively became more sparse because his move took him to increasingly distant places for the urgent search for new foods that the advance of spring brought. After such a long fast, anything edible was welcome.
Even a large female in those days temporarily left her shelter where she had wintered. But she was not alone, unlike many other bears, because in the soft padding of the bed, there were three puppies: the bear had given birth towards the end of January, naked and tiny. Now they were somewhat grown up and covered with characteristic grayish hairs. Inside the den they were very dynamic, but they still did not have the spirit and probably the strength to get out of the den. It would have to be a few more weeks before instinct led them to leave the comfort and protection of the den. In that first moment the Bear did not venture long distances, merely digging the red ant-deer at the feet of old pines around them to satiate its hunger so much that it now looked gaunt and obviously shrunken compared to the beginning of winter.
The snow had almost completely gone for a long time
The snow had almost completely gone by and, as the season progressed, the sun rose more and more in the sky, the nights were clearer and the rays opened the way to the green of the new grasses. At the withdrawal of the snow also reappeared the cranberry fruits of the previous summer, kept under the white blanket. They were an excellent source of food for bears out of the burrows. The fruits found them everywhere because the soft undergrowth of the taiga was covered, almost without solution of continuity, of these succulent gifts as well as of mosses and lichens.
The Brown Bear first left its den in early May. Then, for several days, he wandered around, feeding on some new emerging grass.
The brown bear was ravaging the big ant acerbis and burning the tender herbs, now more and more triumphant. The temperature became rather mild and with the passing of the days he never returned to the den where he had wintered. He moved west, through the woods now filled with the singing of birds, many come from the wintering areas of the south to escape from the great northern winter frost, and, as his innate nature, he prepared a shelter for the summer in a wild place shaded by secular trees and young damses of spruce, birch and Scots pine.
The changing of the seasons followed, like every being whose survival is linked to the earth's resources, and with the advance of spring, it changed its neighborhood according to a renewed instinct.
The day was particularly hot for those latitudes. The brown bear came out of the forest above Josajarvi, on a trail of a path made by the frequent passage of reindeer and elk; it was directed at the edge of the wood, in a large clearing where new grass was being born.
The birch forests gradually revived, in contrast to the last snow that still lingered on the sweet tunnels of Finnish Lapland, the Bear burned in the green patches that appeared among the dry grass of the past season, and turned the pebbles in search of small animals that captured with extreme readiness of reflexes. At times he took to dig to bring to light the white roots of some plants.
One day the lonely nature of the brown bear took over and cautiously moved away from those places where other bears were present. Only the young remained together as well as the females with the little ones who, at that time, still kept sheltered in the burrows. The adults would have led raminga and solitary life until the late spring / early summer, when the sexes would have searched for a short time, to mate. Then still the solitude until autumn; later, some would return to meet just before winter, in those same places they had left in the spring.
In a primeval forest of centuries-old pines, between already green clearings of nascent epilobes and tangles of birch and willow trees, the Brown Bear stopped when it reached an old bed at the foot of a huge, mossy boulder. With strong strokes of paw he undid a part of the accumulation of dead leaves, and he settled down to rest. Instead, the verdant forest of the taiga stood out above and beyond.
It was the real beginning of spring
It was the very beginning of spring, when at the end of May the soft green of the new birch leaves began to dye the trees of a dazzling color that contrasted with the green of the pines and spruces and the whiteness of the last snowfields.
The brown bear wandered rummaging through the layer of soil, but found nothing edible. Later he continued to descend, moving towards the wild Juminkeko valley.
In the valley he had the surprise of meeting a rich group of reindeer who eagerly burned the white lichens, but despite the presence of the bear, they completely ignored him, which he too instinctively did. At that time the great Brown Bear was intent on raking a big red ant-and then, perhaps partly sated with insects and their larvae, he moved away from it to graze briefly in a small clearing that opened a few meters into the dense forest. Shortly after, he returned to the shady pine forest, and settled under a centuries-old sylvan pine, the undisputed symbol of the arboreal plants of the Finnish taiga.
In the immaculate mirror of Lake Maaselanjärvi, the dense coniferous forests were reflected like a jagged dark band dominated in the background by the top of the Tunturieko. The brown bear then grazed near a stagnation of water facing a swamp, where an expanse of wild herbs had been planted thanks to the humidity of the area.
When at three o'clock in the morning the rising sun began to mirror itself on the great lake, the brown bear moved away towards the wooded Serrakky lowlands where myrtle boulders stood out, colorfully colored by numerous species of endolithic lichens.
The brown bear suddenly stopped and began to smell in all directions. It was the smell of rotting flesh. From the clearing the wind also brought the cackling of the inevitable imperial crows. The Brown Bear changed direction when it went, to follow that particular scent trail.
On the edges of a depression, he found the wretched remains of an elk probably killed by wolves a few days earlier. Around the mud, a network of footsteps of wolves, foxes and a "fearsome" glutton.
The brown bear approached the few remains of the moose among a restless flutter of crows; he moved around as if looking for the best parts, even though he managed to tear up very little stuff, since the necrophagous animals that had preceded him had already grabbed the best parts.
When all food interest ceased, before leaving the place, he rasped some dirt on the carcass, trying to mask the remains, driven by an ancestral instinct that told him to hide them against the voracity of other animals. And this was the making of every bear, whenever they had the carcass of an animal at their disposal.
He then left the area to follow a path to the valley, but after a while he changed his mind, deflected and headed for the base of a hill.
The brown bear then climbed up towards the ridge of the Tunturieko where in the first part the wood was still dense and intricate due to the juveniles of birches and aspen poplars. He heard several times the movement of a bunch of reindeer who did not give any sign of interest because his goal was to find a den that he knew hidden under the shade of Scotch pines.
Meanwhile, autumn
Meanwhile, the fall had taken its course and, to the particular sensations that arise at this juncture of the year, echoed the changing sparkle of the colors that dyed, as artist brushstrokes, all the surrounding environment. The birches lit up with gold, the swamps reddened and yellowed, the other broadleaves changed into a red-orange-colored woman's palette, and at any moment it seemed to capture the changing of time. Just the autumn season had in fact more than any other time of year something that inspired the change of the inner spirit.
However at that point I remembered the recent month of May when I arrived. In particular, the last days of the month hit me significantly. "They were intense days, widespread, silent, dreamy days full of contrasts and wild melodies. I immediately saw, almost in full, the world of the taiga and its legitimate inhabitants. A tree cut down and sagaciously gnawed, channels in the water, clusters of branches, earth and trunks, irregular corridors: the life and the deeds of the beaver. A sudden and fascinating world on the banks of a crystalline river. Among the interlacing of the undergrowth of the taiga, I walked with a mixture of curiosity and surprise. Suddenly a rapid and noisy beating of wings: the black grouse, then a woodcock, in the swamp a curlewherter and in the clear lake a half-wiggler. I turned and landed, after I had reconquered the path further upstream, and ran into a brown bear excrement and then into gigantic ant branches. How much wonder in such a short time. And then the incessant company from the sky of the raven, the king of the great north, an indomitable and imperturbable bird that has always fascinated the Nordic cultures and mythologies so much to be considered, even by human populations not in contact with each other , the primary architect of the creation of the world. A belief that the imperial raven always showed with his dexterity and his exceptional resistance. Every time I listened to a raven's voice, it always came spontaneously to greet him inwardly and often even physically with the gesture of the hand. At the bottom "the kings" deserve the right respect!
The next day I moved quickly by another way a short distance from the hut, always alternating the majestic forest of indomitable birches, spruce and Scotch pines to other open stretches thanks to the presence of lakes, swamps and sudden clearings. Then, back in the forest again, another beautiful encounter: an extremely comical male moose in the behavior and exploits of the escape. A very nice, confident and highly attractive being. Then, taking up the path, I came across a long tract of fresh droppings of black grouse, marten and variable hare. Then the flutter of wings of a francolin of the mountain, the traces on the mud of a glutton, the passage of a sea eagle and the graceful and silent flight of a tawny Lapland. Those days when the light never disappeared could not miss the inebriating effects of the contrasts between the serene and the whiteness of the clouds, the long reddish sunsets, the mystical states that generates the crepuscular vapor that rises from the lakes, the fantastic reflection of the great forest on their reflecting water, the late evening arrival of a wild swan ...
Even the return to the simple hut I was reassembling after the long wandering, things were equally important. Everything seemed so beautiful that I felt I had entered a surreal world. They were intense moments, also because they were seasoned with the fantasizing of the mind that made me feel fully the life that lived in those places, far from the ephemeral and petty illusions of man. I regenerated myself completely, I felt in my inside breathing life, pulsating emotions completely free from the influences of anthropogenic contemporaneity. I really felt a different life, for the first time, so different and intense that I believe it has no truly descriptive form. The lights of the great north, always limpid and luxuriant, also had the strength to generate a sort of sublime abandonment to one's own interior and dynamic reflections ... ".
The colors of autumn
The colors of autumn fascinate, as I have already mentioned, more than any other time of the year. The polychromy makes everything deeply magical and gives, with the splashes of the colorful colors, a landscape that seems to be molded by the hands of an artist who paints, with a certain impressionist opalescence, the wild world that encloses it.
The autumn that slowly leads us to the long and white winter, seems to take us by the hand leading us into a maze of sensations and lights that can not be grasped only with the thrust of imagination, but above all with the direct visual participation.
In the autumn I saw the gradual change of life that, abandoned to itself, departed to suspend itself in an ethereal and infinite mysticism. So my mind also changed and transferred in itself a message of peace and inner peace where hope and harmony took the upper hand strongly. The environment in which I lived reminded me markedly of the changing of things and the becoming each of life.
The rapidly changing colors inspired an indescribable sense of wonder and fascination and life in all its magical splendor announced its continuous renewal in a new form. A sincere hymn to joy.
I believe that living one's time in the desired dimension, in the spirit of the free continuity of nature and mind, inspires a profound sense of unlimited equilibrium, both with oneself and with the whole surrounding world. And I remember that in every life there is always a point of listening, a point where even the different things, while maintaining their peculiarities, continually merge into one dimension.
The days passed busily while the last vestiges of the season that the Native Americans call "Indian" summer were dissolving and I, more and more taken by my wanderings, I knew that the wild beings that accompanied me daily like ghosts in the dense forest, I was deeply friends because, in my heart, I shared the grave threats that contemporary man spread on them.
As a symbol of these misdeeds there was no better "victim": the wolf of the woods. That mysterious vanescent presence that seemed to materialize with every gust of wind and every noise of the forest. Perhaps it was more valid for the emotions of the spirit to imagine that presence that, paradoxically, to see it directly.
How much wealth reigned in the spirit in that wild nature. How much mystery lodged in the imprints of the lynx, the glutton or the brown bear. As Aldo Leopold wrote, "the wilderness is a wealth that can only diminish but never increase" so the soul of the individual conscious of this fact is enriched day after day thanks to the perfect unison between the human seasons and those of the forest.
I lived deeply those feelings also because I often repeated that it was necessary to "always find peace with oneself to illuminate one's own path”.
One day
One day, as it was my usual hour, shortly after the first light of dawn, I made a long excursion. In fact, I had the need to meditate on walking, because the profound necessity of finding in me the hidden mysteries I was trying to answer was always alert to me. Then, having spent almost four hours, I set off again, following another path under a serene sky, made even more benign by some milky veils that at midday almost went to rest on the Noderland forest.
As I descended the path leading to the valley floor, I turned my gaze to the mountains of the east and those of the west, where I glimpsed, at the upper limit of the vegetation, the tawny coloring of the quiet days of autumn days when the intense yellow of the birches lit up like gold under the warm vibration of the sun.
The long descent, begun just before, ended at the point where I discovered other old huts, which followed one another, quietly aligned on the edge of the track; astonished that on that small aggregation of houses the feeling of precariousness and anonymity did not hover, but on the contrary, the almost palpable blanket of an ancient and uninterrupted dwelling spread out.
The view that opened from that point, although not prominent, widely spread over the Karden mountains and the impervious and tormented mass of the Krugel, with its impressive rocky cliffs.
As I left those images, I headed north, passing where the path remained between the east and west hills, almost as if the valley wanted to accentuate at that point the wide breath that would open soon thereafter. 'approaching the plain, partly swampy, of Storland. As I passed the short passage I met a long series of imposing centuries-old firs, which rose with a touch of shy solitude and appeared almost severe in the neutral coloring that time had spread on their trunks. I had just finished turning my attention to that astonished group of trees, when the valley suddenly opened before my gaze with a new dimension and an intense brightness, joined by a feeling of ecstasy that permeated that theatrical scenery manifest. As I walked along the path, the sudden cry of a nocturnal bird of prey weakened the silence of that particular situation, as if to announce to me the profound sense of mysticism and mystery that pervaded the air of that wild environment. And everywhere there was the great forest of the taiga that almost seamlessly reached the northernmost outposts of the region. Probably no relevant human structure separated me from the far north, but only wild, restless, perennial and essentially dynamic nature. The deeper meaning of wilderness manifested itself in its most true expression.
By now I had arrived in my hut, welcomed by a singular mixture of silence and precariousness that in the twilight hours is proper to living in solitude when one is immersed in a primordial forest. In fact, the evening had come and under the uncertain light of the moon, sometimes veiled or blurred by thick clouds, the shadows of the trees seemed to represent emblematically as a sort of theatrical scenery and the great lake, flanked by the river bed, reflected on its candid mirror the density and evanescence of the forest, this image made possible, as mentioned, by the presence of the moon.
Every time I returned to the hut, it was always more welcoming to me thanks to the big, rustic pine trunks assembled masterfully between them; a touch of charm was then given by the external color of the same since they had assumed over time a natural graying that allowed a perfect setting with the place where they were placed. Since the hut was slightly raised thanks to a small hill, it allowed to observe from the window or the veranda a good part of the surrounding area with a slight sense of dominance. This positioning allowed to glimpse from the south side, the lake and the river a few hundred meters away although the tall and dense trees concealed a large part of it. Internally there was practically a single room whose small rooms were created only in the sense device, ie the desk and the bookcase at an angle, the stove in the middle, a table to eat near a window and so on. The smell of resinous wood was always present as if that simple dwelling had been erected recently. It was enough a few hours of absence to instantly perceive that delicious aroma distillate.
Overlooked by a clear sky
Overlooked by a clear sky that the november day turned to gray, the surrounding mountains rose pure in the whiteness of the snow that covered its tops. Looking toward the north, the Karden valley was clearly visible, while at midday Boden's was hiding at the sight behind a tender shade of blue. The sun rising behind me was gradually turning the mountains of the west red, while the wide clearing on which I looked out quietly abandoned itself to the light that was now triumphing. Meanwhile the first snow began to fall and the already frozen lakes sometimes made the limbs tremble when the superficial cracks that determined the strong frost produced singular and slightly slick pops that burst into the silence of the forest like a sort of thud, so make believe that they came directly from the depths of the mysteries of nature. On the ground the white and immaculate snow gave an enchanting scenery, so that sometimes I felt a certain "nuisance" in trampling it, it seemed to me that I broke a magical spell of beauty. And I remembered a famous phrase by the Finnish poet Aaro Hellaakoski when he wrote: "Tietä käyden tien on vanki, vapaa on vain umpihanki".
A great silence overhung the hut, but it was broken on certain days by the angry voice of a northeastern wind. It was a wind that scourged everything with impetuous bursts so much to bend the tops of the trees, until sometimes to crash them. He howled, hissed, sometimes with sharp accents, sometimes with aching lament. Meanwhile in the sky a fight of titans was unleashed with the wind, which rushed strongly towards noon, it flashed a sort of swirl on the tops of the mountains full of clouds and already overloaded with snow. I saw in that wind the mysterious symbolism of the development of deep sensations and changes of the spirit. In the wind that pushed impetuously through the clouds I was represented the strength of the moral conscience and of the love that led me towards a dialectical moment that ended in antithesis in the astonishment and placid serenity of listening to the howl of the wolf …
The cold month of January had come
The cold month of January had come, a month that strongly emphasized the harshness of the Nordic climate. A month which, however, has a charm that rarely remains the spirit of the spirit. The clear and crisp air of the clear days, the giant trees full of snow that curved heavily the hair so as to transform their stunned appearance. The stasis of the great taiga where it seemed that time was suspended. The roar of the snow when the snowshoes were sinking in the long hikes. And, on clear nights without moon, the celestial vault thanks to the absolute darkness appeared in all its splendor because of the infinity of stars that seemed to cover every available space and then, without solution of continuity, sparkling gave the company to the spirit and the look fascinated that he observed them. But, suddenly, the great north still offered its own unique marvel. Floating lights, changing color and dynamically changing form and position, filled the big screen of the sky in the starry night. Chills of light illuminated the innermost recesses of the soul that deep inside expanded into the great mystery of nature. It was the aurora borealis, the magical and graceful fairy tale of the northern hemisphere, a fable that did not tell a definite story, but outlined in its entirety, an indecipherable message of universal union and even more the continuous evolution of things. This northern light that from the late autumn was manifested, always gave wonder and novelty. And in fact whenever I witnessed that poetic scenario, for me it was always the first time and never represented a habitually detached vision observed because too often admired ...
The month of February, cold and, that year particularly snowy, was announced with days full of clouds that darkened almost from the early hours of the late morning. It was in one of those days that, intent on observing the diffused grayness that could be seen beyond the windows, coming out in the middle of the storm, I suddenly heard, albeit in an attenuated form, the howling of a pack of wolves. The wild world, or rather, what was left of a wild world, was manifesting itself in all its splendor ...
My agitation doubled day by day; the howling of the wolves I had heard overlapped exactly my soul and sometimes appeared as a single variegated essence from which I felt strongly attracted. Practically a sort of soul above a soul, a bond that was strengthened by what I once caught in the eyes of a wolf, emblematic representation, as I had repeatedly remarked, of the essence of wilderness.
This state reassured me and made me fantasize. I tried to imagine what could have happened in the imminent future; the thought of the singular, trina attention, gave me an exaltation that was however to mingle with a state of vagueness, since I felt that my identity was perhaps going to interpenetrate, at least in part, with that of the forest, and perhaps with all his wild world.
A subtler suffering was then generated by the inextricable overlapping of the changing "souls" that I no longer managed to separate, so that that singular mixture seemed to me more and more like a mysterious illness of the spirit. It also happened that in the course of my solitary meditations I sometimes dedicated myself to comparing my appearance and soul with that of wolves; in one I saw almost the materialization of the trepid and uncertain dawn, in the other the representation of the fullness of the summer's merits.
Meanwhile, the winter period with the few hours of light and the particularly inclement weather, led me to write many letters to my unknown recipients that, as always, I placed in the mailbox "outgoing". I repeat, I wrote many, but one, which I carefully compiled, seemed more eloquent, singular and profound than others and was written for "time". I report the most significant excerpt: "Dear Time, I am writing you the present to make you aware that since my members live in this sunny place, I have rediscovered the feelings I had lost for so many years. I rediscovered the time of the soul, but also the material time that actually never flows. The concept of time is the product of our mental development, to which we place, or rather, encase, moments or actions according to an artificial and precise scandise that we have constructed according to a very relative scheme. In thinking or writing, I am still a prisoner of this concept, but this does not detract from the possibility of understanding its transience ...
To better signify this my thought, I transcribe you and dedicate a beautiful poem that was written by a young Indian:
'What do we need time for?'
Then in ancient times,
we never needed it.
We were orienting ourselves according to the rising
and the sunset.
We never had to hurry up.
We never needed to look at the clock.
We did not have to be at work
at a certain time.
We did what had to be done,
when it was appropriate for us.
But we were careful to do it,
before the day comes to an end.
We had more time,
because the day was still intact
This reflection of mine is therefore the fruit of spending one's existence in a secluded life, made up of questions and research, but which really helps me to see things in a different light ...
To conclude, in order to give you a better understanding of my state of mind, I bring you the beautiful words of a Taoist text that well collects, in its brevity, to stay on its own:
In a small kingdom with little population,
I would make sure that the instruments for ten and a hundred men were not used.
I would make the people go to die
And that far did not go away,
that despite having wagons and ships
he did not go up there,
that despite having arms and armor
do not deploy them.
I would have him come back to the knotted cords
and he used them,
that he found his food tasty,
her clothes are beautiful, her dwelling is comfortable,
delightful his customs.
Neighborhood states would see each other,
the voices of the roosters and dogs
they would answer each other,
but the peoples would reach death by old age
without having trade with each other
With a heart in hand, Larsen ".
It was with difficulty that I succeeded in putting it in view of the fullness of the box. Then, like every time, with an almost mechanical, I opened the other, but inexorably it was always empty. But I kept hoping for something …
The climate was clearly mitigated
The climate was clearly mitigated. The forest was alive and green again, the sun's rays warm on the glades enriched with polychrome and extensive blooms.
When the Bear left that place, towards the evening hours, to go down to graze in the clearings, the three puppies were tempted to follow it; tried to do it, but the fear of the unknown pervaded them a few tens of meters from the den, then to end up frightening thought the Bear, who turned, roughly drove them back, angrily blowing at them. The three little ones ran into the den and from their entrance they watched curious and fearful the parent's go through the trees, until it disappeared; then they heard the sound of his footsteps again for a while, then all fell silent. The three puppies withdrew wandering at the bottom of the cavity, and cowered to sleep, side by side as usual. The Bear would have been around for many hours.
On a particularly clear day, the Brown Bear lifted from the provisional couch to reach a large enclosed pasture between the fir colonnades.
The sun was now high in the sky and illuminated every part of the forest and infiltrated the dense fronds of the trees.
The brown bear felt a strange call that pushed him to move. The spring-inspired love inspired him to look for a partner.
He had grazed most of the night and caught small insects under the rocks; then the unconscious call took him back, the instinct to love, as it happens for all the creatures of the earth, upset him again, making him less interested in food. He looked astonished at the clearing; he wandered aimlessly through the tall, damp grass, until he felt something in the air, something indefinable but so clear for his primitive instinct, and decisively went into the forest. But near one of his summer beds was another bear, which bothered him not a little, given the lonely and not at all social nature of the species. This did not prevent that in certain places, places for example rich in food, more bears would gather close to each other with the sole intent of eating without any social bond. On the contrary, sometimes the real scuffles were kindled between the males with breaths and "roars" to be scary, fighting even with extreme violence, during the period of love.
He came out of the woods
He came out of the woods where the last sparse trees bordered the swamp. From there the Brown Bear dominated all that particular area. The grass was thick and fragrant, each species was in bloom, in that month that summer began, favored by the rains of the spring that ended. Every corner showed the luxuriance of life and the shades of the intense green filled every available space.
There was a kind of peace and indecipherable harmony; only the buzz of millions of mosquitoes broke the silence. At times, to fill that buzz also intervened the song of male birds that attracted females and some delimited their territory. Yet the great Brown Bear felt the presence of another Bear; sexual instinct told him that he had found a female, even if it was not clear to him. He sniffed the air insistently, walking into the swamp, cutting through the wet grass. At times he stopped and raised his head at the top, sniffing with increasing insistence. He met in the grass that flattened in the swamp, the traces of another bear's passage, found excrement and smelled urine: it was female. The brown bear snorted with excitement at the smell of exhalations, and the female appeared suddenly there where before there was only a stunted Scotch pine.
Smaller than the male and lighter in color, frightened, the female rose upright on her hind legs, grunting and blowing too, in turn excited, but frightened by the appearance of the big black male, staring at him as he walked towards her . The brown bear now moved slowly, cautiously, the hair swaying along the back. The female lowered on all fours, circled a trunk and headed towards him, now more quiet. She had taken the sexual inspiration for a few days, and she, too, like the Brown Bear instinctively sought a companion. The two bears came close to physical contact and sniffed each other for a long time, everywhere, on the muzzle and then all over the body, while slowly the excitement and fear of both faded and subsided.
After the meeting the female went away into the woods, because the sun was now high. The male did not abandon it, nor did he drive it away. The nights that followed, by now always illuminated, returned to pasture in the clearings, and if the female ignored her companion, she never left her, nibbling here and there, but always alert to her movements. He approached her often, brushed her hips, pretended to attack her by alternating moments of unsustainable excitement during which he became aggressive and aroused his violent rebellion, at moments of calm and almost indifference.
They lived like this for several days, moving sometimes in the silent and wild forest of the taiga.
In a "night" lit by day, a second male appeared in the swamp. Smaller and of a blonde color. He stopped sniffing in front of him, smelling the female but also the other male's. The Brown Bear did not accept that presence; with a bristly fur on his back and a watchful eye, he snorted and ran to meet the young intruder. They clashed violently, angry; the jaws bitten the thick fur tearing it into large tufts, and the big paws vibrated with blows on the sides and on the muzzle. Bleeding wounds opened on the most vulnerable parts of the head, where the claws came more easily to the skin. The noise of the struggle annulled every other sign of life and violently broke the quiet of the theoretical night. Even the bear female was frightened, and walked away to the edge of the swamp.
The struggle did not last long; the young male immediately accepted the supremacy of the other and left the place with a quick escape, heeled by the large winning male still tense with excitement, he passed the curtain of the trees in a noisy ruin of foliage and left.
The big black male stopped his run on the edge of the forest, then turned and ran again, but toward the female. After the fight, the sexual greed assailed him. The bear welcomed him fearfully, but accepted his effusions for an instinctive desire to be touched, an ever more lively desire that increased with the passing of the days. And the food also lost interest in her at the time.
The approaches of the male became more insistent. The female began not to drive him away so often; she also began to bite his ears and neck, to lick his face, to fight like a puppy with him in the grass of a dry clearing and in the undergrowth. Then one evening, just before the graceful brightness of the sky slowly subsided, the female gave herself up to the brown bear; he allowed himself once, twice and then again and again in the night, now completely bound by sexual inspiration.
Thus they spent several days and nights; they mated other times, then their excitement quickly faded, until it ceased altogether.
When the great Brown Bear took the road to the Juminkea woods, abandoning the area and the female, it was now fertilized.
A relatively hot day
A relatively hot day predicted with a sunrise at two in the morning.
In a large den located beneath the roots of a fallen fir tree, three teddy bears were waiting for their mother who wandered far in search of food. They were born during the winter, born while outside the white winter coat hid the den under a thick layer of snow that had completely changed the face of the forests. The three puppies had grown sucking milk from their mother's breasts, a large bear of old age that, in her life, had given birth so many times.
An innate instinct was soon to push the bear away from the den; an important event in the life of the teddy bears, who would one day bring them to their independence from their mother.
When the Bear returned from his nocturnal wanderings on the pastures where he had searched for roots and insects, he found the puppies who were more courageous and spontaneously ventured away from the den, chasing and tangling, fighting against pine seedlings with their already fearful claws, climbing on the smaller trees and rolling carefree on the soft cushions of the moss of the undergrowth.
As the Bear was approaching and moving in the forest, the three puppies, who were struggling animatedly in an apparent furious quarrel, stopped playing and became frightened; they immediately retreated to the den, and hid themselves there. Then recognized the mother's step back out and ran towards his dark shape, until he licked her legs with constant moans of contentment.
The Bear licked them both on the face and in other parts of the body, as every time it came back, and the little ones looked for their breasts to satisfy their hunger.
When the bear pushed the puppies to follow it, moving them away from the den where they were born, the sun had long warmed the air. He walked quickly to Laisioki; he knew that in that season raspberries and blackberries were ripe to be eaten.
The puppies, undecided and frightened by that event that they did not know, wandered and after a few dozen meters instinctively returned to the safety of the den as other times they had done to move away from the parent; but this time the bear came back on its feet and drove them violently towards the forest. Then he moved slower, and they followed her off between her legs, frightened by that experience and the new world they saw and that was no longer the unchanging vision they knew around the den.
They crossed the dense pine forest where large trees soared over a dense stain of renewal, not yet accustomed to that environment and long journeys; the three teddy bears several times remained behind, scattered in the tangle of birches and epilobes that with the heaths and rhododendrons even more infused the endless tide of blueberry seedlings, and the patient Bear was back on its feet to reassure them with its presence .
Beyond the ridge they descended into a small clearing in the woods, and there the forest opened more narrowly of trees, large, and gray by the abundance of lichens. There a carpet of blueberries covered the litter and the bears prostrated themselves to taste the sweet fruits.
After a few hours the Bear was moving along with her three puppies in the thick vegetation. After drinking at a resurgence for a long time, the little squad moved towards the Olkijoki river, where the mother hoped to catch some fish in a particular restriction of the river known to her or, in any case, to find someone dead deposited. on the shore or floating in those shallow waters.
A few days later with a sure and determined go, he reached the placid waters of the Olkiljoki river where he knew a place where the waters flowed in a narrow passage, about ten meters at most and moreover the depth was only about fifty centimeters . He entered that stretch of river and with careful and careful attention, probed on the surface of the water every thing that moved. Its purpose was to steal a few trout, of which the river abounded. His calm and his patience rewarded him after a half-hour when, with an extremely dynamic and extremely rapid movement, he jabbed a large trout that he devoured in a few minutes, resting on a large rock that emerged from the water. Then he got back into position, waited patiently, and the next two trout passage found him unprepared, because he had the fatal indecision of which one of them was snapping. The attempt then went to empty. He remained in the water for another hour, but then became impatient and reconquered the surrounding wood where, after a blatant collapse, he settled down at the foot of a hundred-year-old birch. The brown bear tore a gigantic nerve with its hooves, discovered an anthill and licked everything, devouring the larvae and the ants that went crazy everywhere.
The luminescent arctic night advanced on the gentle hills of the tunturi. At dawn the apparent quiet returned. When the sun was already shining from the east, the brown bear stopped digging the ground and moving the stones and walked away into the shade of the forest.
Spring was now near
Spring was now near also announced by the progressive retreat of the snow. In the sky made brighter, small groups of clouds of a pure white ran fast towards the west; meanwhile, on the slopes of the mountains, where the birch trees were swollen, a tender green vibration spread out. At times he was breathing a new wind that had a disturbing heat inside. In those days the lingering of sunsets tinged the tops of the mountains with an intense red that, before dying off, was changing in purple.
Just in one of those meriggi I had walked along the very clear path that, turning to the north, flanked the slopes of the mountains of the east; I followed the narrow street, absorbed in my thoughts when, as I turned my gaze towards the bottom of the valley, where remote the waters of the Sarekin appeared melting, I saw the appearance of an elusive lynx that, beyond a row of trees, headed slowly towards a secondary river. It was a more unique observation that was rare given the elusiveness of this species. With a determination that was not customary to me, but very cautiously, I climbed over a random mass of rocks that bounded the path in that stretch and walked in small steps towards that big "wild cat" lit by the last light of sunset.
It was one of those moments rarely granted to mortals, the moment in which the souls, in interpenetrating one another, together drown in the great breath of the surrounding nature, also because in that case the lynx was for me a sort of ring of conjunction between the wild and the domesticated, the only union that was fully fitting with my limited spirit of human being, perhaps irreparably removed in its deep entity from the authentic world of indomitable nature.
In the days that followed
In the days that followed, all those fleeting moments of encounter with the wolves and especially with their howl came back to my memory; I analyzed the pauses, the hesitations, the vibration of the sounds, the imaginary dialogue with the fleeting glances, but I remembered above all having seen in the eyes of a wolf, in singular harmony of what happened to myself, the unconscious perception of precariousness of the moment. I then fell into a sort of anguish when I stopped to compare the doubts that breathed in the spirit, when I tried to reinstate myself, albeit in a relative and humanoid form, with the wild, whose difficulty spurred, as for a sort of retaliation, the my uncertainties.
But a feverish anxiety tumbled in my soul, an uncontrollable desire to shape the reality that surrounded me, almost as if it were the transposition of the travail that I felt when, before a sort of immaculate canvas of nature, I tended to look at the search for the absolute, then land to the downsizing of myself, taken in the reality of my limits compromised.
I was macerating in such thoughts when, after a few days, I fleetingly saw, on the edge of the forest, the elusive "ghost" of a wolf; I met him under the dark green of immense firs, an ideal place to gather the events of these pleasant characters. In the forest, then I felt the twilight of coexistence solatia, so similar to mine. The eloquent silence of that immense nature, the dull light that filtered through the thick branches, the wandering circumspection of the whistle of the wind, the calm harmony of the events, clean and articulated without ever turning into situations of banality, provided my soul to a sort of state of quiet and meditation.
But the meeting of that day was for me a cause of particular restlessness, because the wolf, avoided all contact, even the simple fleeting look. The wolf had confirmed its elusive nature in an almost "closed" creature, a species of sphinx that turned its attention to the unknown of the forest.
In the days that followed, I tried in vain to find a justification for the behavior of the wolf, even if it seemed right and sacrosanct; to reassure me I told myself that perhaps the ostentatious indifference of that savage had arisen from the subtle skirmishes between the dominating and destructive man and a being perfectly integrated into a universal unity made of one concrete element: the holism of all existing things.
That labor, however, was about to be resolved, because, after a few days, I saw a wolf again, perhaps the same as before even if this time we met, unwittingly, in a large clearing in the thick of the wood.
That renewed amazement lasted more than twenty minutes, until, as dusk approached, such an extraordinary twist, at least awaited, pervaded the situation; while I was hiding in the trees at the edge of that area open to observe that wolf, these, as if driven by an uncontrolled force and foreign to it, turned, or so was my interpretation, with his deep gaze towards my direction so much that I managed with the binoculars to directly cross his proud and inscrutable eyes. In those interminable moments the impatience of my being was ready to wait, but never a few moments passed so slowly. Finally the wolf turned his snout up and began to howl. I was astonished and paralyzed also because that mysterious wolf howling seemed to do it ideally for me, to greet me, but above all to remind me, in my interpretive metaphor, the true spirit of the wild …
One day I started to paint
One day I started painting a wolf even though pictorial art was not usual for me. I was in fact rather limited in technique and finishing, but a small "talent" perhaps belonged to me. I spent about fifteen days developing and completing it and, in a first phase, perhaps due to a kind of distraction, I observed the painting with a certain superficiality. Then suddenly I began to reveal a deep meaning, as if that small work was the result of another author: the figure of the wolf was portrayed in the domain of a large richly wooded valley that opened on the diffused whiteness of the sky. The wolf was portrayed in the act of carefully observing the elements of that articulated valley. However, from the sadness of that look that was lost in those wide spaces, it was clear that a sort of painful presentiment lodged in that wolf, a presentiment of looming threat to the most evil deeds perpetrated by man towards his species and the whole nature. In fact, this "thought" seemed to clearly emerge from his gaze. It is not by chance that the light of the painting rested on the expression of the proud predator with a vibration that was exalted in comparison with the cold tones that dominated the rest of the composition; in the quiet shade enjoyed in the simple dwelling of those long summer breaks, the solitary light of the painting seemed to vibrate with its own sound, so strong was its prevalence. At that point inwardly I was more and more convinced that I was not the architect of that work!
After placing the picture, carefully analyzed, in a free wall of the hut, I began to spend a lot of time contemplating the painting, which exercised a growing attention on me; this did not come so much from an emotion of an aesthetic nature, when from the concrete loss from which I was taken when I seemed to discover that my personality had mysteriously doubled, to reappear in the wolf portrayed in the painting. The extraordinary transposition seemed to me the work of a beautiful and sagacious spell operated by some kind of mysterious event as if it had in a certain way, with an act of magic, accentuated that reflection to make regenerate in that empty simulacrum, the call of the wolf wild that at the bottom houses in the soul of anyone who wants to reconnect with the mother earth. I understood even more than when they were penetrating those strong images now sublimated in the deep union with the heart of the wilderness and at the bottom also with the calmness and wisdom of listening.
Evening twilight
The twilight of the evening of July 7 ended a busy and fascinating day. In the space of only six, seven hours I had the good fortune to be able to see directly some of the "illustrious inhabitants" who lived near my "hermitage".
It was late morning when I decided to make a short excursion with the purpose of not going too far from the hut. Once inside the dense forest where a gentle slope seemed to be contained in the lower part by a row of large granite boulders adorned with red and yellow lichens, I saw three resting wolves, each lying on one side. They did not see me, nor did they hear me, because the faint air movement was in my favor and I was at least fifty feet away. It was thanks to my powerful telescope that I discerned the silhouettes of the wolves with sufficient clarity, but their almost total immobility did not allow me a clear and well-defined vision. I was waiting patiently for them to get up sooner or later, which would have allowed me a more precise observation. But the tiredness that made itself felt (almost a couple of hours) during the expected waiting, brought me to relax for a few minutes, and those few moments were fatal. In fact, when I returned to the observation posture of a slight rustle, the disappointment was total. The wolves were gone! It was a moment of inner anger that I prefer not to dwell in the description! I took my equipment, loaded the backpack and moved gently for about a kilometer to the north with the hope of being able to see them again; but it was all useless. The wolves had vanished into thin air. I sat down on the ground with only binoculars in my hand to see if anything moved in the direction of an open band a hundred yards away from me. I was lucky! At that moment, "perhaps due to the law of compensation", with his slightly high step he was passing a glutton, a rare and generally very elusive species, difficult to observe. He crossed the clearing, stopped for a moment near a large stone and then folded into the thick pine forest and disappeared from view. I was however very satisfied with the observation, because up to now 90% of the surveys I had done around this ephemeral mustelid had ended only with the detection of tracks in the snow, ice or mud, reliefs per se sufficient to my spirit, but direct observation allowed me to better focus on the author of those traces.
At that point I took a break to sip a cup of hot coffee I had in the thermos. I rested for about twenty minutes and then walked away, heading towards the river, very close by. At the river I observed the big hole of a beaver that I had already known for some time. Further down the valley, an intertwined log of trunks and twigs seals its classic dam and all around the stumps of so many birches and alders "knocked down" over time by this formidable rodent. But even if my observations were concentrated in those details, with the corner of my eye I saw a movement on the surface of water: it was him, the dear beaver who carried a branch with a mouth that had just been cut off. It was wonderful to be able to see it so easily, because previously I had never been able to do it and, a few times, always at twilight with very attenuated light. He walked confidently to his dam and with surgical precision inserted this new element into the already tight network of branches. Then he turned abruptly on himself, he returned for about twenty meters in the same direction of the way forward covering some stretches even under water and then veering to the left and land on the shore of the placid river about ten meters from his lair. He stood on the edge for a few minutes then reached a birch tree and began to break it. It took only a few minutes and the seedling came down. At that point he did not care about it, but back in the water earned, as a costume, the entrance of his den from underwater, lair that, as I wrote, on the surface was well sealed by mud carefully spread and well compacted . I waited a half hour but you would not record any more movement. At that point if I had been organized to stay longer I would have done it, but some things at the hut called me back. I walked away from the river and regained an old well-beaten path that I knew inch by inch. Going, always paying much attention to what I trampled or what I felt around, halfway through a large clearing, to say the true swamp, at the point where the path lapping on the right because there was the bottom was harder. I lingered for a few moments and, attracted by an incessant croaking of two ravens, I turned my gaze to the sky, although somewhat restricted because of the circle of large trees that extended to the edges of that open space, but it was pleasing to see the free and harmonious sailing of an adult of golden eagle, improved vision thanks to the aid of my binoculars. The raptor was clearly exploiting a current of hot air to gain altitude without having to resort to the beating of the wings and spend energy; but then his doing increased the circle of turns and the large Scotch pine trees concealed the bird of prey from view. I remained in observation and was rewarded - even if only for a few moments - a few minutes later, since the mighty eagle, probably a female, reappeared to my sight (always "escorted" by the two crows), but on this occasion higher and unlike before, in the classic "slipped" flight that took her in a short time to the north disappearing definitively from my binoculars. That fleeting sighting activated in my mind all the remembrances of the past years when I constantly studied the life of the eagles and in a few moments my mind represented to itself all the scenes and the sensations I had felt for such a long time. Now I was struggling with my particular research, but in my heart, along with it there was always a storage room dedicated to that formidable bird of prey. I knew well that the eagle in those lands had three nests, two of them on rock and one on a big fir tree whose basket, placed near the trunk just before the summit, reached a thickness of at least two meters. Meanwhile it was getting late and I resumed my journey, but a final event awaited me. About a kilometer from the hut, my eyes rested on the big brown bear footprints that had passed in that place a few hours before, certainly after my passage in the morning when I had embarked on the short excursion. A little further on there was a large excrement where it was possible to discern clearly the fur of a mammal that I did not identify, probably a carcass that the plantigrade had found somewhere in the forest. The track was heading east, but the now incipient twilight made me desist and resumed my going to the hut, which I reached after about twenty minutes.
I come back euphoric and satisfied. That day I had been lucky and had been, so to speak, greeted by my noble friends who harmoniously gave life to these beautiful lands. The bear's footsteps made me immediately remember what Adolph Murie wrote, whose note I had used as an incipit on my scientific paper on the bear I had written a few years ago ... .. "I remember the first bear print I saw in my life ... All we saw was a footprint in a mud puddle. But the print was a symbol, even more poetic than seeing the bear itself - a delicate and deep approach to the spirit of wild Alaska. At any time a bear's imprint can create a stronger emotion than seeing the bear itself, because imagination is called into play. You carefully observe the landscape, waiting to see it appear at any moment, while the attention is refined and reinvigorated. The bear is somewhere and can be anywhere. The area has suddenly come alive, has acquired a new and richer quality ".
A beautiful reflection that in my life that I was doing in the taiga I was lucky enough to live many times, practically every time I came across the footsteps of a wild animal. It was in fact like that for the lynx, for the wolf, for the otter, for the elk and so on. The wealth that those places offered me was always manifest even when the gift was partially hidden.
But the thing that was even more important to me came from the fact that - in addition to the undoubted tangible episodes produced by those direct faunistic observations - the whole of those events would have greatly enriched my continuous "inner listening" which, adding the other, held their irrefutable and unaware part in order to progressively lead me towards the right "understanding" to which my mind tended.
In the hut I stirred up the stove and before proceeding to some urgent tasks I had to hand, I noted in the notebook the meaning and the events just described.
Attend a courting parade
Attending a parade of courtship of capercaillie is truly spectacular and transfers to those observing a sense of bravado and security, because this appeared the ways of making males of this big grouse. The spring period had begun and the snow was gradually retreating, although in many places there were still several centimeters. I was moving with the purpose of going to one of my observation sheds, as I often went there to watch the wolves. I was still in the thick of the forest when, on the right, a few tens of meters, I heard an unusual "chatter" that I did not immediately focus because my mind was focused on moving towards the shed. I stopped, I moved slightly to the left and lowering myself on my knees, protected by a large Scotch pine, I pointed my binoculars towards a clearing that opened shortly thereafter. A real parade of courtship of the male grouse was in progress. I was able to count at least seven and, focusing on one in particular, I noticed all his typical and famous way of acting. The head and the neck stretched upward, the shaggy beard, the wings a bit 'spread apart and the tail completely open to fan. The subject was on the ground, unlike another that stood higher on a branch. He emitted, as indeed the others, the characteristic song of love. I moved slightly to see if there were any females and in fact, on the west side of the forest, a small group of them, even if with a somewhat reluctant progress, approached that particular "arena". From the literature I knew that for mating it was essential to eliminate or at least reduce the initial aggressiveness that could occur between the male and the female. In fact, thanks to numerous observations made, it was seen that females choose above all those males who adopt a behavior of balance between the dominant one of the parade to that of submission. Here, in the great taiga, the population of the grouse was conspicuous, unlike other districts and in fact, apart from this moment of courtship, during my stay and especially during my wandering in various points of the forest, grouse, as well as of capercaillies and Hazel grouse, I had always met them in large numbers (in addition to the frequent excrement that I found a bit 'everywhere). Obviously out of the reproductive period, males and females spent separate lives and even during the reproductive phase was the only female to deal with eggs and chicks.
I remained in place for at least an hour, but since the journey that I had to travel was long enough, I reluctantly had to leave the area because the call of the "king of the forest" pushed me inwardly to overlook the other wonders that were offered to me. However, I knew that when I was not busy with the wolves, I had plenty of time for other random or targeted observations.
In fact, it was my expectation that the following week I would approach, in the right distance, towards a beaver hole, to observe with meticulous attention, all the enormous work of this formidable "hydraulic-forest engineer". And then a beautiful osprey nest was waiting for me, to which I was particularly interested in studying all the important phases of its incredible water hunting technique. To a couple of golden eagles I would have finally dedicated at least a dozen days stopping on the spot with my tent; this, not only to observe the progress of their wild life, but also to remember my youthful years, which many seasons I dedicated to this great bird of prey and even the thesis of my degree.
The rest of the observations, given the richness of the faunal areas in which I moved, would have come spontaneously by themselves.
A new friend
A new friend enriched my pleasant solitude in my hut. It was a beautiful specimen of Great gray owl, the great gray owl, who came very often in the middle of the day to rest on a perch that I had right in front of the kitchen window. He was there for many hours and I watched him with admiration and wonder, because he did not just sit quietly resting on the roost, but often threw himself headlong to the ground to steal his favorite prey: voles, mice, forest lemming. It is also true that the place was facilitated by the presence of micro-mammals because on the ground there were many crumbs that fell down from a neighboring manger that I had long prepared to feed, especially during the winter, the small birds of the taiga. Kalevi (this is the name I gave to the tawny) was not interested in the coming and going of the birds, only from time to time was limited to observe them and then, immediately afterwards, concentrate on the ground to find, with its formidable hearing, the his prey. He often spent even the night on his roost.
In the early days I did not have the courage to get out of the hut so as not to send him away and I waited for him to leave spontaneously. But since the attendance became anything but sporadic, in the end I decided to leave the back of the house equally and, with a stealthy step, I walked at a safe distance, and the dear Kalevi, even looking at me intrigued, did not go away. Time passed, but one day there was a big and pleasant surprise. Kalevi was on his perch, while a light sleet fed by a weak wind enriched the scene making it almost fairytale. At that point I decided. I took off my boots, walked out of the front door gently and, still with an extremely calm expression, stepped closer to him. I immediately thought that it would fly away, but that did not happen and, as the wind moved its soft feathers, one step after another took me only five meters from him. We stared into each other's eyes, then Kalevi shook himself from the snow that was now falling more copiously and the only gesture he made was to prepare well with his paws, perhaps ready to escape. I remained still and in fact the graceful owl remained to look at me. His eyes seemed to reflect a sense of goodness and trust in me, hoping in my heart that this feeling was really felt by the bird of prey. Those few moments seemed like an eternity, then, always slowly, I came back and with my heart swollen with joy and amazement I returned delicately into the hut. It seemed that Kalevi had accepted my presence so much that in my mind I thought of a sort of metempsychosis. From that day, when the soft bird of prey was in the hut, I went out safely for my duties (taking wood, arranging something, etc.) and he, while observing carefully, remained on his now "melancholy" roost. When one becomes, albeit symbolically, a friend with a wild being, the spirit of life and the lights of the soul seem to enrich themselves with something indefinite but more or less well represents "the free continuity of the wild nature". Such a situation I would never have imagined, and in my heart thanked the gifts that nature offers us so generously. Over time, even when Kalevi was absent for several days, in almost every moment I looked at the roost in the implied hope of seeing it present or suddenly coming. Another significant listening was added to my research.
The observations on the behavior of the great gray owl reminded me of the words that one day a friend of mine told me: "......... Every living species, be it eagle, wolf, otter, moose, etc. despite their total diversity of life, they are always in perfect unison with nature, they are one thing and never, I say never dream of seeing the surrounding world as something disjointed, as something other than itself. We men instead wished with unusual determination to separate things, distinguish them very well and as a result we created a distinct dualism, completely unfounded on any side you look at it: the man with his life on one side and the nature well spaced and almost alien from the other. This distinction has been the foundation of the current irreparable disagreement that sees the man absolute ruler who completely destroys a kingdom to which he too was a full member. It is the only case of a child who kills almost before his mother is born! ". Words beautiful and sad, but true that always penetrated into the depths of myself and confirmed for the umpteenth time the impasse that we were walking humans.
That wolf figure
That figure of a vanishing and enigmatic wolf that, during my wandering inside the forest some time before, I had been able to suddenly and for a moment, observe, was impressed with such unusual force in my mind to procure an unconfessed agitation of the spirit. For a long time my thoughts still turned to that fleeting apparition with a singular mixture of feeling and complacency, so much so that to accentuate that sudden sensation one morning I sat at the desk; but I lingered for a long time before writing or reading something. I was tempted to hand to a beautiful book about wolves because it seemed to me that reading some steps, even if randomly, would have brought even more to the nakedness of the emotion that I wanted to intensely exalt. The words of the book, which I finally decided to scroll a bit, "rose" to degree by degree, and spread in my mind so much as to bring me to a sort of real reverie in the wild world. My positive tension was now drifting on the reading from which I drew a state of calm abandonment, but it brought me at the same time to the suffused image of the wolf so that, at times, I perceived a feeling of suspension and total transport. Yet I had observed it only for a few moments. But I felt that something special was hidden in that free and proud being perhaps because it was totally free from human mediocrity ...
The following day, gathered in the hut near the warm stove, I was absorbed again in reading, when I slowly fell asleep. In the dream that followed ... .. "I heard the door knocker sound discreetly. In opening I saw the figure of a man, a man who reflected in his face a life deeply lived among the silent northern forests where he was born and where he had developed, certainly from a young age, an incredible ability to live in the forest and to know all his savage inhabitants; behind him, a little covered, his faithful dog. When they advanced into the entrance compartment already immersed in the gloom, the figure of "half-wolf" still appeared to me indistinct, but not so much as to prevent me from noticing in his attitude a hesitancy that seemed to accentuate in that being a sort of ancestral wildness. As we entered the room illuminated by the soft and uncertain glare of the "little" sun, the figure of the man seemed to light up in the sudden reverberation of light, in consonance with his decisive personality.
Contrary to the light that was declining, after a sincere greeting of welcome the conversation with that person developed rapidly, even if sudden silences interrupted the harmony of our saying, but those silences - far from generating embarrassment - showed to compose in a unison 'hypothetical thought of the elderly man with my own, as if we vibrated in perfect consonance with the incipient twilight, even if we had just met. In the meantime the dog had completely gone down, perhaps because he was a little tired, but always kept a certain attention.
The man finally broke the silence, but only to remind me that the centuries-old forest that surrounded us had something else in it but the simple "technical" exterior beauty. I, who at that point actively participated in the conversation noting the great knowledge of man and his extreme practicality, I transfixed in my words, helping to raise the discourse to the infinite world of wild and uncorrupted nature, of which man was obviously strongly involved .......
In the end, I interrupted him and accompanied his friend and his faithful friend to the door of the hut, where we greeted each other in an eloquent silence. Shortly after walking a few meters, the man suddenly turned to me and said softly: know that very often bears or wolves are not seen and do not feel, but equally they live inwardly because they are like the wind: you can not see it, but you can always perceive it. One day you will spontaneously understand the metaphorical and real meaning of wind perception. You see, some things can not be learned directly, because the fundamental elements of nature, be they bears or any other event, basically do not express themselves clearly as one believes. It is necessary to seize the right moment to go a little further, of our material direct knowledge in order to enter, even if only slightly and perhaps for a short time, within the spirit of the wild world "...
With a start I woke up and stood for a few moments with my mind focused on that dream event that suddenly manifested itself within my solitary world. A small event, but strongly significant.
The sun was high on the horizon
The sun was high on the horizon, burning in the middle of summer, and the Brown Bear rested in the shade of the fir trees.
The symbolic Arctic night had long since arrived, remaining relatively warm. Only then did the Brown Bear get up from the bed, stretch its stiff limbs, move a few steps over the open area of the pasture and sniff the air. Then he moved along an obvious path. In the middle of the night, though full of light, he was in sight of a group of reindeer who did not notice his coming.
The Brown Bear rushed at them and landed some of them in the melee; then he grabbed a small one and drew back, still raging shots of claws around to make way for the escape of the remaining reindeer. He moved quickly, still dragging his prey, towards the woods.
That "night" the brown bear stopped in the thick of Scotch pines and, undisturbed, began to eat the meat of his booty.
The Brown Bear was an old male and had a superb build that reached almost three quintals of weight. Its passing through the silent forests of the great northern Finland was rarely silent, so much so that the rustling of the juveniles that thickened the undergrowth or the dry heathes, often felt a few tens of meters and then, its blowing, when something troubled him, intimidated not just the animals that were currently in its vicinity. In general, the reindeer or elk, when they sensed his presence, suddenly withdrawn, while sometimes, when they saw him face down with the intent to repose of blueberries, they almost completely ignored him. Then something attracted him: a fetid smell that emanated a reindeer carcass. The great Brown Bear approached the eating area, but found a hungry glutton that with an extremely aggressive manner brought the bear to desist and to wait for the shrewd Mustelid to leave for some remaining remains of the carcass.
But when he was the first to run into a rotting carrion, he used to sometimes skin it almost entirely, following an atavistic instinct. It was then filled with meat to the most I can not and in those circumstances its feces were not as usual "perfumed", but emanated a very bad smell typical of the made of real carnivores. If, on the other hand, his food was blueberries or other plants in the grass, the characteristic smell could be defined as gentle and at the same time penetrating, but never annoying. The skinning that the bear made to the carcasses in most cases was so precise that it rarely reduced the skin to shreds. Skinning was a typical sign of "use" of a bear on a whole carcass.
The Brown Bear in the middle of the summer was one day grazing in a clearing in the middle of the great forest of Palonen, but the grass was well ripe and, since it becomes rich in cellulose, the Bear knew that it is much less digestible and then after a few more mouthfuls, he headed for the tangle of the forest to look again for the fruits of the red and black bilberries or scrape under the stumps to feed on the numerous animals that were hidden in them. However, the extension of the blueberry carpet was virtually seamless and that situation was optimal for feeding the large plantigrade.
In the great light of the day
In the great light of the day, the bear moved, followed by the trotting of the three now almost independent puppies. He crossed the pastures and marshes of the place until he entered the woods.
It was not long in coming and lying down on the beds, they took one of the usual moments of rest. In that peace only the mosquitoes were constantly buzzing annoying the bears, but at those latitudes at that time of year, these tiny insects were a real scourge for all the animals. Sometimes the reindeers sought relief by leaning into small depressions where there were small snowfields that kept away the deadly mosquitoes.
In those days the brown bear felt that it was time to move. It was decided, in the thick of the forest to feed on blackberries. It was a particularly rich area and also other bears gathered nearby. Between banquets and rests they remained in those places for several days, then each took his own path. Bears are not social animals and when they are in close proximity, they sense something annoying. In fact, a few days later, the Brown Bear, following a well marked trail, reached a plateau where tall plants of Scotch pine, birch and willow trees grew.
The Brown Bear persistently sniffed the bark of the willows. That season had already been there that season, especially in spring. The trunks were injured by bites and claws. The animal instinctively felt an uncontrollable fury grow within itself, and unleashed it against one of the trees. He stood up and his claws came down to peel the trunk in long strips; the teeth clamped with fury, cutting it in several places, and with each assault the fury seemed to grow.
Soon the claws whitened the trunk all along its length, and when the Brown Bear forced against the hair with its weight it crashed breaking the tree where the teeth had cut it more deeply. The sound of the crash seemed to unleash his senseless and instinctive anger even further, and the thrill of his muscles intensified; like deep rumbles, the screams and breaths of the brown bear were heard higher than the curtain of the trees. Soon the foliage of the willow tree was nothing but a cluster of fragmented twigs, scattered around with the strips of bark and the sharp splinters of the wood: and the trunk stood out milky white against the brownish pines of the forest.
Sudden as it had begun, then the fury of the brown bear ceased, and the animal left the plateau. His figure became confused among the trees, towards the juniper bushes in the lower clearings of the valley.
A deep rumble of thunder could be heard far away, as the clouds grew darker and the wind increased its strength. The brown bear felt the approach of the storm in the smell of the air and the animals seemed to wait respectfully that a ritual was performed.
And the ritual was accomplished with the roar of a cataract, as violent as it was short in that world where time did not make sense.
When the quietness returned, the brown bear lifted from its bed among the juveniles and vigorously slammed its sides to shake off the water that had infiltrated the fur, then walked silently through the litter of the soggy and soft underbrush. primeval forest of Jarnioki, where he had set up his winter den between a hollow tree and a large anthill.
In the clearings that opened
In the clearings that opened in the old boreal forest, the Bear began to shatter the putrescent stumps looking for the small animals that live in contact with the ground. The teddy bears imitated it, but more often they looked for the savory wild fruits of blueberries and raspberries, so easily ready for use.
A full day the Bear did not retreat into the shade of the forest, but continued its search for food. He went up the valley to reach a clearing at the high limit of the forest, in that strongly undulating stretch.
The bear came to the edge of that grassy area that opened up, allowing a glimpse of wild hills to appear, and stopped suspiciously, before advancing with the puppies in the open. The presence of some male could always be a possibility.
The Bear felt the quiet of the place and only in the late afternoon they left it, while the sunlight triumphed everywhere.
When she wandered around with her puppies of the year in the thick of the taiga, the Bear had to stop her walking to wait for the young bears to come down from the trees, which for them was a fun and a real game. At times, even while snorting strongly while waiting, he scratched his hairy back on the birch trunks, while at times he avoided the pine ones so as not to become impregnated with the dripping resin. But this was by no means a fixed rule, so much so that there were no opportunities to bask and enjoy its rubbing on large pines or firs whose resin easily harnessed the long bristly hairs of the plantigrade.
Dark ghost
Dark ghost that walked slowly, the brown bear was going up the slopes towards the pastures of the articulated hill of Risitunturi.
After about an hour the brown bear came to the pass. He had stopped several times along the slope to find insects under the rocks of the vast stone that dotted those pastures, but the desire for more food stimulated him to keep looking.
On the plateaus of the ridge he headed east, where he knew he could still find some green and appetizing grass thanks to the rare rain that often came down. After a couple of hours' doing, the Brown Bear rested and only at the end of the day left the bed. While the fog was taking over the warm rays of the sun, the Bear followed the trail to Ilajoki, stopping only to eat the ripe berries of ripe blueberry to penetrate immediately into the woods. The plantigrade descended along a trail and emerged into a swamp, though a mist obscured the landscape a little.
The Brown Bear moved into some bushy surrounding clearings and, almost suddenly, a young bear appeared out of nowhere. At his sight the brown bear snorted suspiciously and rose up on his hind legs to sniff and better observe the intruder, and only when he was reassured he lowered himself to go into the bush, indifferent to his companion.
The two bears wandered around in a large clearing, sipping some small blueberry berries. They caught them lowering themselves to bring the groups of fruit to their jaws.
In the late morning they left the place and entered the dark shadow of the pine forest; the mists had now dissolved with the heat of the sun.
The Brown Bear had lived all summer feeding on small animals found beneath the stones or in the anthills and rotting trunks; of herbs and wild fruits, and sometimes of some small reindeer preyed in the areas below or of some carcass, overthrown by wolves. Then he had his refuge in the forest that cloaked the valley; every day a different place, choosing the most hidden and intricate places in the vegetation, moving from one bed to the other, each time by reapplying or digging new ones. Now he was moving toward the autumn neighborhoods.
In the night, in the clearings and in the swamps, the dew sometimes already was freezing on the stems. Then at dawn the rays of the sun filtered by the fog were drawn in the air as if they pierced the woods.
During the day the cloud cover never left the peak of the hills, even if, at times, slight drizzles seemed to lighten the landscape. Banks of fog continued to rise and descend along the valleys, stagnating in the woods. In the evening they descended until they touched the plane of Karsikoski, turning the forests into an inextricable gray maze of trees that exalted its vastness.
In a ravine among the rare rocks, the Brown Bear awakened from its torpor. He got up and left determined by the shelter.
The leaves had long since changed color and in the coldest places many had already fallen. In the woods the symphony of autumn began with those colors and with first colds. The Finnish ruska was back. The aromas were different, the noise and the atmosphere were different: there was everywhere the smell of mold and dead leaves, the smell of the damp earth, and the birds' song had changed, or it had disappeared.
The branches and the leaves of the trees dripped moisture that condensed with the fog, and the noise of large drops beating the dead litter accompanied the din of the brown bear's footsteps that rose in the forest where the Bear was all night long brown lazily wandered in the bushes.
He had restored the bed built who knows how many years before other bears, settling with herbs, leaves and soil, but above all with rotting wood remains. It was a very large and sunken basin, hidden at the feet of a fir tree all twisted and dry for the age.
The female was going through
The female was crossing a large grassy clearing with her cubs of the year, but did not stop at any point, even if the place offered some good snacks. She was headed towards her den, which had long since invigorated and made as comfortable as possible to collect her and her three playful teddy bears inside. The winter of the great north, in the late autumn, could arrive very suddenly and the female, who had the experience, was already well prepared to avoid any unforeseen events. The implacable frost and the abundant snow would arrive with certainty and nothing could be left to chance.
The Bear was passing through a patch of forest that was unusual for her, when the smell of a carcass drew her to the edge of the woods. He saw a dead Bear female partially devoured at the foot of a large fir. He sniffed at the carcass, but did not care about it and resumed his journey.
Probably she had been killed by a big man. Accidents of this type are rare events and typically occur when a mother tries to defend her offspring from the attack of adult males.
In fact, one day the female with her three puppies was grazing quietly in a large clearing of the forest of Jarkoski, when suddenly a male Brown bear appeared at the edge of the forest. The female immediately stopped eating, ran to that bear, stood up and began to blow and open her mouth with extreme violence showing her fearsome teeth. He tried very vehemently to scare the male, so that he came in close contact and tried to wield a sonorous paw. The male withdrew promptly and, without any reaction, took another path away from the area decidedly!
The female with the puppies is always very careful and, without any hesitation, is ready to attack with a very aggressive approach when it comes to protecting her small defenseless.
A few days later the bear with her three puppies in tow was passing through a clearing in the middle of the forest, a wet and partly muddy clearing. Suddenly he stopped and began to smell a series of mud tracks left by another bear. The female with the smell she perceived realized that they were of her own kind and immediately, wary, stood up to sharply smell the air. She was worried that there was some other bear in her range of motion and, being a male, she became extremely tense and alert. But a quick reconnaissance made her understand that they were signs of a few days and no bear was nearby. He reassured himself and with his puppies that at times touched her almost his legs continued his ambulation.
The Brown Bear had in its temperament a mixture of dynamism and profound laziness. There were moments of extreme activity such as during sexual inspiration, or disputes with other bears on some carcass, or even when trying to prey on some moose or reindeer, but whenever he could, he always took advantage to lie down to rest in a dessert do nothing. Even his ambulation was often driven by circumstances. If he found an easy path already well beaten, he preferred it almost always to occasional and more difficult climbs. Only when he landed in the flat areas of the taiga, the uniformity of the orography and the soft mantle of the moss that covered the undergrowth, pushed him to wander randomly without having to find a track already outlined.
That day the great brown bear waited patiently for a glutton to move away from the remains of a large male elk. Not that the bear was not able to drive it away, but the combustion of the mustelid bothered him and preferred to wait at a certain distance. When the glutton departed because it was probably full, the bear promptly took the dead animal and, without particular greed, ate for thirty minutes. He had probably already grazed long before and that unexpected meal took him by surprise.
The next day the great brown bear had just rummaged in an ant-rufa and with a slow go headed for the swamp. The forest echoed by the strong wind that blew from the north, when suddenly the Bear noticed a large male elk lying next to an ancient sylvan pine in an apparent state of rest. The brown bear approached him a few feet and, thanks to the abundant moss that covered the entire undergrowth, his going was extremely quiet. But instead of taking advantage of the situation to attack that potential prey, he began to snort and scrape on the ground. The moose in the blink of an eye rose to his feet and rushed to escape. Often the Brown Bear behaved in that way before a large prey, preferring to attack the young almost always or in any case the smaller specimens perhaps not to deal with a prey that would fight, to defend itself, with extreme vigor. At that point, still calmly, the Brown Bear calmly resumed walking.
The brown bear left the valley
The brown bear left the valley, climbed right up to the jagged ridge of trees and disappeared into the damp shadow of the forest; another bear moved away hiding in the stunted but intricate vegetation of that place.
The first colds made themselves felt that fall in advance; already almost all the leaves of the birches, of the willows, of the alders, of the sorbons had long since fallen after they had changed their green in the golden yellow, reddish and purplish hues of the dying leaves. On the lawns the frost fell every night to ruffle the damp earth, and in the lowlands where the cold was most intense the night a veil of ice spread over the marshy areas. Meanwhile, the days, after the uninterrupted light of the summer, were shortened abruptly.
The grasses of the fields were yellowed and dead and the marshes had assumed a different shade, also reddened by the rhythms of autumn. In the woods the last leaves fell continuously, leaning over the others.
The brown bear had begun to descend from a tunnel to the plain below.
With a precise go, the Brown Bear crossed the wooded, dense slope of trees, slipping like a ghost among the trunks of the pines, to a place well known to him at the end of the forest. He had already stayed there in the spring, resting during the day in a bed placed at the foot of a big fir tree grown on some rocks.
Forward in the night the Brown Bear found the tree and found the bed: the green branches of the pines that had broken to build his strange nest were now dry and this led the animal to tidy up the bed with determined strokes of the legs in the ground , then came back to stuff it roughly peeling moss and lichens and finally lay down to rest.
Other bears had been in that place, and the beds scattered in the area bore the signs: piles of odorous excrement were piled up at their margins, signs of that rest.
The sun was now high, but no longer as in the summer, when the Brown Bear woke up changing position in the bed. The rays did not heat much, muffled by the thick foreheads of the conifers. A cold wind from the north blew vehemently and shook the forest, accumulating dead leaves in places where the orography facilitated their thickening. And, in the shadow of that area, the nightly frost lasted all day. Where the brown bear rested, sheltered from the old fir, the temperature was however slightly mitigated by the pale sun.
At dawn, the brown bear female began to climb towards the round summit of Mount Semioki, moving away into the forest followed by the young. The bear rose slowly, but the three puppies were instead forced to trudge in his footsteps in order not to lose contact. The plantigrades emerged on the pasture, crossed it and descended on the other side sheltered by the old pines and the sporadic firs that were harmonized in small numbers in that stretch of forest.
The advanced autumn had brought down a good part of the wild fruits and made the ubiquitous cranberries even more ripe.
In the woods the brown bear wandered from one rowan of the birds to the other, lazily, catching what nature so easily gave him in that season which heralded winter. He needed to eat a lot, to produce a lot of fat so that during the long winter sleep the stimulus of hunger did not wake him up. When they were not the sorbi, his attention was for the blueberries or, again, for some ant excite, so abundant in those woods. The accumulation of fat useful for the period of winter lethargy is concentrated mainly in the withers and in the rump in general and, secondarily in the muscular spaces.
Other bears frequented those areas; some came and went from the surrounding forests, where they would all retire before the end of the year.
With the cold, the red berries of the blueberry, still a bit sour even if ripe, softened slightly because touched by the frost, and the Brown Bear devoured them as a last resort, starting to move towards the burrows in winter.
Days passed and the bare deciduous trees appeared as dead silhouettes.
When the first snow came to whiten the whole scenario, the Brown Bear almost felt the end of its feeding.
The weather was always more and more changeable and many nights the frost already showed itself with sharp precision. The Brown Bear still wandered often in the forest, but had long ago given a good reset to its winter lair because it perceived inwardly that the season was about to end. Through his mysterious and inscrutable gaze, the Bear was still looking for something to eat and that was a lucky day because he found the remains of a small moose, already torn by wolves and partly stripped of crows and foxes. But there was still something for him and it was an excellent opportunity given the incipient cold and long winter.
The brown bear, felt inside that the time was about to stop, to get off the stage of summer. The signs came clearly from the surrounding environment, but the deepest came from within himself because, by innate nature, the input came inwardly on the attitudes to be taken in those days of late autumn.
On the slopes most exposed to the morning sun, the brown bear male had set up its burrows and its winter beds; they were concentrated in small areas well chosen for their wild appearance, covered by copious arboreal vegetation. For generations the bears used those same shelters, in which large quantities of dry grass had accumulated.
The brown bear passed the day hidden in the aspen groves on the lower slopes of the hill, on the edge of the pine forest.
Autumn with its multicolored colors announced to the bear the imminent approach of the icy winter season, because in the great north the snow and frost arrive very early. The Brown Bear knew it very well and busied a lot to find the last foods to accumulate the right amount of fat that would allow him to spend the entire winter in his cozy, though cramped lair, waiting for the spring rebirth. Everything that appeared to him edible swallowed him without too many thoughts, passing from the reindeer or elk carcasses, to the blueberry and rowan berries, to the rare fish he could capture or find decomposed on the banks of the lakes and rivers. Even the anthills attracted him not a little, but as a whole, even in these extreme latitudes, it was always the vegetables that used to dominate percentageally in the context of his omnivorous diet.
The insistent croak of the crows repeated always in the same place, was for him a symptom of the presence of some carcass and, whenever he could, reached them with extreme diligence to take advantage of a cheap meal.
Sometimes he lingered for a few moments before eating something that attracted him, but his hesitation was only the fruit that at the end of autumn already felt that he was almost ready to face the long winter, so that his appetite decreased simultaneously .
"I am a castaway who rests without stopping in the middle of the sea
hoping to land in some beach
not knowing that there is no more land! "
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SECOND PART
The dream and the epistle
It had been a long time now
It had been a long time since that part of me that I had dedicated to stable life in the forest and everything had become more and more familiar to me. I felt the crystalline and limpid air of spring, the warm and sunny air of summer, the colorful of autumn, and the swirling, icy, bleached and often long-lived winter. I seemed to see our human seasons, however, lived in the loss of time, presented themselves under other vestiges. I knew now the pack of Shiro and Deeva (these were the names given to the two dominant wolves), I knew their main movements, their lair, as I knew the uninterrupted giant of the "apparent" immoto trees. The cold waters of the torrents quench my thirst and the crystalline rivers and the articulated lakes loosened the density of the beloved forest, while the pleasant swamps stimulated the imagination. By now I had almost become a man of the forest, a man of the great taiga even though in my depth I still lacked something fundamental to really belong to you.
The events followed one another and it seemed that time had expanded and developed only towards an essential substance.
The spring passed Deeva had given birth to four puppies and in the following seasons will learn the first rudiments of hunting and life in the woods.
One day finally, with due calm, I met Shiro, the dominant male of the herd. I watched him for a long while, sniffing at the hunt place of the day before when he and his group had managed to pull down an old, battered moose dragging its last vestiges of life. Twilight came for everyone, but in nature everything seemed so clear and flowing that there seemed to be no solution of continuity between life and death. Shiro carefully looked around often, smelling the coolness of the northern air and with a mixture of curiosity and security did not linger much in moving between the dense forest of fir trees and small clearings that interrupted the continuity of the forest. He seemed to be proud of himself, of his strength, of his sure character, while I, in the smallness of my spirit, almost felt like an intruder not to say a stranger, in that world that emanated wildness, prolonged silences and atavism. The owls, despite the daytime, often announced themselves filling the air with melancholic and flowing notes. Shiro was a very beautiful, robust wolf, with a crepuscular appearance, and I liked deeply sinking into his reality made of essence and never of appearance. It was indeed this the most admired thing in the wild nature: the essence of things, of life, of the air. I remained in such a vain state for over half an hour, then, as soon as Shiro dispersed in the forest, I returned to my spiritual steps that led back, as I said, to my littleness and my precariousness.
Meanwhile, back at the hut, I set about preparing the bait for fishing the next day, since I would go to Lake Talken to make some provisions for the winter. In fact, in those remote places of the north, it was very important to anticipate the long winter, an accurate and meticulous preparation that contemplated not only fishing, but also firewood for the hot fire of the stove, the fruits of the forest turned into juicy preserves and the abundant mushrooms that dried directly in the hut.
One day, while I was canoeing I went fishing, on the opposite bank of the lake, I saw Deeva, the alpha female of the herd, who for a few moments had approached the water, perhaps to drink or to sniff out some hunting grounds. The meeting, even if fleeting - I was already used to it - always seemed to me as if it were the first time and, like the first time, it excited me a lot. These days and moments were so intense that in certain short moments I did not live fully because I had the constant fear that everything could be dissolved suddenly as a result of a beautiful dream. Among other things, the vandal man's hand was advancing more and more and this gave me not a little anxiety …
I was looking from the edge of the lake
I was observing from the edge of the lake the soft and colored lights of twilight to see some sequence of the "film" that nature was projecting. I left for ten minutes, took my notebook and began to read some reflections written in a surreal dimension , in a moment of profound irrationality and general discomfort ...
"A lake unfolded before the sight of the heart. A sense of life lay in the air, but in my mind something seemed to be missing, something profound that alienated me from the surrounding world. I was like a ghost moving in a beautiful atmosphere but almost unreal and opalescent to me.
I understood that it was not the environment that determined my deep intimacy, but my spirit, which everywhere wandered, brought with it something obscure and incomprehensible. I felt sadness, a sense of not belonging to anything, of being out of the real world even if so beautiful and unrepeatable.
I was devoid of inner life, I did not know anything, and everything seemed meaningless and not vital. I felt I loved death, but basically I did not want it because I had only one fear: to lose forever the possibility of being able to sink into the wild world.
The day, at the first light of the northern dawn, everything went on like this. I was empty, I did not recognize life with its strength and only sadness and melancholy seemed to manifest itself. My mind wandered between nothingness and total emptiness and nothing seemed to satisfy me. I was too sad and inwardly alone. Nothing stirred and energized me. It was pure non-life mental madness!
A pleasant walk in the forest alternating with lakes and swamps. But my spirit was elsewhere. I did not feel the breath of life even if the environment spread in abundance. I felt the lack of something essential in my soul. Why this mental madness? Maybe I did not know or maybe I was fully aware of it but I did not want to reveal it to myself. I felt the breath of my body but I continued to breathe non-life. An ugly and empty feeling. Not living while living is something hallucinating and indescribable.
I probably had inside me the secret of this sadness, of this incurable melancholy, but nothing seemed to shake and enliven me. I lived as an alien, as if I belonged to a world not mine in which I could not adapt. But I did not speak of a foreign world from the external point of view, but only and exclusively of an inner world.
Living life is beautiful, but you have to really live it and consume it. You do not have to die inside little by little and feel nothing. It is better to immediately sublimate yourself bodily, it is better to perish spiritually to cancel oneself in the emptiness of true and inalienable death. I have always loved you or life but unfortunately I did not live you yet.
Why did not I hear your breath or your heart button? I missed you. I missed you a lot, too much to continue living without experiencing you. I felt so much the unexpressed world of the savage.
The next day was a fatal day. Tension, irascibility, sadness, harshness. A strange light overshadowed my day. There was no possibility of harmony. Only sectarian and mean lies. The wind fed my anguish and nothing cheered me if not the thought turned to the possibility of connecting with the wildness of the soul. I felt a deep love and an ungraspable sense of loss. I knew that I could lose something beautiful forever, for eternity and this was for me fatal and unacceptable. I was looking for a mediation, a healthy madness, but I could find nothing but ashes and the worn remains of things.
I did not have the strength to react, to counteract and let things go so contrary to my true will. It was yet another sad, dense and gloomy day that finally turned me away for the umpteenth time from my true self. I felt madness, the sense of loss and nothing could comfort me, nothing, nothing. But oh inspiring nature, give me the strength to react, to rebuild my being, even a little at a time.
Be happy or my beloved wolves. That everything always smiles at you and that the evil man with his ax is a thousand miles away. I was happy for them, while my life was dying out! I did not dare to think of them, but at the same time they were inside me. It hurt too much not to be able to symbolically hold them in my arms because they were disappearing little by little. But I felt their occult presence and this relieved my sadness at least a little. I felt their scent, their breath, and I felt that their heart, unaware of everything, was beating with hope. The sudden tears streaked my face, the sadness expanded within me, and everything was lost in the nothingness of my void existence. Perhaps these were my last lines, but a strange feeling made me react and hope again. But I was equally pessimistic, I could not see anything around me that could give me the strength to react. I no longer belonged to anything, the emptiness around me. I was always absent, I did not listen to anything, and nothing seemed to be able to listen to me. Goodbye sad day, goodbye revolving world. I wanted so much to leave the scene, forever and with certainty.
A few days later the day still began with an anguish in my heart after a night full of nightmares and deep emotions. But perhaps it seemed to me that the fresh morning air could bring some comfort and "optimism". Will it be true? I would have checked it later.
The anguish in the evening, however, had the upper hand, because I had to do what I never wanted. Find me in front of a fork and have to choose which way to go. It was absolutely not the right time and perhaps it would never have been. I preferred to find alternate events, even uncomfortable but always on a single path to go. Instead, the case of my life seemed to reserve this serious ambassador for me. What a pain in the chest, deep inside. Loving tears ran through my face and drops of blood came out of my heart.
The next day was a day with alternating phases, but the sadness was still still mistress of me. A nice hike through the woods was not at all enough to lift me up at least a little.
I was now going along a path because even though reluctantly, it probably seemed that I had preferred it to another. How many beautiful things I knew to lose for eternity. It was certainly not a good feeling. It is true, probably no way leads to any part, but I bitterly suffered and burned ardently in my deep self. I knew that I was forever losing something "special", something unrepeatable, and yet it seemed that I was doing it and moreover my fault. I was in fact losing unity with nature, I was losing the wild spirit forever. But I realized that I should not have had to choose. What madness. This would have been the worst madness.
The light around me did not illuminate me in the slightest, but deepened within me, it grew more and more intense.
The anguish was still my mistress, but on the one hand I understood a little the meaning of my intolerances. After all, I deserved it because in my life my behavior had been too disharmonious with nature and the image I had given to other beings probably did not answer at all to my true essence. You can not always take things from life in their own way and according to their "domestic" needs. I had understood that if relationships with the world and with other beings were born it was necessary to activate a more universal and less selfish behavior.
One day I made another useful reflection. It is not possible to live life by projecting it only into the future. Always walk moved forward. Or doing things by pretending to forget others. It was useless because at every corner the anguish and the disappointments would always reappear. How much incurable sadness was still inside of me. How much distrust! I felt like a prince who had previously had a lot, but a lot of reveries, unexpressed relationships, continuous and rich thoughts; then suddenly the emptiness and here the prince finds himself poor and devoid of real things. I had become really poor. I had lost or maybe I was losing my dreams, the most beautiful things, the strongest feelings, my only truth: the wild side of oneself. I was probably furrowing the wrong path away from the wilderness of life.
The environment around me was strongly in unison with my ego, at least in appearance, but a constant unease gripped me and the disharmony made my heart melt. I could not control it and not make it belong to my spirit. I did not know how long my life would last, but in that way it was impossible to continue it. I could not do it. No, I could not do it.
Even that day had therefore begun in the blackest negativity!
One day I decided to reflect more on my state of being.
Finally I was perhaps reacting a bit 'positively to cross that tunnel of negativity that now seemed endless.
The light around me seemed a little clearer and a feeble optimism seemed to present itself to my heart. Perhaps a liberating dream had helped me and in those decisive moments I finally managed to glimpse something. Yes, actually on that day, maybe I was able to raise my spirit. I felt the return of truth and interests for things, at least in a small way. Surely it was the right moment to start changing course and taking the "master" way of nature. I would have seen the actual consequences in the following days. I was strongly hopeful. A certain help certainly came to me from the quiet existence of the places in which I moved even if at times everything seemed to me to be strongly foreign.
After the cautious optimism of a few days, anxiety returned to me probably because of the difficulties not yet overcome on the structure of my inner future. I still felt the wild life escape me and nothing appeared clear and restful. But I should not have rowed the boat because with a little perseverance and patience I could have done it. On the other hand it was almost normal that suffering belonged to me and I knew that if I wanted to build something new, I would never have to look back!
One day a crucial moment came. I found myself again in front of a path that suddenly changed course. Is it perhaps the right one and is not it really a question of the route?
I thought of my dreams of the wild and of lightness, and a wolf of the woods appeared before me like a vain phantom. I saw the features, the graceful features and at times lost his vision. Because?
The stars fell into the sky and my hidden desires multiplied in my mind. I listened to the silence while my suffering vestigies brought me company.
An emptiness spreads in the air and transmigrates among the souls of the eternal. I smell the will and I understand the freedom ...
When the moon appeared in the late sky it was an evening of remembrance, the evening of my quiet certainty. I was perhaps moving away from a senseless perdition. The moon was reflected on the lake filtered by a magical opalescence of the mists. The sense of calm and mystery was suddenly reinforced even if I lost my emotional control ... The falling stars came down in clusters and I always expressed the same desire for each of them ....... At that moment I was so to speak happy, joyful and I wanted to stop the time, but what was holding me back?
Then suddenly I finally understood something: I could not close myself in my inner sufferings, live in nature, love it, but be far away because darkened by some kind of gloomy thoughts, always being fearful of everything and continually succubus of my mind prisoner of herself, being overwhelmed by an anguish born of the booming existential threats, by not being able to really deal with things, not to cultivate and bring to light my wild side, turn off little by little at the time of consumption ... .. but at this point I can not, in truth, proceed in the speech because the great dilemma remains: will I really deal with the reality of the wilderness of life? Will I be governed by wisdom and due courage? Will I stupidly dominate the domestic side of the wild? I do not know what I will do, or rather I know what I should do to be in truth, but only if I realize it will I be able to see its marvelous positive effects. Meanwhile, I thank that mysterious and surely metaphorical wolf of the woods, for its essence, its truth and its beauty; I will be with his spirit, in any case, forever united and irrevocably inseparable! My spirit will never cease to dream it even if he is far from me. The savage if you've lost it or you've lost it, you always feel it inside, anyway.
May I find you once again a lonely wolf to be able to caress the thick fur so soft for the incipient winter, even in another life ... “.
That morning was a traumatic awakening
That morning was a traumatic awakening. And to think that the night before I lay down full of confidence and optimism knowing that the next day I would have to leave for a long excursion.
The awakening was traumatic because the night I had a surreal dream in itself extremely beautiful and full of reflections, but full of hidden and inexplicable meanings; these were in fact the first sensations I perceived. This situation brought me, in fact, upon awakening, to a sort of strange disquiet which did not give me, so to speak, peace.
As all dreams with the passing of the hours they tend, especially in detail, gradually fading, I decided immediately to write it down in my notebook, "coloring" inevitably with the transpositions and licenses that allows writing, adding above all the feelings that I had tried inside the story, but without altering its basic development in any way. Taking the right concentration, I wrote ...
"It was like a sudden shock. A sincere and profound feeling was born for an elusive wild she-wolf called by me "Lupa blanca", this for the indissoluble bond of symbolic love that immediately joined me after meeting her in a silent forest north of my hut. I called her "blanca" because her coat was candidly white and, as in every non-human being, her heart was devoid of masks and lies. A special love came on, I would say indescribable and very deep. Perhaps it was his pure and absolute wildness, his continued neatness, his loving kindness, his elegant posture, all en bloc ... I do not know. What I know is that in any case I got madly in love with her. Lupa blanca was, for me, a unique, unrepeatable being that, with graceful leaps, vanished among the shady forests of the taiga as if to remind me of the evanescence of our ephemeral and false "certainties". It emitted a kind of sublime attraction. I felt a sincere bond that united me with his deep soul. The days spent with his spirit continually reminded me of his being. Sometimes I came to "associate" with her many events, finding her features and loving kindness in the most disparate recesses of reality. I came to conceive of time in another dimension, so much so that I felt I had always known and lived it. I had been with her in indescribable significant moments and I do not think I fall into rhetoric if I say the most beautiful of all. It was all very intense, passionate, infinite and there was, among us, a sort of elective affinity. It was something undefinable to me. Lupa blanca was always in my spirit and, thanks to its existence, my life could continue its pleasant course.
One evening, standing near a fire, Lupa blanca approached, clung to me with her white cloak and sent me a lot of telepathic energy so intense that it caused me a fervent vital thrill. Then he turned around the fire, looked at me, howled briefly and with an agile leap he passed the trunk where I was sitting and quickly returned to his forest. That great love for Lupa Blanca was teaching me many things, perhaps the most important things in life and that brought my heart to rise to the highest peaks of feeling. I reflected at length, at times I thought bitterly what Lupa blanca also wanted to make me ideally understand. The destruction of the earth, the end of the forests, the alienation of feelings of love and understanding. With his direct example and with those he electively transmitted to me, I gradually began to understand better and more deeply the many warning signs on the destruction of the earth's wilderness.
Lupa blanca was the absolute sublimation of pure wildness, and it also made me perceive that harmonious melody that could vibrate between the spirit of peoples, between the unitary spirit between man and nature. He seemed to want to reconnect a brutally severed bond between man and the soul of life. Lupa blanca created with me an indissoluble feeling also because I read in her deep eyes a passion of great truth and, when I seemed lucid, I imagined that they were also moved for me. A tireless transpersonal love was practically born where Lupa blanca recited the part of the sensory spirit of the feminine and I, obviously, the masculine one, whose sensitivity could only be taken as a gift. In fact, it was precisely this: the female soul generally allowed to transmigrate into the masculine one that sense of goodness that can reign in the soul of being.
One evening, tired and weary, after a long day of walking and working, I fell exhausted next to the fire I had barely managed to light to cook something; in the following dormancy I had a whirlwind of dreams, many of which I did not remember at the following day, but some scenes in which Lupa and I were running free and graceful in the fir-tree forest, I found them all clear and broken in the morning's restful mind and it was all one act, within myself, while my thought was always for Lupa blanca, a beautiful Inuit song of love that I had known for many years ... "This night I dreamed of you. In the dream you walked on the pebbles of the shore, and I walked with you. I dreamed of you, and you seemed to be awake: I pursued you, I desired you, and you were desirable ... So I dreamed of you, so you were desirable ".
Many moons passed and, except for a few breaks, I often met the gaze of Lupa blanca, even if at times the events of life took us far or made us change our paths otherwise almost always joined. When we met again after some time his leaps of joy and my tears of joy were the most exciting moments of the meeting; then Lupa often took to running on the banks of a lake or seemed to play hide and seek among the colonnades of the centuries-old fir trees in the forest. I tried to follow her, to observe her, to rejoice with her and, sometimes, to be honest, even in those moments of positivity she gave a sort of failure in my inside because I thought I'd better remember that Lupa blanca was a she-wolf wild and sooner or later he could also take his own path that would take him to shores far from mine. Those moments of sudden pain lost me a lot, even if I understood the real possibility of the event. I remember one day, while the rain with great force came down, Lupa blanca passed near my hut, sniffed the air, turned to me that in the meantime I had crashed on the door and, as if to make it look like a sort goodbye, he turned away without paying any attention. I remember my moments of panic when I saw her vanish in the forest ... I turned around, shouted her name, ran into the forest and Lupa blanca was gone ... I went back downhill in the hut and I gathered in an intrinsic pain. I thought I would never see her again. I do not know why, but I had that feeling. Weeks of suffering, sad sadness, abandonment of myself passed ... then suddenly one night, it was a starry night, I heard her howling not far from the hut. I rushed out, I ran almost without direction, and under the great shadows of the trees illuminated by the clear light of the moon, the whiteness of Lupa blanca appeared like an angel wrapped in a symbolic phosphorescent cloak. He ran to meet me, I ran to meet him and, when he got to a meter from me, he raised himself with his hind legs and placed the front ones on my shoulders. I hugged her with all the strength I had and I could not hold back the emotion and long lines of tears came down my cheeks. It was yet another moment of joy that Lupa blanca offered me in the most total spontaneity.
After a few weeks, then one day, what I had been thinking for a long time, I felt more vigorously in my heart. I thought: Lupa blanca is a free being, why do I hold her bound to me that perhaps I no longer possess my wild side? It was certainly not a bond of strength, it was a "pact" of love, but what did I actually give him? Nothing. Just nothing. It was Lupa blanca that gave everything to me and from me nothing ever. I entered a tunnel of profound bewilderment, of quiet resignation, and I thought that perhaps it was better for me to disappear from her to let her fly on the wings of her freedom. It was also true that my presence was strongly accepted by the she-wolf who in her way certainly loved me, but who knows if in all this she found any suffering or impediment in the unfolding of the rhythms of her existence? I had doubts, uncertainties, existential contortions ... but then I made the whole thing even because it was always Lupa blanca that spontaneously presented itself to me.
A few weeks passed and there were many events that happened. One day, Lupa Blanca had caught a black grouse and found it near the river bed, while she tenaciously dismembered the flesh. I approached her and she, but, completely ignoring me, went on with her. To counterpoint, I went to get the fishing rod and, once again reached the river, in less than a quarter of an hour, I caught a trout of a couple of kilos. I cooked her right on the bank of the river, while Lupa blanca, about ten yards away, having finished her meal, lay down on her side, and occasionally glanced at me. When the trout was well cooked and partially smoked, I threw a piece of it to the she-wolf, who, without too much enthusiasm, ate it very calmly. Probably he was satisfied or unwilling to give me the satisfaction of eagerly devouring a bite offered by me. Obviously these were joking thoughts, but they did nothing but contribute to increasingly unite our bond of particular friendship.
A few days later a fact happened, just for a change, rather strange. It was early morning and I was near the lake to observe with the telescope the strolaghe and the wild swans that enriched, with their pleasant and harmonious presence, the beauties of that mirror of water, mirror of water lapped in all its perimeter from a majestic forest made of pine trees, spruces, birches and alders. While he was intent on that pleasant task, Lupa came out blanca, with a course so plush, so that I did not notice his coming. He carried with his mouth a twig of birch adorned with gems and, coming to me, he deposited it on my left side. Then, moving away a few meters to enter the undergrowth, he picked up a pine cone and made the same gesture. Then, back in the woods, after a few minutes she brought me a fir cone. And he always did the same gesture. I left my ornithological observations and, amazed at that behavior, I called to me Lupa blanca and asked her, obviously fictitiously (I did not really think she could understand my speech), what she wanted to make me understand. As revealed I did not manifest any reaction to my saying and lay down quietly a meter away from me. I meditated a few minutes, then I got up, took the three "findings", and instinctively went to bury them at the edge of the woods. Obviously my fantastic interpretation was that the gesture wanted to symbolize the renewal of the life of the forest and at the same time the preservation of its existence. I was spontaneous to ask myself how Lupa blanca conceived something like that, but I easily came to the conclusion that all of her ritual gestures, perhaps did not mean anything, but I liked to think that instead they were a warning, a subtle warning, on the destruction of forests that proceeded, in the world, at an incalculable pace. Obviously the immense taiga was full, like the tropical forests, subject to that uncontrolled annihilation and day after day, immense giants of that immense green sea, came down under the "ax" of modern buldozer trees.
It was an unpleasant feeling, but unfortunately all too truthful. The wild world had not been more present in the human mind for a long time, and the immense gifts that nature offered us were seen only as something external to exploit for the most basic necessities of an unbalanced society, a society that saw only and exclusively the so-called "development". The unhealthy mind of man always conceived of it in ever-increasing growth, or else the system would go into a blockage.
At that point, mine was a double interpretation. The first, the symbolic one of the behavior of Lupa blanca, probably the result of my imagination, the second, the realistic and unfortunately unstoppable which tended with extreme diligence the human race, now exaggerated by an incommensurable globalization. It was born, already long ago, a unique, but unequal society that spared no part of human beings and the entire planet earth!
Another small event caught my attention. I was warming up the soup the night before, when I heard the door rasping at the door of the house. It was Lupa blanca, probably long since arrived, but with my work in the kitchen, I had not noticed the presence. I opened the door and, taking the mess tin with steaming soup, I went to sit on the outside bench, while Lupa blanca, after approaching me, went to the neighboring fire where she had laid a white hare, recently captured . I looked at her, laid the mess tin and told her that now she also wanted to take care of my food menu. I was a bit perplexed, then I took the hare, I cleaned it as I used to make and light the fire. Before cooking it on the grill, I cut a nice slice and gave it to the she-wolf. He did not hesitate for a moment and vehemently took his well-deserved portion. I gave up my soup (it seemed to me a rude to the she-wolf not to accept his lunch) and willingly ate that delicious morsel that was given to me.
Another beautiful example of fraternal friendship profusami from Lupa blanca, I was offered one day when on the setting of the sun she presented herself to my hut with a dynamic and full of energy. In itself there would be nothing strange because its life force was always clearly expressed in its global way of acting. But the mystery was that on that very day I felt deeply melancholic, I had an anguished feeling within me without any apparent triggering cause. I was down and nothing more. Lupa blanca, on the other hand, arrived with an extremely dynamic look, more dynamic than her normal behavior. I turned around several times and, howling in a questioning tone, seemed to wonder what was happening to me. There was practically a telepathic connection between us. I remained motionless, observing it with a mixture of curiosity and wonder. The she-wolf came up to me, pulled me lightly by the pants as if to invite me to follow her. I interpreted that event as a "delayed burst", so much so that after that attempt by the she-wolf to shake me out of my torpor, she hesitated on her continuation, since there was no reaction on my part. But shortly after she wolf insisted on his intent to "drag me" somewhere and, in the end, I took the event. I followed her along the short path that led us to the lake and stopped abruptly, looking towards the other bank. A ball of fire illuminated the area of a purple red, while a fresh and crystalline air spread around. I witnessed those two simple events: Lupa blanca looking at the setting sun and the light that quietly colored. Lupa blanca began to howl, while the sun was going out behind the "great wall" of the firs. I remained at that moment without thought, and my previous melancholy, perhaps because I was distracted by those particular events, moved away slightly. Then, when the sun set and Lupa blanca ceased to howl, a great silence dominated the scene, but by now the concert to which he had been invited to listen was about to manifest itself in all its forms. A sudden wind yearning shook the immature stasis of the trees, while the tyrants in the lake uttered their questions and wailing lupins. The declining brightness made the landscape increasingly opalescent and at that point the she-wolf turned to me and then turned her gaze back to the dying lake of light. We remained in this state for about half an hour and I was feeling a sort of restlessness, when, as if it were a sudden apparition, the fullness of the moon joined the ecstatic concert. At that point, things became clear to me: Lupa blanca wanted to show me that life is structured with a variant and multi-faceted pattern and there is no time that the change in situations is not full of strong and varied forms and contrasts. In similitude, even the life of the individual had these dynamic connotations and there was a single space that was not allowed to enter, because it was a space that could not exist: it was the renunciation of the dynamism of life, was to be melancholy and pessimistic, it was that of seeing things from one and disputed point of view. It was a clear warning, made clear by simple and common events that are manifested each day, renewed, in life.
I took a breath, I looked at Lupa blanca and once again I noticed her particular sensitiveness in getting hold of my sometimes too frequent states of abandonment and quiet sadness. I understood then that in life, even if a moment of loss or lost joy occurs, it, joy, is always around the corner and awaits us with the maximum of its splendor. Pessimism, sadness or resignation may come, but if we listen to the free unfolding of wild life, the joy and positive force of life will always have the upper hand. In nature, terms such as melancholy, sadness, pessimism and others, never find any space to manifest themselves, because they are in deep and unbridgeable antithesis with the gift of everyday existence. The strength of the individual is felt when he has to deal with an act of courage and robustness. Lupa Blanca had taught me that what is negative sometimes comes within the soul, it is very normal, but it is only a very brief moment of contrast on what is the real life and on what is the only path to follow. With the refreshed soul, in the height of the night, I returned to the hut.
In short, as mentioned, all these small events, although not explained rationally, I approached more and more to the dear Lupa dear and seemed to me extremely remote, perhaps for a sort of froidiana removal, that one day that friendly friendship could suddenly stop . There were too many signs and teachings that the wolf gave me and I tried to see in each attitude, even if it was small, what meaning was hidden, if meaning had to be there.
On another occasion I began to walk along the woods with the she-wolf that followed me like a tame dog. That confidence of hers always seemed so strange to me, so much so that once I did a trial. As we proceeded on the edge of a swamp spaced about thirty meters, I stopped and called it to myself; immediately, with a military obedience, he quickly reached me and was caressed as if nothing had happened. A real apparent domesticated behavior.
In the maze of events one day I finally came to think that Lupa blanca was not a wild she-wolf, but perhaps fled from some presumed "owner" who, having taken her from a puppy, was now accustomed to human companionship. But his way of doing easily unmasked my unconvinced thought. She was a skilled hunter, disappearing for weeks to suddenly reappear as she pleased; maintained, even in its apparent docility, an expression and a way of acting that gave her all the connotations of being wild and, even if I tried to describe her behavior, in the depths I never found the right attributes. I was inevitably limited by my concepts of being humanly tamed.
In short, the days spent busily and I always felt enthusiastic and proud of me to have as a companion, though not constant, a savage she-wolf. In fact, I sometimes wondered if everything was true or the simple fruit of my "stubborn" fantasy. From time to time I wondered if Lupa blanca was a solitary being, as I saw her, or she belonged to some herd that she frequented when she was often absent from my hut. Probably, given her strength and her character, she was an alpha female, and she wanted to decide, when she had the opportunity, to get away from her group to come to me. I did not know, but I was dubious about his total solitude compared to his fellow men. But, in any case, I never saw her together with another wolf.
However, as a whole, my tangible link with Lupa blanca, as already mentioned, at times seemed extremely strange to me and I did not see it again, the meaning of the situation above all by the behavior of the wolf.
Several weeks passed and it was at least six months that Lupa Blanca often came to stay with me. But with the passing of time, even if I felt myself resting on my laurels, I fell back into that crisis, perhaps unjustified, but in any case pervaded my whole being. Was it really good that Lupa blanca all that time with my mediocre domesticity? The doubts became more concrete even if I did not notice anything strange in the behavior of the beloved she-wolf. But, after an absence of five days, when she returned she found me, in a strongly absent state of mind, sitting on the bench that surrounded the fire. Lupa blanca, as was his usual, turned around, gave a little yelp followed by a brief howling how to say "wake up" and I, in that circumstance, I showed a sort of coldness, even if the term was a little exaggerated. Then, perhaps caught by a deep sense of guilt, I do not know, I looked at her with the intention of pushing her violently, but I held back, because my spirit did not feel like pushing her away ... But some time later, suddenly, in a spring day, when the last snows melt, while Lupa blanca after an absence of two days she came towards me, in a kind of shemale, I shouted at her, intimidated her, waved her a stick and kept screaming at her excess . The she-wolf, obviously, was frightened not a little and, even with a trot not overly supported, went away, taking the direction of the forest ... The next day of the wolf there was no trace and then I took the opportunity to fill my travel bag with 'intention to land, temporarily, in an extremely remote place where Lupa blanca could not reach me ... Time would have done the rest ...! “
Thus the dream was dissolved and this is what I wrote about it. However, the next day, I wanted to summarize, again in the notebook, the events of the previous day with some additional reflections: "At that point I woke up with a start and, as mentioned, I was particularly impressed by that fantastic story. After having transcribed it, I paused, reading it several times, to reflect for what reason that dream had so disturbed me so much, that I wanted to find or perhaps better see, in its development, some meaning, admitting that dreams have someone.
It was in the late afternoon that, thought over thought, I came to the conclusion that in my opinion the strangest part that I did not see collimare with my nature, was the conclusion of the dream, its fading during an inconceivable act, that is my voluntary and decided departure from that wolf which was in very clear contrast with my real life because, as expressed many times, for the wolves and for the wild life I had from a tender age a very strong bond both symbolic and tangible with hand. In other words, there was perhaps an exaggerated elective affinity with this inscrutable species, but in the dream, in which I had the great fortune of being "friend" with a she-wolf, I voluntarily wanted to distance myself from her in a clear and decisive form. I did not understand the meaning and it took me a sort of self-execution to steal what could mean that gesture of mine so strong.
But there was also another element, not secondary at all, made to perceive me in the dream of a white wolf, which troubled me greatly; it was the awareness of the decline of wild life, of the primeval forests and of nature as a whole. Moving away from Lupa Blanca seemed to me that I tried to ignore even that very real awareness. In fact, it seemed to me that Lupa Blanca had made me realize that ... the wild wolves go away. The spirit of the savage goes away. The breath of the wild goes away. Silent and endless forests go away. Everything, free and wild is going away. Time flows and the wild goes away. The light that illuminates the wild transcends. All that flows without time is going away. Perhaps the same memory of the savage is going away. We are losing our true essence. We are migrating into the void of life and we are, little by little, quietly extinguishing ourselves. We are always poorer than the truth of the savage, we are always poorer than the same life, we are even poorer than the wolf's lurid. A distant and feeble melody wants to sing us the world of wilderness, but we are playing notes of infinite sadness, because we are portrayed before the absoluteness of the wild. Sing well or melody and wake up the dormant soul of our spirit that now no longer contemplates the world of nature. Goodbye, a proud and kind wolf, goodbye, proud and indomitable wolf, goodbye, wild lights of the spirit that, in dissolving, lead our hearts towards the gloomy obscurity and, melancholically, towards a dead-end road without any soul or hope. Forests look at us astonished as we search in vain for a world that is less and less wild, free from the truth of the wolf's howl. I cry strongly against all this, because I know that by losing the wild, losing the last frontier of nature also means losing life and leaving behind a world of infinite beauty and silent forests. No, I do not accept it! The savage must return and, if it can happen, we must at that point reacquire it and relive it in all its splendor. But now, in the face of this abyss, on the wolf's wailing we will be able to reflect for a long time and write many words and perhaps we will say many things, but our rhetoric will never bring us to the essential! This is precisely what we lack: the essential and then we suddenly find ourselves alone. A solitude we wanted, strongly desired because we no longer have the hearing to hear the howl of the wolf. The howl of the wild ...! “.
However, some time passed and my daily commitments distracted me, for a certain period, from that event, also because with the passing of days I associated more and more the events of that dream as something random and little by little I made that initial tension diminish. emotional within a simple dreamlike suggestion.
But exactly two months later something strange happened again. It was still a dream, but this time indecipherable so much that in the morning, just after waking up, I remembered almost nothing but the dazzling appearance of an undefined, elusive and white being. The fact did not trouble me there, but with the passing of the hours that white color brought me, perhaps making the fantasy travel, to the image of Lupa blanca, the candid and graceful white Lupa. Perhaps the association was forced at that moment, but what happened four days later seemed to confirm my apparent reverie.
I was by chance in a large open area where the tundra replaced the large forest. As I walked along the crest of a hill, I saw the movement of something in the distance. I immediately surveyed the area with my binoculars and, while paying much attention to the observing phase, I did not notice anything. Resumed, however, the path, always with the eye turned in the direction of the alleged sighting, I saw, this time with certainty, the running of a mammal that, immediately framed with binoculars, turned out to be a beautiful solitary specimen of a wolf. But what caused my uncontrolled emotion was that the wolf was white! It would not have been anything strange because in the tundra the presence of wolves with a clear coat is not so rare, but the unconscious and then obvious association with my dream immediately brought me to Lupa blanca. After a few minutes of psychological instability, the wolf disappeared from my binoculars, as a depression no longer allowed direct observation. However, my fantasy began to gallop and, with a certainty as a child, he told myself that surely it was Lupa blanca.
I remained in the area for a couple of hours heading towards the valley depression where the wolf had passed shortly before, but there was no longer any trace so that I slowly retraced my steps to go to my base camp where I had installed a tent.
I lit a nice fire and remained in meditation. The lucidity that occurred almost immediately made me obviously exclude any association between that observed wolf and the events of my dreams, so much so that for a moment I ridiculed myself.
It was evening and, after a frugal meal, entered a warm sleeping bag I went to sleep. I took more than an hour to get to sleep, but it was a restless night, a sort of half-sleep, so that in the morning I felt more tired than the evening. But in my half-sleep there had been the presence, in my imagination or in the moments of sleep, I do not know, of Lupa blanca. This time, however, I could not approach it and it seemed elusive and almost phantasmagoric. It was probably only a sublimation of Lupa blanca and nothing tangible. I did not remember any other details at all. But the biggest doubt was, as mentioned, if those opalescent images were in the moments of sleep or in my light dormancy, that is the result of a sort of "hallucination" or of nocturnal fantasy to which I had manifested my much sought after she-wolf. Doubt remained in me, but again the memories of the first dream were rekindled in me, made months before when, as I have amply described, I left voluntarily and inexplicably away from Lupa Blanca. Again, what little by little had dimmed, now it was again present in my mind and gave me neither calmness nor serenity. At all costs I had to interpret, in the right sense, my refusal of a friendly relationship with a wild being, a symbolism, the savage indeed, to which my person and my spirit had been pursuing for years!
The following days, back to my lonely house, the thought of finding an answer did not settle and only the usual daily work commitments managed to distract me at least a little. Everything seemed strange to me, even the probable exaggeration I was making on a simple dream, a dream that, like many others, does not often have a linearity and a development that can coincide with rational logic. So, at times, I moved away from the event, while at times I was strongly attracted to it.
Under the snowfall
Under the snowfall the young brown bear followed the trail of a path that skirted a stream. He wandered on the bank of the river, everywhere insurmountable; he tried to go down into the water several times but the strong current and the high water made him desist each time.
The bear finally left the bank and began to climb a small ridge in the nearby forest, renouncing to wade the river.
Dawn arrived slowly; it became day as the sky lit up by the ever dimter northern sun. In fact, its rays were not warm, the latitude was too high. The cold was already intense, and the pools of water were now completely frozen; only short stretches of the springs where the water flowed fast, the frost still waited, but it was only a matter of days.
The brown bear approached the sources of the Variokj and drank slowly, but what attracted him there more than the thirst was the smell that gave off a trunk of Scotch pine that emerged almost from the pool of water, battered by ancient scratches that generations of bears had marked with their strong claws and soaked with hair that the resin held with tenacity; his nose told him that other bears had been at the source at that time, approaching the burrows in winter. Even the brown bear sniffed against the pine and rubbed it against his hips and back and injured his bark with his fingernails and teeth.
The brown bear entered the forest among the broad-leaved deciduous trees of their green fronds. He followed a path through a wooded vegetation rich in dead branches and tree trunks crashed by snow and wind from the previous winters, and lost in the thick of the woods.
Late autumn passed him in that pleasant arboreal extension. He often moved to reach the numerous clearings, some swamps; he ate the berries of the birders' sherds, especially the younger ones he came to, standing up and resting on the trunks. Even if he did not see them, in that large wooded area, there were other bears including a female with three puppies. He moved away from that place when the cold became more pungent and when one night the snow came to whiten every corner possible; took the path of a well-marked path that slowly led him on open clearings on top of a hill, then he retraced his steps and, back in the woods, he satiated eating the berries of the ever-abundant cranberries.
A few days later the Brown Bear descended into the Karden Valley, leaving its unmistakable footprints in the thin layer of fresh snow that was larger in some places because it was piled up by the wind.
In the clearings the epilobes were now dry and rigid stalks and every other type of bushy vegetation was nothing but a tangle of branches without leaves.
For some time, after the splendor of the ruska, the leaves of the birches had fallen to the ground to color the soft layer of the litter made of soft mosses, rhododentiaries, heather and lichens.
The cold was now intense and the snow that fell during the last perturbations of autumn would not have gone any further until the following spring. Now the days were shorter and the sun was already down at four in the afternoon, while in the morning to see it behind the great wall of the taiga, it was necessary to wait at least nine.
The brown bear was crossing the thick and primeval forest of the great taiga directed to the open areas where among the snow could still be satisfied with the succulent blueberries; occasionally the animal stopped curiously to smell the air, as if to find an explanation to that sudden change of time, then continued among the trees attracted only by the desire for food.
The brown bear appeared suddenly on the clearing like a shadow and went down into a small valley studded with stones that rose out of the snow; a rowan of the birds grew up there, twisted, and the brown bear went to rummage through the snow at the foot of the tree, looking for the fruits that had fallen to the ground by the birds.
The night, now more and more dominant, presaged more than anything else the incipient winter.
I was going through a bad period
I was going through a bad existential period. The fact was not connected with the dream of Lupa blanca, but it was simply the result of periodic my existential discomfort that at certain times intensified and took over me and annulled any inner peace. In those days things, which unfortunately gripped me more and more, were strongly melancholic, depressive, psychotic, anxious, phobic, hallucinogenic states; all with an irrepressible fund of sadness. Suddenly I saw life dilated, uphill, opalescent, canceled and, physically, I had obvious repercussions: state of ataraxia or asthenia, extremely low blood pressure, difficulty in performing even the simplest gestures, etc. In many moments I had the feeling of not being able to live, rather I saw life before me with a term that I felt I was anticipating. I did not know, but I was not sure, if my life had any value so much that I had to endure, in those fortunate short moments, an almost indescribable daily suffering. I always had a strong temptation to go down, but I tried to hold on as long as the rope would hold! My heart throbbed, the blood flowed in my veins, my mind wandered and perhaps, even in my melancholy, I would have lived a hundred years or perhaps I would have ended my existence the next day, I did not know.
"Making sense of life can lead to madness
but a meaningless life is the torture of restlessness and of vain desire -
it is a boat that longs for the sea, yet it fears it ".
So wrote E. L. Masters, and I also reflected on the beginning of that profound poem when he said "... a boat with furled sails, in a harbor". And yes, for me more than the meaning of life at the bottom were my furled sails, because my mind, always dreaming and projected forward, for its incurable mental illness and its self-imprisonment, meant that if the boat had hoisted his sails to take off, would be shipwrecked soon after. I had a total detachment from reality while living in an environment that for me was extremely optimal, calm, isolated, far from everything ... In those moments I repeated a simple sentence that sums up my existence well. "I am a castaway who rests without stopping in the middle of the sea with the hope of landing on some shore, not knowing that there is no more land".
And in these circumstances my only positive and ultimately decisive thought was the one addressed to the dear memory of Lupa blanca, a being that, even if in the imagination, only a few lucky people in the world could afford to have in friendship.
Many things that I felt about her, I had already transcribed immediately after the dream, but, in those moments, it was mentally necessary to repeat, albeit with the necessary variations, what for free had given me Lupa blanca and that I had noted. I remembered that evening again, in the dream, when I recovered from a profound state of ataraxia and existential malaise. His beauty was indescribable, but the main one was in his soul, a kind and profound soul that had the ability to understand and perceive the essential things of human existence and brought with it a loving sense of strength and optimism, so strong as to transmit it to those who came into his knowledge. Not that he probably did not have moments of inner suffering, he was still a living being, but he had something not describable that made it above the parts. He spontaneously managed to always go a little further where others stopped long before. When he appeared to me in the dream, as I said, it immediately seemed to me that I had always known her, also because in the instantaneous form a strong, true and unique friendship was established. It was his exceptionally penetrating nature that allowed him such a great act of fraternity and solidarity.
It immediately became for me a being above all things, for her spontaneous love and for her indomitable greatness of spirit, so much so that within myself I felt towards her something that words could not express, because, what pervades the inner part of a being, so many times it is so high that it can not be translated into the human saying.
Here, then, that Lupa blanca became for me also in real life an existential comfort and this made even more obscure my choice, in the dream, to escape from her ...
After all, to make a comparison, it was like chasing away, in the relationship between two human beings, the person who loves deeply, of a love moreover perfectly matched.
Why I gave up on the wild
Why did I renounce the savage in that beautiful and at the same time disturbing dream? Why did it seem to me that I rejected the evidence of the end of the earth made me understand by Lupa blanca? Why did I want to find myself in front of my dazzling Lupa eyes and re-embrace her with the maximum of love and union? Why did I continue to be a slave and a prisoner of a simple oneiric manifestation that, as I said, could mean nothing? In fact, I always repeated to myself that it was nothing but a dream, but in the end I perceived in the deepest that a practical meaning had it. Perhaps my mind wanted to remove it, to cancel it, but in reality to prevail was always the search over any purpose, conscious and unconscious!
That dream had a clear and dominant surreal structure, but it was also full of practical events, events that lived in the dream itself, and the following day, with hindsight, I managed to transcribe not only the development, but also the innumerable awareness practices, reflections and landings in concrete areas. I had at times the feeling that I had lived a dream within a dream. The surreality in describing the events, has the strength and the full freedom to be able to give free hand to sensations or concrete facts without the constraint of logic and of the limiting rationality. In most life events, using only conscious reasoning, it is probably not possible to go beyond the limits of the mental categories to which we are strongly chained. The surreal element was always my workhorse even in my previous writings, because, again, they allowed to express the maximum of reality with maximum freedom. So it happened with the dream of Lupa blanca, and now, even if I did not understand my "refusal" of the final part, I had, in any case, given a wide range of possibilities to fully understand other things, things that perhaps with the reason in hand, I would never have arrived.
However, for a long time, when I slept in the evening to sleep, I always hoped to dream of the continuation of that story and had obviously had a very different course. But that did not happen any more and, even if with the passing of time, for long periods I no longer thought of Lupa blanca, occasionally, especially in the days of melancholy and sadness, as I have amply described, my thoughts ran right away from her and his symbolic help, within my imagination and in the remembrances of the dream itself, turned out to be always a decisive aid.
One day, however, I was reminded of the idea of rewriting the story of that dream and of giving it a development and an end suited to my being and my feelings. But even that new purpose immediately collapsed, I wrote a single page and threw it away, because, I thought, if I gave him an interpretation completely manipulated by the conscious, rational state, it would be overall certainly satisfying and fulfilling with myself, but would not never revealed the true meaning of the "warning" given to me by the dream of Lupa blanca.
In the end I preferred not to think about anything and to leave buried in my unconscious what I was trying to reveal.
And so it was that in the end everything remained virtually unfinished, hoping that the development of my life led me, in its course, to truly understand, without failures and perhaps without having consciousness, what was hidden behind the graceful fairy tale of Lupa Blanca. "My friend, now I can not believe that because of me the time is over for us, no, because I can not survive your loss. My soul dies ... But if you have to go ... I too will vanish into thin air.
And I remind you that every wild flower, even if it fades quickly, before dying gives the wind infinite seeds ... “.
One day I decided to go forward
One day I decided to go forward for a couple of weeks, a little to dilute my fixation on the dark truths of the dream of Lupa blanca, in the shadowy and silent taiga, walking a few dozen kilometers and bivouacking in the evening next to a comfortable fire ; I wanted to capture even more the feelings that solitude translates into multiform and peaceful reflections. The inner result was optimal, because I could stop my mind, in calm and relaxation, on many significant speculations. The notebook I took with me was so thickly filled in such a short time that I had to write down some thoughtful patterns on the cover and back ...
When I returned, to tell the truth a little exhausted, to my simple home, I was strongly taken to process my notes, but I found a surprise that I could never have imagined: the mailbox was completely open and inside there it was nothing more. At first I did not dwell much on that fact, as I was taken by a sort of concern about who had been in my house and for what reason. In fact, immediately I rushed into the house, but I did not find any sign of presence, nor did the doors present forcing or clumsy attempts to break into. Everything was in its place and I had, for a moment, the appearance that a kind of "ghost" or ethereal spirit might have been in the area. I came back out and saw nothing. I wondered who could ever be wandering in that remote place and be more interested only in my correspondence. It remained a mystery, but for some nights I did not sleep well.
A few weeks passed and my mind came back from time to time to the mystery of that visit, but in the end I did not worry anymore, otherwise, with my total solitude, I would have gone mad with fear or doubts.
More than a month had gone by that mysterious fact, even though I thought at last some wanderer might have passed, and since he was not a thief or an attacker, he did not think of taking anything except, and this always sounded strange to me, of my "Schizophrenic" letters.
A new autumn
A new autumn was coming and, before I had to prepare for another harsh winter, I decided to do a hike of several days again, but this time only for a week or so. The autumn air that was already beginning to make itself felt was an excellent inspiration for reflections and listening. So one morning, shortly after dawn, I took the road north. After all, my going was certainly a material fact, but my mind was always free and above all ready to wander in fantasy and often in illusions within an inextricable world of its own: a world in my own way! I always imagined that all nature was dynamically intact, where: "In every place it would take a place, thus, left uncultivated". Then my world was made of "distant forests, blue lakes, green hills and pure skies where the animals roamed free and the men still knew the harmony of the whole". My world was serene, secluded, lonely and the clash, which until before this trip of listening took place before the raw reality of civilization, led me always to a discomfort and an ever greater need to close in myself. A kind of real autism. However, I always had the right "characters" who, in my imagination, protected me and gave me the wisest advice and practices to follow. In this way I had some chance of surviving, of defending myself, otherwise I would have completely lost myself in the objective paths of "the other world".
So I wandered for a week, among the beauties of those places and the fantasies of my mind. Then I went back to the hut. When I got back, I lay down on the pallet and remained motionless for a couple of hours, when I was worried again if there had once again been some mysterious new visit. But nothing had changed, and outside, looking in the mail box, obviously there was nothing left; then, with a certain superficiality, I looked at the mail in "entry", I opened it mechanically and at that point my "crisis" was total. Inside it there was a roll of well-locked paper and collected by a red bow !!! I think it was less than a quarter of a second and I already had that mysterious envelope in my hands. I rushed into the hut, untied the bow and immediately realized that everything was composed, more or less, about ten pages. They were written in black ink and with an extremely clear and accurate calligraphy. My heart was beating in my chest and at the moment I dared not read anything. I went out of the hut and looked carefully around, but "obviously" I did not see anything. I took my breath, tried to contain my discomfort, then gathered my mind and with little courage returned to the hut. I should have read that envelope. I was still undecided, then I told myself that eventually every fantasy can also be reality. I sat down on the kitchen table and started reading.
First I noticed that there was no header and was written in the first person as if I had processed it myself, but I did not want to go with the eye to the last page to read the signature, assuming it was there. I sipped some water and let myself go …
"I'm alone in the hut. The snow falls copiously and everything seems to be sublimated in the beauty of matter and spirit. I'm choosing a different life, but I have to commit myself to live and breathe the new. I do not have to be afraid of changing and joining everything. I have to transfigure myself into myself. I have to walk in the night, fly in the mind and savor the hidden meaning of natural truth. I'm alone in the hut and I have to draw water from the well and warm myself with the wood I've collected ... It's really true. It's hard to come back simple, it's really hard to do it and above all to feel it inside. I become inebrained with the inner lights and transfigured into infinity, but I breathe deeply and feed myself with my new thought. I feel sometimes the hidden truth that little by little comes back to light. Light, a beautiful word that contrasts with darkness, not those of the night, but those of the spirit when it is busy searching for the ephemeral and the vacuous. The light brings me back to life, perhaps even united with death itself, but the truth gradually penetrates me into solitude and the lost way. I'm alone in the hut. The wind brings with it swirls of snow, icy sensations, but also transfers in the air the call of the wild and clear visions that the rustling of the fronds of the trees amplifies theatrically. I lock myself in my I, I try to look at myself from inside and I see my mistakes, my indecision, my transience and I push myself further, beyond my limit and, with surprise, I begin to glimpse the right bank where everything is like must be and as always will be. Dear wolf alone, come back to my mind, help me to open me to the wild world so that I can find again the load of truth and beauty. Thank you spirits of the woods. Your voice announces freedom, announces the right path and I, at the mercy of true life, slowly transmit towards the absolute, an absolute that in an opalescent form I remember that a distant time was in me, in every human being then ... the 'magic' word civilization took it away from me and I got tired, it's true, I got tired of it. I recognize all my mistakes, one by one, and I hardly try to find some kind of wisdom in between. Then suddenly I find one: awareness, being aware of something. It is a great possession, because it is the first step towards the right path. But at this point I do not have to go back. It's too good to lose it again. I can not afford it. Forgive me all if one day you can. I feel petty and ephemeral, but I began to be really aware now and now I can not help but go on for an enlightening and omnipresent path. I can hear the wolves. Finally I understand it in the right and undisputed way. But above all, now I really live it. I leave the hut and join that piercing sound because in my heart I finally feel that I can start again, really start again “.
At that point, the letter had a dotted line as if a chapter had been completed and the next one went. I kept reading ...
"At the height of the Nordic winter I find myself gathered in the hut surrounded by the infinite taiga that in the apparent sleep gives you the life and the 'breath' of the blood. The feeling of free freedom always returns to me, with the metaphorical watchful gaze of the wild wolf. I no longer understand the weight of falsehoods and masks, I feel the truth emerge from my skin and nothing, just nothing can distract me from this state of mind. Being in the wilderness means always being oneself, stripped bare with its own weaknesses and with all the limitations that each existing brings in one's own burden of life. Every action of the members and of the spirit is essential, and listening, knowing how to listen to silence and loneliness is now something to be learned and no longer to be seen. Nothing can take away from us the desire to breathe the truth, and nothing can prevent us from freeing ourselves from the useless chains that we have gradually imposed upon ourselves. But we must want to do it.
Listening to silence, the silent silence that gives reflection, calm and true serenity. The alienation of a man alone within the walls of civilization is strong and leads him slowly towards his ruin and his perdition. It extinguishes itself, it takes away the breath from itself and there is nothing that can wake him up from the deep sleep of his own spirit. I have learned to listen, by now very well, the calm and the voice of my inner part that in the end is perfectly intertwined with the great breath of the essence of wild life.
I was a prisoner and a slave to anguish and anxiety, and I was not at all master of myself. I was a sort of puppet whose threads were moved by the yearning of apparent life, and I no longer knew the secrets of my hidden truths.
In order to do so, I went to the margins of the voracious great circle of civilization, which assembled everything uniformly and reduced everything similar to a "machine" that produces, gains and above all consumes. To come out of it substantially outside, or at least to put oneself on the margins means to have understood that inside every life pulsates something else that is not money, power and ephemeral chimeras. The simple and simple sociality could lead to a multiform, harmonious and wise relationship, but the great, global and senseless sociality, or rather 'asociality', transforms things differently even if apparently unites them and leads, I would say, suddenly towards the abyss and the end of knowing how to listen to 'silence'.
The inner vision of life no longer seems to belong to contemporary man, and all the ailments of such a state come to light. The man therefore degenerates believing that with his work he is always doing better to 'come out' from a life that seemed to him intolerant and devoid of 'useful' things. He is therefore falling into the trap of himself, in a trap that may not allow a way back.
I reflect on the meaning of my life and I recognize that it is not a choice, but a duty, a duty that must be honored in the best possible way. If I cancel myself to spend meaningless existence it is as if I refuse to live, and this is not good. I have to react to the negativity that I impose on me or that sometimes indirectly imposed on me. I have to release my positive energy to dedicate it to the quality of existence.
From around the taiga seems to sleep, but it warns me, the sense of me awakens me, and leads me directly to the path of essence. So I take my spirit and let it flow through the river of life. A life of quality and essence where the vacuous and the nullities no longer find a place. I have finally understood that dream and reality merge into one single substance where the beauty of what is nature breathes within me and inside things.
I truly feel in my being the wilderness of life, the call of the wild. It is useless to raise great discourses if nature is killed. We all leave. Instead we must reject our selfishness and accept the universal beauty that the simple howl of the wolf can already well represent. Because what offends the sense of things, the sense of nature, offends the whole of the whole in one fell swoop. I feel like I want to love life with nature, because nature is love and life itself. For me everything that offends nature was inconceivable and from this point of view my clear tendency is, or all white or all black. My mind gave no nuance to the destructive work of the natural world by man.
I find myself in the hut in the heart of the taiga and I write these lines, the story of what 'said and did not say' the wolf, the story of love. And I hear a song, a song of sorrow, when man spontaneously wants to remove and annihilate what he believes does not belong to him anymore. He sings his error, his evil error, and I try to recognize the right, in harmony and in peace. Then I listen to the song of nature and cry for the joy that emanates, but I also cry for the hand that offends her. Oh man, why do you offend your mother? I believe I understand your gesture. You have simply lost the sense of reason and you no longer have a soul of universality and love. And then you destroy yourself and the things of nature which then, in the end, are the same thing.
But the wise words are not heard, do not enter in the soul in the now hardened even in the limbs. You do not listen, you can not see, you do not hear. It's not good. Why, man, do you escape the truth? I ask, I ask and I never get an answer.
In my past, as I have already announced, I too was blind and deaf and I had fallen into existential anguish and the sadness of life. But the spirit of the forest, the spirit of the Great North awakened me, made me understand and gave me the hope of existence. So I started to move away from the certainty not 'certain' of false everyday life and I started to distance myself from that strange existential malaise. And slowly, listening to the howling of the wolf, I gave back to myself what belonged to me.
When something ends, it is not important what ends, but what starts. All things are united, even when they are different. It is up to one's own wisdom to understand which path to follow.
Time seems to pass slowly, but the taiga has taught me many practical things, and I would say above all the essential ones of the spirit. My long follow the life of the wolves has confirmed to me and at the same time unveiled many things of their witty existence. The herd is exceptionally compact, clean, perfectly adapted to survive in an environment that, especially in the long winter, is anything but easy. The dynamic of its members, extremely active and multiform, inspires a lot to always resist in life, because we must fight to the end. We must never give up and must penetrate, the tasks of survival, with the stimulus of their energy. The sharp look of a wolf or its true, but also symbolic howl, always reminds us that there is still an indomitable and wild nature, although I believe we can not fully understand all the messages, because there are many things that we do not perceive because there is less what the wolves can not tell us directly!
But anyway, we do not want to learn anymore, we do not even want to listen and we obviously do not want to understand. Now I ask myself: if we do nothing of these things, who will hold up the world? Man lives continuously on credit, but his fund is ending: nature. Think about it before continuing ... ".
At that point the reading was suspended for a few moments, also because again there was a line break and then a new chapter; I also noticed more and more that, in the reflections and development of the writing, I recognized a family style, something that belonged to me. Yet, at least I believed, indeed it was practically certain, I was certainly not the author of that always strange and inexplicable dissertation.
I took now from the growing curiosity and participation in the progression of the concepts expressed, I continued immediately to slide the following pages:
"The world of life flows like a river, at times placid and sometimes impetuous, and along its mighty path, it welcomes in its bed all the elements of the surrounding world and of its own interior. It is now felt in the heart that we must close the circle to get out of the infamous world of the 'spirit' contemporary to place, as much as possible, the margins of madness, not to end up chained to absurdity, to vain subjugations and bitterly to understand of have not lived. Our existence is marked by often rigid and immutable categories based on structural archetypes that can belong to the most varied origins: religious, legislative, mental, cultural, traditional, etc. These categories place the way we see things in completely partial sectors because they are always referring to models 'constructed' by the varied and artificial conventions. But a simple analysis immediately shows what governs this principle: the relativity of the whole.
But if this first analysis had already highlighted to me, albeit for a very brief reflective passage, important aspects of that miscellany of reports so obviously distorted and altered, I needed now, in my argument, to deepen the pivotal element: the value in itself of nature and all things.
The knowledge of a phenomenon is purely empirical, that is the fruit of the sensitive mediation of the subject. This acquisition, however, can not be elevated to a universal concept, since it is quite arbitrary to generalize a strictly individual experience. A personal experience, then, also presents limits to itself, because it is the result of a constantly variable empirical 'moment'.
The 'intrinsic or intrinsic value' of a phenomenon (noumenon), a value devoid of subjective experiences and mediations, takes on a lasting, universal and real character. The 'value in itself' is something superior, something undefinable perhaps not knowable, which transcends the subject to become the essence of the object. Thus, a profound universal and indelible concept appears in the mind.
Only at a later stage can we 'interpret' the noumenal transforming it into a 'phenomenon' that is the object of the senses. The contraposition between "things in themselves" and "things with respect to us" is therefore born. The dualistic vision of the natural world was largely imposed in the West mainly (although many other elements overlapped) by a negative religious influence (eg Christianity placed the dominating man on one side and the nature subjugated by the other), and it was proper, among other things, of the Greek philosophy that placed man, a thinking and sensitive subject, outside an objectified and subaltern nature. Only in Eastern thought will it be possible to discern, at least in part, a vital philosophy that is not anthropocentric and therefore missing dualism. In the West the self is exalted to the detriment of everything, in the East everything is exalted to the detriment of the self.
It is therefore recalled that the interpenetration of opposites, even in diversity, always generates unity within the dialectic of nature provided that the vision of the world is unifying and centripetal.
The 'intrinsic or intrinsic value' of nature (natural noumenon) is the highest expression of thought. To affirm therefore that the natural substance (in the general sense of the term) must be preserved and respected for its value in itself, without our own mediation or intuition, is the highest conceptual elevation of conservation that can be formulated. Every action must always be an end in itself without attributing to it a positive or negative value in relation to the possible consequences it generates (the man is neither owner nor depositary of anything).
On the contrary, in the common mental speculation of knowledge, we are always referring to concepts with respect to us. In fact, interventions are stimulated only if they bear material or spiritual "gains" or in any case utilitarian. Translating, we will have: we protect a centuries-old forest so that in the present and future generations man can enjoy it materially and spiritually.
Here, however, is a superior concept: "Nature must be preserved and respected for its value in itself, not for our material, spiritual or ethical interest".
A natural phenomenon has its greatest value in itself, and manifests itself independently of knowledge and sensitive mediation. It is essential to understand that a 'place' has something in itself that we can not and should not try to interpret. Only in this way will we succeed in giving the natural world the right value that belongs to it. Once upon a time, as mentioned, the human spirit had in itself, in the unconscious, this concept, as a wild wolf or a bear of the forests possesses, but the traumatic detachment from nature has deprived it. Every being has its own 'vision' of life and unknowingly posits itself (especially as an individual) to the 'center' of reality. But this centrality is only apparent, useful for the needs of the survival of the moment. On the other hand, man transforms that centrality into a total subordination of all external reality from him, making only the universal and absolute rights of his own species prevail. All with the maximum of awareness. Man and his culture on the one hand, nature and its essence distinct from the other: in other words, DUALISM!!
If, as I have just pointed out, man has in the past been a full member of the wilderness of the world, has progressively become the only subject, has come out of the stage of nature, falsified the truth, and has conditioned his subtle interests almost all the elements of nature.
Faced with this deep dialectic so articulate and rich in variables, the need arises, within the same human thought, to reverse the state of things, mental and material, to recondition man to a 'balanced and just' dimension. If man remained in connection with the wild world, as an indistinct element in the ordered and unpredictable natural chaos, he did not raise any problem of destruction and intrusiveness and, consequently, of protection, respect or conservation of nature. But his rebellion against natural truth led him to extinguish within himself the sense of original harmony and purity, transforming it into a voracious being blinded by his own affirmation and self-centeredness. Here, then, that the essential becomes superfluous and the vacuo becomes essential. The total detachment from nature takes place, the overwhelming of things happens and the annihilation of the external world by oneself. Man then considers himself the center of everything and the only yardstick of things ... ".
Suddenly there was a white page with a perfect circle drawn inside which there were written two significant phrases: "The wind can not be seen, but it can be perceived" and "interpenetrating unitarily with nature is so valuable that to give it a sense of measure it would be necessary to conceive the infinite and go beyond! ".
The last page, short and concise, ended with a particular signature, structured as a sentence, without any individuality whatsoever, and which itself had, in my opinion, still something to say:
With heart
In very low spirits
Rest the sheets on the table
I put the papers back on the table and with the tears in my heart and my eyes fell into a deep, almost dreamlike dimension where there was great room for a marked melancholy and a state of abandonment. I could not think of anything and it seemed that my mind wandered outside of space and time. I perceived something subtle, a faint and archaic sense of calmness, and I fully understood that the boat of my being had arrived at the shore of truth. Now I could lower the sails ...
I remained in that state for perhaps a couple of hours, then I took my conscience in my hands and began to question myself and above all to analyze what was written in that letter.
There were all the answers to my doubts and to my research, he had brought out what I had long felt latent and subdued inside of me and, if what was read for a good part was developed in a poetic / narrative style, the final part became almost scientific, analytical and perfectly addressed. A strange development that I did not understand, but then at that point I did not understand anything about the situation of the mysterious letter. Then, perhaps in the grip of an altered state of mind, I began to think that I had written it myself, with my journey and my journey (the text, as mentioned, was written in the first person), but if this was plausible from the a "conceptual" point of view, how could it be from the practical point of view for writing what was noted? Many things did not coincide: I did not remember at all writing something similar, the writing was certainly not mine that was normally almost illegible, frenetic and at times proceeded by intuition; and then the type of paper, a kind of parchment never possessed and the evident use of a nib with a lot of inkwell. No, the matter did not fit, but there was a response somewhere. Perhaps he had simply been a highly enlightened wayfarer who, after reading my numerous letters, had wanted to answer me in the same tones and give me answers. But even this hypothesis did not satisfy me at all. To be true, there were too many coincidences that continued not to cross.
The following day, after a sleepless night during which I saw the letter several times, I came to a conclusion that was certainly not exhaustive, but the only one I could give myself: I had been myself, or rather the part of me that lived in its secluded world and hidden, to write everything and to build the whole scene. A sort of splitting of the personality. That's all! I did not believe it, but I could not think of anything else and at the end, to be honest, the enigma did not dissolve it at all ...
But the occasion led me to a consideration that I considered extremely valuable. In fact, I believed that many situations, even if they remain unexpressed, could contain highly positive elements because it is beautiful to understand or realize something, but perhaps sometimes it could be more penetrating to dream and live it inwardly because it will remain forever in its maximum value and splendor! For me the truth of an element was like a wild forest in a remote place. Not being able to live in the middle, I rejoiced equally knowing that it existed.
Finally I reflected on the meaning of the signature. It, in its brevity, still contained a clear doubt to be dissolved that I interpreted this way. Since its literal meaning was "melancholy", this could mean that while having understood the errors and the deviant line of human progress, perhaps there would never have been a truce that man would make use of 'stipular' with the natural world and therefore unitarily and emply with itself; and this would not have stopped the definitive decline and the inevitable end of all!
Perhaps mine was a very pessimistic conclusion, but I believe it to be profoundly true.
Faber est suae quisque fortunae
(Everyone is the creator of their own destiny)
Now a thin but consistent layer of ice
Now a thin but thick layer of ice extended us to the lakes and to the more placid river features. On the waters, shimmering in the dim moonlight, the last wild swans still in the area moved calmly. To shake them from the calm of the night, other nights came the Brown Bear, who crossed the frozen water and walked away towards the dense forest.
With the arrival of frost and snow, the forest was enveloped by a stasis and, every form of life seemed to disappear. And as the temperature went down more and more, millions of snowflakes fell. The dark tint of the pines and firs turned into a pure white, and on the ground the snowy blanket, now thicker and thicker, began to conceal everything from sight.
In that almost dreamlike atmosphere, silent shadow in movement, the brown bear disappeared in the winter whiteness of that immense expanse of trees towards the known lairs.
In the following days the snow increased, more fell, and the hills were already overloaded. The temperature had dropped to over ten degrees below zero and the bear was approaching the moment of its withdrawal from the scene of that superb boreal forest.
The Bear had sniffed the air several times, and had witnessed almost motionless at the coming of the snow. The smell of the wind was different, but he also felt the strange impulse that invaded it every year in that season, removing the desire for food. Even the little ones he brought with them were no longer greedy of the abundant wild fruits they still managed to find among the snow in the uninterrupted woods. They were not hungry anymore.
Many other bears had already entered the winter dens. Something told him that it was time for her and her kittens to get away and sleep, waiting for the long months of cold to pass.
In fact, the following night the family of bears had already retired to the den which the female had long since restored, made comfortable and soft with branches, spruce fronds, grass and anything else useful. It would have been long the period of presence in that narrow hole.
The den was at the foot of a giant spruce that had long since crashed. The old age of the plant and the winter snow load had caused its tumbling fall a long time ago. Under the roots of the roots, other bears had also prepared the den. The scarce presence in the area of rocky ravines, allowed nothing more than to dig the base of the twisted roots of the great fallen trees.
However, another female of Brown Bear, unlike most of her brothers, prepared a den for winter rest not under the stump of a tree come down, but close to a large mass of lava rocks placed at the base of a small orographic elevation. The entrance, exposed to the east, was rather narrow and this, in addition to facilitating the camouflage of the site, also reduced the thermal dispersion to complement the snow that at the right moment hid everything. Those rocks were particularly beautiful to behold because they had been brushed by the multiform colors of the endolithic lichens that covered most of them. Some were completely red, while others were of a mixture ranging from yellow to red, ocher and other colors. The bedding had been prepared in the best way, with a wide and soft base enough to certainly allow a comfortable and pleasant wintering. The humidity was almost completely absent.
The teddy bears were pervaded by the instinct, still unknown to them, that had influenced the mother, and the games that until a few days ago excited them no longer interested them. Together with the mother they entered the den with the desire to sleep.
When the storm broke, the Bear was still awake. Slowly the ground whitened even more before the opening of the den, and in the days that followed the snow increased until the entrance was completely closed; Then the Bear didzed off in what became a long sleep for her that lasted until the days of April.
Even the great Brown Bear went to his den; he went in and huddled in the great mound of grass he had dragged into his winter home and he let himself go into a deep torpor, and days later he fell asleep.
The long sleep
Long sleep was upon us. Towards the end of November the great northern winter had long since arrived. The Brown Bear was lying with its snout between its front legs, huddled in its deep burrow, also hidden from view by the wall of the new snow. The breath was barely perceptible, the heart beating slowed to only eight to ten pulsations and the body temperature dropped by a few degrees. His metabolism had changed profoundly, perfectly adapted to his long lethargy. But the great brown bear, if molested, would have promptly awakened and would have been able to defend himself vigorously.
Outside the den, the great taiga had stopped, and in those moments and in those phantasmagoric scenarios, nothing gave the impression that months later everything would change and the incessant rhythm of life and the bears would resume its journey.
The storm had passed for two days, and the trees were increasingly loaded with snow; the bitter cold did not stop even with the wind coming down and with the whitish clouds that had brought more snow. By day the temperature rose from a trifle when the sun was at its zenith, but it could not mitigate the harsh climate; now it only appeared for a couple of hours at most.
In the colder places, at the bottom of the wooded valleys, the frost had crystallized the snow on the clearings, and there the trees, even in the stems, were almost covered with snow. Scots pines and spruces bent the leafy foliage to completely change their real appearance.
With the month of December the snow reached over one meter thick and the temperatures sometimes exceeded even thirty degrees below zero.
Finally, January came and, in an invisible den, a brown bear female stirred in her sleep; and soft moans joined in the faint sound of dry leaves. Then something more violent shook her to arouse her from the torpor. Throbbing pains that tore through her belly signaled her brain to open her eyes. The Bear found itself in the den and sniffed the room, but made no effort to exit beyond the white barrier that closed the access slot; no instinct called her out, and even wished even more the warmth in which she lay, because instinct told him what was happening to him and why she had awakened.
She had retired to that isolated place, already knowing what was to happen to him that winter. He knew that he had to give birth to puppies as he had already happened in his life, and he knew that he had to stay in a sheltered place, comfortable and isolated from the males that in spring immediately after winter they would wander in the area where they wintered with serious danger for newborns that she would then have to leave alone in the den to go in search of food.
She gave birth to the two puppies without a whimper, little naked beings that the bear dried lovingly with the hot tongue; the two tiny beings, of a few etti, lay in the rustling bedding of birch leaves of the bed, sheltered between the soft and warm belly of the parent and her paws, in contact with the nipples of the udders swollen with milk.
The light wanderings did not cross the barrier of snow before the den and soon reassured the bear, who went back to sleep. But he awoke more often since then, taking care of the two puppies, that caring never choked in his movements in the narrow space of the den.
Outside the snow began to fall again, and the wind roared through the trees, occasionally dropping large blocks of snow that were piled up on their branches.
It still snowed until the end of March, but the Brown Bear no longer abandoned its den, nor did it wake up again. Under the thick blanket of snow, wrapped in the great heap of grass, he did not fear frost or moisture.
The winter had tightened the forest in its grip, harnessed the placid rivers and froze with a thick blanket the innumerable lakes in the area.
The forest was silent; never like in that season the woods became silent, almost impalpable, muffled by that white grip. And while the quietly dormant bears were sheltered in their little holes, outside, even in the stasis of the taiga, the wild world or perhaps what was left of the wild world shone in all its vigor.
____________________________________
PART THREE
With profound humility
Spent some time
Spent some time. Once made of pauses, reflection, of snow and nothing appeared on an unknown horizon. I slowed down my course and reached the limit of knowledge.
Posi brake to the duties of the soul.
Pauses, silences, fleeting moments, perhaps ignorant. I walked.
Suffused breath, disenchanted forests and then the white, the torpor, the blue light of the polar night.
A surreal darkness. Expected ... suspensions and luxuriant aspects of metamorphosis. I put in the greed to understand, but perhaps the incomprehension enveloped my doing.
Candid snow, bright aurora, sidereal spaces, constant twilight.
I listened to emptiness, the spirit gasped and the shadow was shaped with my silhouette.
Then there was not ... maybe it did not exist. Anyone could appear. What force was hidden behind the flattery of illusions.
Still break.
The artist's brush painted white, but his was an obligatory choice.
Loneliness filled life, but the same was hidden from evidence. It did not appear to be delayed and the memory was not born. Footsteps, delusions in the night, then, but especially after the research was born. I could not find the courage, but I understood the meaning.
The events were strange and too many unanswered questions plagued before our eyes. I did not clarify the illusions, but, at bottom, I understood the metaphor. The confusion seemed to take over, but some certainties savored the taste. Inner breaths nodded to the positive, but continuous contrasts concealed its development. My spirit wanted to find the meaning of something, but had to arrive at a beach of tranquility. It was not clear, but at that moment I did not feel any other desire. And then…
I moved away, even for a short time, from the duties of the soul and I gathered to remember what the deeds had cleared up. And suddenly a light appeared to me that, in a linear and apparently clear style, momentarily exposed me a truthful reality …
Before the civilized man
Before the civilized man made his "appearance" on earth, the whole world was "wilderness", an immense wilderness where only natural truth reigned. Then the civilized man arrived and, little by little, he took from the world and himself the unpredictable and "chaotic" harmony of nature that was the spirit of life.
Man is therefore responsible for providing for the preservation of nature (because he is the man who destroys it and therefore it is he who must preserve it); unless one wants to consider it as a simple component of dialectical materialism, which would have been entrusted with the task of subverting completely the natural environment: only this could be, in an ironic key, the essence of androcentric philosophy. In truth, human interventions on the territory are devastating and do not spare any element of nature: water, air, flora, fauna, inert matter, etc. Faced with such degradation, the defense of the environment, through a wilderness vision, must become a primary and global goal. But in conserving the natural world, the field must be cleared of a preliminary ruling that is of such importance that it assumes the value of a contradiction in terms, since this is precisely the claim of those who insist on considering the environmental problem exclusively in relation to man . Man is a part, a piece of the ecosystem, is not the navel of nature, so it is in grave error who subordinates the protection of the environment to the primacy of man. In short, there is the risk that our inveterate androcentrism is always present in our speeches, everything and always for man. It is necessary to overturn such a concept to place the global interests of nature at the center (ecocentrism). The rule must tend to preserve nature for its value in itself: in the end even man will take advantage of it but it will be a reflection, not the purpose of that rescue. An ecocentric vision would bring enormous benefits and rebalances also from a social point of view. Civilization can not ignore the wilderness, the wild and uncorrupted nature! (John Muir).
But to elaborate the profound disagreement of man with nature is a task that is anything but easy, even if one simply wants to reach the pure awareness of the fact. It is partly like trying to recompose a complicated puzzle made up of many unequal elements without having a leading image in front of them. This is also due to the fact that it is necessary to eradicate a form of thought that in recent centuries has been progressively directed towards an all-encompassing disjunction where the mental monocultures, based on the deep groove of dualism (man on the one hand and nature, well distinct, on the other), they are strongly perched in a vision unilaterlally turned towards the only truth and existence of mankind. A new thought, libertarian and broad-minded, must therefore face a double obstacle; the first is to eradicate globalized thinking on the dominance and one-sidedness of man (thought that even in the unconscious form is now inherent in the minds), the second will be to unsaddress the false certainties so strongly set to glimpse, albeit in the distance, a holistic view of everything. How many authoritative figures with their saying and their actions have tried to carry out this immense task, but, at least in the first instance, they have seen themselves in the difficulty of being metabolized by "mental monocultures" to the exact opposite. But perhaps one day what for now, in some respects, still seems distant, will be understood and practiced in total awareness and understanding. At the beginning the acute "prophets" of a profound change have not been understood or even completely ignored, but even if the time is very limited, a cautious optimism on the inversion, even partial of the route, could hang in the air (? !). Understanding, understanding, self-examining seem to be terminologies and concepts difficult to digest, but it is not excluded that they instead make their right path in order to eventually be acquired. Hope, even if weak, is always the last to die. But for the moment until exploitation, looting and destruction of the planet earth (on all fronts) will still represent a huge economic advantage, extremely difficult will appear the way to proceed to the right operation and vision of things. So far the man from his blindness has begun to see something, but only the smoking remains left behind his devastating path and will be so wise and far-sighted to reverse the route? The doubts remain many and largely unresolved. Many actions that now seem positive are still a small drop of water in a large ocean that is excessively dirty with “oil”!
The first day
On the first day we breathed the purest air, and that was not good.
On the second day we ran at breakneck speed through the immense and silent forests and this was not good.
On the third day we quenched thirst at the most crystalline springs, and this was not good.
On the fourth day we traveled to the wildest seas and mountains, and this was not good.
On the fifth day we admired the indomitable and free spirit of wild animals, and this was not good.
On the sixth day we felt united in one thing with the deepest soul of nature, and this was not good.
On the seventh day we did not rest and destroyed everything, animated or not, and all this was really good!
On the eighth day, which basically did not exist anymore, we simply remembered, albeit weakly, what was called "MOTHER EARTH".
Uncertainty resumed the wind of life
Uncertainty resumed the wind of life and the whisper of reality slowly faded. I looked at my thoughts and understood that every element was gliding to reach a few, but very evident meanings.
Inner calm, reflection, indecision. Sudden turbe. Silence. The wind that filled the void. I seemed to understand reality, but at the same time seemed to elude me. I was proceeding in a disharmonic state, sometimes hidden, sometimes evident. But the mysteries of the events suggested to me not to force destiny. I was running in the snow, walking on the river, breathing in the forest. I was inebriated with moments of certain lucidity and emphasized those moments like the breath of a hinted certainty. But the vortex of the situation brought me to moments of despair, of calm resignation and the irrational seemed to take over. But I was struggling, struggling and looking for a conclusive answer. A point to be applied to my events. I did not want to develop a long story, but I wanted to restrict the field to the essential and bring everything back to the core of its meaning. I picked up the mind and let it wander only at times. But the inner strength was not enough, at least at first, to direct the government of my daily life.
Again silence, brush strokes of watercolor. Strict whispers. Glasses filled with a tasteless drink. I was losing track of reality. I was losing the clarifications that seemed to me to have grasped. My path had suddenly branched off and no longer delineated a master course. I was discouraged. It occurred to me that this would be my only dimension of life, but the twilight lights gave me hope. Perhaps I should have waited for the waters of the river to defrost and only then let the yearnings of life flow. Too many uncertainties surrounded my doing and then I momentarily let fall attempts to rationalize the features of being. I was convinced that the fruits would ripen suddenly ... but I had to go through something non-linear. And in fact…
After the last events
After the last events I was assailed by a deep sleep, a sleep of the soul and spent a long period of oblivion, of dreamlike dimension where each element became an inaccessible surreality and completely lost the vision of things. I no longer understood the time and entered a hole where only after having gone through a tortuous path came out. The following pages are only a partial representation of what happened to me ...
That day a strong wind
On that day a strong north wind brought with it an icy sense of death. The limbs were collected numb and every effusion of the mind did not come to anything. The storm, a storm that also blew in my interior, seemed to transmigrate towards the spirit of light where, from time immemorial, the steps of a famished sense of research were repeated. There was never a desire to take refuge in an anger, and the profound ecstasy of wonder grew in every instant. The going of life seemed to be connatural with the events of the seasons and there was no instant that the soul took possession of its own autonomous dimension, so much were the burdens that daily imposed on reason.
They carried artefacts and fragments of soul towards occasional beaches and never succeeded in complementing each other to smooth out the unknown saying and outside the reality. No external voice was heard, and his feelings were inebriated in self-examination. Everything seemed to be tightening around the sense of emptiness, but there were so many elements that ran the opposite way.
Inner cries, indecipherable sounds, untranslatable whining seemed to possess the burden of the mind and sinuous reflections of light rather than illuminating the scene, giving a sense of darkness and dark remembrances. How many wonders could they do in so much dialectic? Many or perhaps a few, but they were always full of inexplicable sharpness of harmony.
I looked up
I looked up and surprised the unknown who was looking at me from afar. I satisfied my dreams in the untamed quiet of the forest, but the swirling movement of the waters of the torrents, the voices of hope dwelt. I moved my limbs without knowledge and every tendency towards self-control seemed to be annihilated in a feeble hope. I never came in a state of serenity, but the resistance had to take the upper hand anyway. I walked alone under the darting of the sun and suddenly the fog enveloped the space preventing the view of the depth of the horizon. There was no instant without the passage could intercede without time and the breath, rhythm to the sounds of the universe, was heightened with each new experience.
Distant and lonely the lynx sniffed the air. His was an atavistic, wild presence, but how long could he still belong to that ecstasy of life? The period of the remembrances gave way and the ruthless divorcing reality ensured every where.
A melancholy day came when everything went on the pentagram of life and did not produce a harmonious sound, but the squeaky creak of a rusty lock. I looked back and always observed my mistakes and I never found positive and prolific paths. Did I have such a disharmonic past? I thought so and nothing could bring me to change my deeds.
Wolves in small herds ran free and wild and at dusk the clear light announced the following day. I could count my proceeding many times, but I never came to decipher a message. The revolving air flattened the sound of the wind and the mix of elements did not converge into repetitive recesses. Everything sailed towards a single pole and it was difficult to turn the page.
I had spent
I had spent most of my life always running away from something, and the new sensations that seemed to me to be liberating, after a short time, harnessed me again and all started again from the beginning. The saddest moment I picked it up on a particular cold day, when I realized that I could not escape from myself. At that point the discomfort winced over every limit and I was informed that I had no escape. The wild nature ran free, but its space was more and more restricted and day after day it lost so many shreds of its beauty, the beauty of the wilderness. Was I a direct witness to the fact? Breathing without air, yellowing hopes and empty simulacra announced the sense of nothingness.
Fluted songs split the air and lying on a soft litter of fir branches I observed my surroundings. I walked a lot, sometimes for days, while at times I stopped suddenly and did not proceed for hours. I was lost and did not penetrate the reality that was untranslatable and illegible. I caught something, but it did not fill my lonely absence at all.
I thought I saw
I thought I saw something beyond the river, but a more careful observation showed me only the reflection of a shadow. An immense forest became small and looked like an irregular dot-like spot on a large white sheet. An inner evil pervaded me all and a profound weariness assaulted my limbs. Was I perhaps the ghost of myself? Floating lights colored the sky, but the horizon was leaden and announcing melancholy. Unfortunately I had no other company and every element seemed to me distant at times even indistinct and I changed my going only in a stasis without harmony and peace. A pain caught in my chest and there was nothing that could diminish it. The murky water stirred in my mind and the saddest sensations lingered too long to be relieved.
The big brown bear rummaged an ant excite, while a shrewd marten moved rapidly between one tree and another. Why could not I also acquire the serenity of a savage being? Why was my soul writhing on itself? I never had serenity and unfortunately I suffered greatly without ever stopping my untiring difficulties.
A voice came to me
A voice came to me that spoke of a mystery. An undefined mystery that circulated the hidden space. I learned the fluctuating waves of life and looked for a possible solution. Did one really exist? I did not really ask myself the question and proceeded with little hope, but with a lot of greed. I refused the help of events that I did not understand and I did not try to be involved. Maybe it was not a right choice, but I was convinced that my weak inner strength could have faced the mystery. The unknown is always the bearer of doubts and hopes and as long as it remains so will be the only fantasy to try to explore it. As events become tangible, ephemeral research will fade and practice will replace vanity.
I was inspired by the rustling of the leaves and the shapeless outline of the rotting increased with the daring of the prospecting. There was no breath of wind, but the inexplicable movement of the leaves seemed to lead to something indecipherable and surreal. There was no harmony between that movement and the real condition of the air. And it was precisely here that the mysterious potion mixed with the interpretable one. It was the connaturation of antithetical events, but strongly confluent.
I heard a sound, a muffled sound, but it spread in the air and reached the innermost recesses of the soul. Was it perhaps the signature of the great mystery I was trying to resolve? I did not know, but I tried a plausible explanation. I shifted my thoughts to an imaginary diagram where the structure brought back all the elements that were at stake. There were very few but the prospect allowed me to quantify the peculiarities of each of them.
Time progressed towards a substantial analysis and my gaze was sometimes master of the world, but my imaginary property was too ephemeral because the wild scenarios were increasingly ephemeral. What could stop that shocking vandalism? The primordial thought told me that nothing could do it and then even a rational projection gave the same answer. I could only be a spectator of a representation that was dissolving …
That day I was at the edge of the lake
That day I was at the edge of the lake and watched the moving of events. On the opposite bank, two elks probed their favorite food in the water and re-emerged with their heads, eagerly chewing their loot so precious to them. They certainly did not see me and peacefully continued their pasture. I identified myself with that existence and only at times steaked that their great freedom and at the same time their fragility in the face of a rapidly changing world.
In the clear sky the ravens fluttered and their croaking gave life to the whole scenario. Immense dilemmas furrowed my thinking and deep feelings gave the whole mixture of joy and sadness. The depressed soul did not go any further and a patina of opalescence enveloped in all its entirety what remained of my hope. Atrocious cross references delighted the appearance of being and there was no perplexed harmony with the dialectic of breathing. As long as I could interpenetrate myself with what every moment tried to escape me?
The deadlines of the hours, at times interminable, marked my pace and the clarifying lights of dawn nodded in feminine form. The inner wind breathed with disharmonic harmony and the motionless members took on the task of unifying the separate worlds.
Two parts were at stake, although in fact the basic element was only one. But to what extent was I able to understand it? Another round was perhaps necessary, but this was not granted to me. Giving respect and bringing to reflection were very important factors. One in all and all in one. Vain ideas or perhaps concrete reflections. What seemed rational to me seemed extremely banal, and what I read over the lines was much more liberating. So the surreal analysis was much deeper than a mathematical metamorphosis of an evolution.
It was a sudden failure
It was a sudden failure. I seemed to fail a duty and I felt the days of abandonment. I took hold of my being and ran towards an unknown little hidden and I seemed to recognize the appearance of a formless but definite enough. What could it be? I never knew it, but I was able to understand it. Silence cracked the air and, in the dynamics of everyday life, the breath of a strange search stood out clearly. What could be worth so much to have to be paid with immense suffering? It was certainly something unique and universal, and suffering did not come from its value, but from its vanishing in itself. Why was this to be produced? Everything was incommensurably inexplicable and reality was tinged with absurdity. A large part divided into two and progressively both brought to destruction. But the beginning of that destruction started precisely from that division. It was the first serious step towards the abyss.
Sometimes what is hidden behind the dynamics of an event may seem secondary and produces a calm sense of research. There is no question, in other words, in an investigative perspective, but the in-depth analysis is omitted because it is wrongly considered completely superfluous. But, a correlated and even slightly careful analysis can reveal unexpected shores and dictate the formula for overcoming the error. Flowing hair in the wind is inebriated with the air of spring, but spring seems no longer want to manifest itself with all its splendor that once belonged to it. What will dye the canvas of the future will be a gradual, fading discoloration of events that will dissipate like fog in the sun. Oblivious poets of pain, incautious hopes of overseas, what can reduce us to so much sadness? Not an answer can be heard from the far bank and the windless sailing gives dynamics to an immovable ecstasy that dwells in the depths of being. It will not be possible to sing a hymn to remembrances and the wandering traveler will no longer understand his intercession. The loss will be the key to future days.
A yellowish shadow appeared on the still mirror of the lake's waters and sinuous reflections of auroras made the flow of thoughts explicit. I could not be surrounded by a bunch of structures and every little memory gave way to the artifice of the deception of the rational. The feeling at times disappeared and a naked and impervious rock replaced the praises of the deep. But time crumbles everything and moment after moment every step immediately belongs to the past. I tried not to look back, but sometimes it was difficult for me and then the past marked my progress and even if in certain vibrations it seemed not to live, in others it surfaced without intentional will. A sense of impotence and of non-control that permeated the most intimate structures of existence.
Days saturated with truth seemed to overwhelm doubt and uncertainty, but it was a miserable deception of the mental optic because in truth every hour there was a non-sentient being.
A yellowing shadow played his song
A yellowing shadow sounded its song and the feeble voice of torment permeated the air of the forest. The sudden cry of an ecstasy of peace seemed to oppose the moaning of the earth. I could not recognize the color of light, but I saw the sense of contrast. The fading of the soul inebriated themselves before the nakedness of being and there was no recollection of a state of clarification. Dark ghost, unleash your entity and walk a visible path. Maybe it will not help, but some hope could hide behind the vanity of your steps. I will summarize the contrasts of light passing through a prism and project its reflection into the spores of the soul. Anguish or exultation become indefecies and indefatigable repentance are reflected in the depths of absence. The eyes, expert in representing pain, looked in vain and did not transmit any kind of emotion. Everything disappeared and desire took over. An ardent desire therefore arose from the last vestiges of emotion and a huge attempt tried to make its way towards the sight of the dark. Divisions of being, outposts out of sight, unfounded recesses, reverberations of nothingness appeared as the yearning of a warm wind. Sublime notes of overseas, sinuous movements of the leaves, announced the hour of truth. Of course the truth! But what would have been ... I sank into the immanence of doubt and finally broke my silence with an irrepressible farewell to the incomprehensible split. The tremor and the indomitable listening would soon become the only sense of perception. Immortal shadow, nefarious genres, whispering without respite, suspended in an orgy of commodification. Not a jolt, not a movement seemed to scream from the depths of the chasm. Defined listening, suddenly multiplied, in what form could they be represented? It was not yet time to lay bare what was buried, but perhaps now I had the ability and above all I had discovered the dynamics of the action.
Expected until dawn
I waited until dawn, then I began to move not without knowledge of the cause. It was the quiescent state of my unconscious that dictated my condition and the rational part of me did not dare oppose. I came to a conjunction of events and, surprisingly, I chose one with extreme conviction and mastery of myself. It was an almost mystical dictation and overcame the obstacles of the soul by appealing to the sequences of my being. I swung like a seismograph, but my pace was far from lost. Maybe I was headed for the right destination, but, at the time, I was unknown ..
Whiplash flickered the thunder of dawn from afar and unperceived symptoms nodded to the vain desire to draw water. Sip some alleged wisdom and perhaps a little restlessness. Impalpable the hand of the dark, and the dyeing of the twilight faded as the yellowing of an emerald green grass. Acute silences from oblivion and a eulogy to opalescence. Until what could be done in such a disaster? The two elements followed one another and nothing precluded, at least in appearance, that could be accessed. I listened, but in the end I gave up some strange inner voice.
It did not seem to be an element, but it was not possible to elude me from existing without committing the fatal error of communicating with the wrong world. Why could not I tune into things without upsetting what appeared? Each element progressed towards unreal sensations, but a hiss of the soul became confused in the maze of emotions.
Thus the days of abandonment passed
Thus the days of abandonment passed and finally I began to regain consciousness. I lost my sleep and a light directed me towards the right step, even if the sight of the soul was not yet defined. I reconquered what had matured in me in recent times and I returned to reflect, with a measured mastery, the events that occurred before the days of oblivion. And then I arrived at my evaluations, even though I was permeated by a breath of confusion, incomprehension and bewilderment.
Time had passed and winter was a bit of everywhere. Brush strokes of white covered the innermost recesses and the cold breath of the air, warming the emptiness in the heart.
The wind suddenly calmed, but at times it reappeared with rhythms and melodies out of reality. Despite the effort it could only be perceived, but never seen. No one had ever seen the wind yet everyone had heard it. So it happens in the breath of the wilderness: anyone, if you want, can perceive it, but no one can ever see it.
The embraces of the snow gave comfort to the daily life and the swirl of the soul blended well with that of the overthrow of winter, and at times the "perturbations" of the events experienced seemed to vanish, but ...
After the many episodes
After the many episodes I had intensely experienced, I suddenly suddenly realized that I was deeply inward, a sort of existential emptiness. Too many had been the facts that had frightened me in the unconscious. Not necessarily in a negative sense, but in any case they had produced in me a certain alteration of the psyche even if by now it seemed to be projecting towards a complete awareness of the harmonious existence. In any case, the only company was my imagination and it was a great company, because it allowed me to fly everywhere and to shape reality according to my deepest and hidden needs.
At first I took advantage of this situation by heading towards random, erudite shores, but as time passed I realized that, in the excessive dispersion, I never came to mental conditions that would comfort me. I decided then to build, with a well-defined plot, a complete story that would have supported me even in moments of existential discouragement. Then I left for a long way, in other sunny places, where pure and uncorrupted nature was the stage for my libertarian to move.
At first I walked aimlessly. Rivers, forests, swamps flowed dynamically before my eyes. I continued unstoppable without having to worry about where to end the excursion. Many days passed and my going still did not find a landing place. Then, one day, I realized that my progress no longer made sense, perhaps I had never moved or perhaps did not need to go further ... And then my mind paused on a reflection, because suddenly it seemed to me that the fruits were really and finally matured.
The first thing I thought was that in life we always needed to have a vision enclosed within a contained space, but which had infinite variables and harmonies.
My life was punctuated by a well-defined rhythm and in order to be able to express itself, it had to move in a circumscribed space to a certain extent. I was a species that was adapted to be able to survive only on specific conditions and I could not rape or fool myself to do it in any circumstance or situation.
My place was definable on the edge of the great circle of modern civilization where I could expand without limits, but in a well-defined space. In this regard, an appropriate consideration was added to me. The keyboard of a piano is made up of 88 keys and in those 88 keys alone it is possible, in the various combinations, to create an infinite number of melodies. The keys are limited, yet the sounds that can be produced have no end. These keys were my circumscribed world, delimited and placed at the edge of the GREAT CIRCLE.
If instead the keys of the piano were not 88, but thousands, thousands and thousands, it is true, you could also compose in this case an infinite number of sounds and songs, but the creativity would be confused in the middle of a too large number and, beyond to try to get lost, you should move in the middle of a maze that, although it seems much wider than the previous one, is instead much more dispersive because it creates confusion and disharmony in the act of creativity and, in the end, the composition would become much more complex and I would also say misleading and hardly creative. The infinite number of keys would be the center of the GREAT CIRCLE.
So here in my deep being there was only one form of possible vitality: an infinite combination of sounds with only 88 keys available.
Most human beings adapt and believe that having an infinite number of keys gives more possibilities to life and blindly accept to be part of the illusory vortex that grips him throughout life to eventually produce no sound. Few people instead realize that with only 88 keys can create an infinite number of melodies and be, in a little, much more free, reflective and creative. I was therefore accepting my adaptation to only 88 keys and an infinite number would not have led me to anything, in fact they would have led me to the abyss of existence and the need to want more and more.
After this thought I looked around and, amazed, I savored the practical and mental sense of the wilderness, because the wilderness is "both a geographical condition and a state of mind" …
With profound humility
With profound humility I decided not to resume my journey back from the "listening point", a solitary and silent place where the spirit re-entered in nature. My wandering and my goal, perhaps more mental, surreal and inner than physical, led me to reflect well because now I was strong in me the full awareness of the bitter fate that the human race has been running for far too long. My now complete awareness of the "hidden truth", pushed me to argue and write in my notebook a last thoughtful step ... ...
"The clear warning of understanding addressed to the wandering traveler will hardly come in sincerity understood, especially in its depth. In fact, in 'surface' there are many signs of partial awareness, but in the real and in the executive the changes appear only fictitious and 'scenographic'. It's like being fallen into quicksand: we are desperately clinging to something to get out of it, but that something is an ephemeral blade of grass that quickly detaches itself. And then the sinking will be inevitable!
The last frontier of wilderness is fading more and more. A twilight that concludes a particular day, whose day represents the last stage of the free and incorrupt life that now, with the arrival of darkness, we do not know whether the next day in the soft light can continue to exist. Even the longest and most winding streets sooner or later come to an end or the limit converge into others, but now the others have already exhausted their route. Therefore, going can not be unfolded towards a customary destination beyond to come and we reach, in the most profound sadness, the conclusion that now there is no more way to go. Fermi, stunned, you look around and everywhere you see large expanses of smoke that obscure the depth of the visual senses and then the minds, lost in the unknown, no longer see the way they could take. In the paradox one deludes oneself, but only for a few moments, that one way, somewhere, is unaware that our previous going had progressively led us towards the end of the line. And now that the gait is no longer allowed, in the mind reappear, all in a rapid flickering of events, the mistakes made and the destruction perpetrated when, at the time, they were sure that the way would never end. To preserve abundance, when it is such, it must be administered sparingly and harmoniously, and never, never say above its sustainable and self-generating capabilities. In this there are all the things that the wild spirit, in a certain sense, has never expressly 'said' because it has always expressed it, every now, in the intimate and subtle bond that in the introspection holds and unites every elective affinity . We did not want to listen either because our progress has always prevented us and because our actions did not want to perceive the essence of things at all. Throughout our existence we have been too 'occupied' in the practice of looting everything we came to - including ourselves - without the slightest semblance of conscience and, at the end of the day: what are the most bitter tears for, tears that seal with their very powerful collagen material, the lights now made darkness? And, in the immense chasm that opens, it will be inevitable the precipitate without interruption in the deepest depths; but, something even more serious and as an act of final perfidy, by bringing with it every existing thing, animated and not that it had appeared in what was called 'mother earth'.
When, therefore, the 'wild wind' always brought us the warning of errors, we did not want to perceive it in any way. But now it is perhaps too late to go up from the deep ditch, even if we had been made - paraphrasing Rousseau - strong enough that we could not fall. What we could not foresee is that we wanted to renounce that strength !! "
"Nature must be respected and safeguarded for its value in itself. It is the man who must 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 in its pride, that freedom and the pride that man, a prisoner and slave of his own conventions, perhaps unconsciously envies “.
After my last, sad, almost desperate statement, I gathered deeply into my self as I watched, melancholy, the lights that filtered through the thick of the forest. At that point I knew that once you are back in the spirit of the last frontier of nature, the "wisdom" tells us not to return, under any circumstances, never back. And, with extreme anguish, I finally wrote on the frontispiece of my notebook: "If we really lose the wild world ... - paraphrasing a famous writing (Cassandra by C. Wolf) - the sorrow will take possession of us. But thanks to it, afterwards, and if a later there will be, we will meet again and if we were to relive the savage we will eventually create with it an eternal relationship of truth, of union, of infinite and indissoluble respect ... ".
With heart,
Larsen
__________
"It is a great temptation to want to make the Spirit explicit"
Ludwig Wittgenstein
"I went to the woods because I wished to live wisely, to face only the essential facts of life, and to see if I were not able to learn how much it had to teach me, and not to discover, on the point of death, that I had not lived"
Henry David Thoreau
"Remember
you belong to
Nature,
not it to you "
Gray Owl
"Wild nature is a spiritual need that each of us carries within us and that goes from the simple love of beauty to the overwhelming need for solitude that some feel. It is the sense of annoyance that we experience in nature in the face of the work of man, even when this work is minimal or has purposes of conservation or study. The wild nature is water free to flow, to erode, to swell and overflow; it is the freedom to fly and run animals; they are the intact horizons of mountains or flat marshes; it is the immensity of the sky on a grass landscape; it is the silence of nature and the roaring of water in the mountain valleys; the cry of the storm in the forest; the hiss of the storm and the fearful roar of the avalanche; the slow flight of the eagle that cancels the space between the mountains; it is the game of waves on the cliffs. The wild nature is to turn around the eyes and not to see the sign of a man; it is listening and not hearing man's noises "
(Franco Zunino)
Lathe biosas
(live hidden)
