Large Fierce Mammal

Spider and Butterfly – September 2007 (Mrs. LFM Photo)

I’ve gotten more than a few good minds to thinking about the Way of the Wild, and some of the resulting correspondence has respectfully asked me when I was going to get into more practical aspects – most particularly, how I personally go about embracing and expressing the Way of the Wild in my own Life. Well, today marks the first of many articles in which I will embark down that road. After all, the Way of the Wild is nothing if not practical, and never forget that it is the very embodiment of patience!

Get a bunch of elementary school kids together and ask each of them to draw you a picture of “the environment”. What do you think you’ll get? I’ll tell you what – pictures of forests, mountains and clear blue skies, lakes and rivers, sparkling oceans that you can bet will have whales cavorting in them, and overall, lots of happy animals of all varieties. No cities, no towns, no houses. You asked for “the environment” and those last few elements don’t enter into the equation. Children, with their endless malleability, operate on a simpler and Wilder level than adults, and yet are being taught to embrace a mindset in which there is the world of Man, and then there is the world of everything else, and that last place is where you can find “the environment”. They are taught that it’s the job of Humans to take care of Nature. They must try to protect Her, so that future generations of people will still have trees and deer and forests and streams and fish and whales to “enjoy”. This is not at one with the Way of the Wild.

This outcome is due to all the spending dedicated to so called “environmental awareness” programmes developed, promoted, and administered by a plethora of public and private organizations. Goals include educating children about how lifestyle choices and consumption habits affect everything else in the world, which animals and plants are “endangered” or “at risk”, how you can help reverse the trend of habitat loss … all the things you’d have to be crazy to argue with, but yet as laudable as these goals sound, the agendas they serve generally adhere to the philosophy that the Earth is a planet divided between where Humans live and where Humans permit other things to live. This too is not at one with the Way of the Wild. The term “environment” as it’s used in this context is meaningless. There is only the Wild, and it knows no boundaries marking the land where people live and the one that everything else calls home. Wherever you are right now as your read these words, you are in the Wild.

There was a time when I was actively involved in teaching what were then, and in some circles continue to be, called “survival” courses – educational programmes intended to provide instruction in the skills necessary to live temporarily outside the shelter of “civilized” comfort. As the years went by, I came to realize that teaching wilderness “survival” was a wrong headed approach because it engendered an adversarial mindset wherein the Human was cast simultaneously into the role of victim and ultimate victor, and everything in Nature either threatened or could be exploited to serve the goal of staying alive. Yet Nature is at once far simpler, more complicated, more direct, and far more subtle than that. Living in the world is not simply a matter of staying alive, and so my approach to teaching and living evolved.

As a Human, wherever you are, you are nothing more, and nothing less, than another creature in and of Nature, and your value in the scheme of things is subject to the same immutable Truths that govern every other living thing. We have evolved a large brain that permits us to comprehend situations, imagine plans and orchestrate events of incredible complexity, and create the tools to make them real; all attributes that permit us to engineer options and adaptations to environmental conditions that other animals are constrained to solve by biological means. This is the key to the Way of the Wild as it expresses itself in Man, and in itself it is pure. It is of Nature. It is not separate from all else, nor is it meant to be so, and it finds its ruin in a philosophy of conquest when Nature is the adversary.

So now, back to the practical. We will begin practical instruction with mindset, and so I want you all to think on the world you personally embrace as “real”. Let’s say that you are doing basically what I’m doing – sitting in a house or apartment, in front of a computer. It matters not what you did before you got there, nor what you’ll do afterward. Let’s look at the NOW, and where you sit as you experience it, and what other plants and animals share your immediate environment (yes, that’s an appropriate use of the term) with you.

Man, a social animal, seeks to live in communities, varying in size from remote single family homesteads, to congested cities made of high rise buildings. Where you live most likely fits somewhere in between – those popularly referred to as “homeless” I will speak to in a future article in this series, for they cannot be excluded. Regardless of size, Human habitations are not an environment apart – they are filters, carefully engineered  to ensure that, insofar as possible, the species that built them can limit access to animals of its own kind or those of other kinds it has invited to be there, and to plants that it wishes to grow there. Humans are not alone in this behaviour – Ants, Bees, and other social insects have them too.

But we Humans are not insects, so let’s confine our thinking to the filters that Man builds. Ask the microscopic creatures that live, die, mate, eat and are eaten, in their multitudes, generation after generation between a half millimeter by twenty centimeter crack under your kitchen floor boards how perfect and impermeable that filter is. The Moulds and Mildews that make their presence known whenever circumstances permit. The Silverfish that haunt your plumbing and bookshelves, the carpet beetle under your baseboards, and the Pseudoscorpion that hunts them. The Spiders, Woodlice, Centipedes, and Millipedes that lurk in every dark basement corner – all doing their jobs as Nature intended them to do, within the ecosystem you call your dwelling, and that you share with them. The Way of the Wild plays out around you at every moment. My office is an annexed bedroom on the second floor of my house. As I type these words to you, I’m sharing it with Mrs. LFM, our six dogs, and undoubtedly a presently unseen and rarely glimpsed legion of other fellow creatures, each doing its own business as we do ours, none doing us harm, and each in accordance with its nature.

Every animal in Nature has its range – a territory it sees as shared with others of its own kind – and that inevitably coincides with the ranges of others to whom it will be predisposed to be accepting, fearful, indifferent, or predatory. My office is part of my range. Think on yours, and the Way of the Wild as it expresses itself both there and in your Spirit. Think also on your forays into the ranges of others, until next time.