Societal Wilderness

You might have never known me, yet in me you were born.
You may fear me, or even flee me.
In fact, few are those who really know me.
After all, I only remain your shadow in your crazy race.
And it’s up to you to turn back.

Free. Void. Silence. Roots. Feelings can hardly be described, but can occasionally be transmitted. One thing that is sure, certain, is the grand quality of feelings felt when living weeks in autonomy.

Labelled under the name of ‘expeditions’, these autonomy experiences are the ones bringing back the long-ago-abandoned adventures, explorations, and all things that one can be filled of thanks to expeditions. And this is what makes expeditions a treasure: the multiple and dynamic benefits it brings in one’s life.

What makes expeditions something very special for me is certainly partly due its completely new and invigorating routine required to live in autonomy in the wilderness. New, as in a rediscovery of something that is deeply settled in us, something that is purely honourable and wise. It sure has something of a oscillating routine. I’ve gone from the silence of a lake to the the hubbub of rapids. From staring at fishes to noisily hooking them out of water, into our plate.

When thought of, humanity can sometimes look horrible and disastrous, whether for the planet or towards other human beings, and sometimes, at the contrary, it is looked at as a wonderful magic soul, as a lovely and positive set of people. But what I want to draw your attention on is an aspect that too often might be underestimated, something whose beauty seems omnipresent and thus fades in our sight.  And that very aspect is the concrete you, your body shapes and all of your physical and biochemical body characteristics. A good way to perceive that beauty in my opinion is to imagine a human body immersed in water. The very shapes of our fingers made to seize elements of our environment and the width of our ears improving our hearing, for instances, are by themselves alone biological and evolutionary prodigies.

Extending this thought more globally, one can comprehend human specie’s beauty as one, by putting aside its achievements and focusing more on its primary profile. And this is very related to what expeditions can highlight. Indeed, to be in autonomy is by definition to be free, but more specifically (again, with this very primary profile) free of movement, of moving around. I’m not sure we all realise what being able to move around really means, and expeditions do teach this. They offer the unusual experience of free physical wandering. Opening up to this new consciousness, I remember the simple fact of being spoiled for choice as for where picking up wood for the fire did seem incredible to me. Should I try around there, or rather by the river, or should I cross the river to bring wood back from there and try to maintain it dry? Or this incredible feeling of being able to satisfy any curiosity about the environment. It only takes a few steps to find out why this bush moved.

Compared to the civilised world, this statement can certainly be true as well, but with limitations. Expeditions really highlight this specific feeling thanks mainly to the fact that everything is accessible, one can go anywhere, is free to step on any piece of land, in opposition to our current society, where every square meter of land is most of the time a labelled and/or restricted area.

On a more concrete note, I cannot refrain from talking about how much of a different contact one has with the fauna and flora while being in autonomy. I must start by stating that the landscapes we surely have been staring at for hours before then become our home, and we then bake aware of most of nature’s laws and mechanisms which we’ve heard about but never witnessed. It is not about looking at the landscape anymore, but being in it, not looking at wildlife but being part of it. Coming across turtle eggs aside the river at midday, being welcomed by a frog who can almost be stroked when approaching the shore to spend the night, meeting a snake who made its home few meters from where you did, having the fishes eat from your hands while you do the dishes, and finally being woken up in the morning by squirrels cracking open their nuts on rocks. Eating the fish you yourself caught, chipped, emptied, provides you with the feeling of being part of the food chain like never before.

Expeditions can be as specific as I described, but what is not to be forgotten is that it can also play more diverse and general roles in one’s life, depending on the person. Demanding a high physical input, offering a whole different routine, having this intimate link with landscapes and silence make expeditions a true multifaceted experience to benefit from.

Unable am I to describe well a benefice expeditions haven’t brought me, according only to my experience. Thus, sadly, or rather luckily, I can only give you my version of those lifeful expeditions and the reflections they aroused in me.

Autonomy is to me certainly one of the most life-learning universe, huge enough to contain life-times discoveries. In fact, we already have spent lives in there. While evolution distances us from that world more and more every day, suppressing most meanings of us being part of it, it is for me a treasure, a gift, to be able to still dive in it and feel the deep warmth of our planet, of our biodiversity. Although evolution has taken away from our species the mental tools to survive in full-autonomy, we are luckily not just yet molluscs and have so far conserved most of the physical tools which allow us to maintain a rapprochement that can typically be discovered in expeditions.

Whereas in the western world the question remains to either go vegan or vegetarian, feminist or LGBT activist, involved politician or thoughtful philosopher, shouldn’t the matter of our species evolution attract more thoughts and interests? Biodiversity has nowadays been labelled as a study matter or something we need to protect from climate change, nothing more, and this despite we ourselves are part of that biodiversity, intimately linked to it, sure differently than before, but with impressive impacts.

Questioning our impact on climate change and biodiversity is one thing, assuming to be, as a member of the animal kingdom, part of that specific biodiversity we are currently ruining, is surely hard to interpret considering the evolution we went through, but does in my opinion deserve to be put forward.

When is it that we decide to be human rather than being vegan, feminist or politician?

sirogo, Cyril Monette

19/11/2018