July 21st, 2008

Spent the weekend reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. It's not as though anything in it changed my mind; I already pre-agreed with nearly all his points. He's preaching to the choir when it comes to me (sorry about that metaphor, by the way). It's really just what a friend of mine said: "If there weren't a Richard Dawkins, we'd have to create one." Hee hee, very good.

But my head and my heart are at odds over something that even Dawkins can't talk me out of. Put it this way: When I was a teenager, I frequently went hiking along the Baden Powell trail in North Vancouver, one of the trailheads of which was just a few short blocks away from where I grew up—oh, how lucky I was without realising it to grow up comfortable and well-fed in a large house in the treed-fringe of North Vancouver, ten minutes from untouched Canadian Nature!

And that raw Nature evokes an awe and a sense of wonder in me, even now (though now I appreciate the rarity of it). There was a sense of magic and a conviction that "anything could happen". Oh, I'm not saying that I really believed knights in shining armour, or dragons, doorways into medieval feudal lands, or damsels in distress existed somewhere out there beyond the next ridge or down in the next valley, but my feelings opened up to the possibility. A thrill, an excitement, and deep drawing of breath that included not just the air of North Vancouver but also of all the myriad magic there might be in a big open-ended world.

I think "magic" is the closest word that I came up with back then with my teen vocabulary.

But, and I must be honest here, those times in the forests were really an expression of immature (un-thought-out) pantheism. As deeply religious in that sense to me as having visions or speaking in tongues would be to others.

And here is where the part of it that troubles me comes in: I loved that sense of being small in a big magic world. I craved (and still crave) the sense of wonder that flows through me when I travel the vast expanse of unknowns of the rainforest. For me it's a thrill, a high. And very very solitary. If I am with companions, I need to "zone out" into my own world lost among the trees. If I am with ordinary (or average) "strangers"—or even if they are close by—I am irritated and disappointed as the magic fades.

Hmm ... Nature appears to bring out the loner in me. Is it the religious nut loner? Maybe the appeal is a siren's call I need to resist. Maybe I need to reign in my desire, because it occurs to me what the end of this path has in store: Alone in my tiny cabin in the middle of the forest left to blend into the flora and fauna around me and resentful of any human disturbance.

I think that's called Individualist Anarchy. Thoreau did it first, and he probably did it best; I should probably avoid immersing myself in it.

Besides, I'd start to miss the Internet after a while ...

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