Photo Essay by Ingrid A. Marcroft
On a cross-country drive, these vistas large and small invited contemplation of the natural world.
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In order of appearance: Redwood Forest, CA; Pacific Coast Shells, CA; Pacific Coast Stones & Sand, CA; Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone, WY; Jackson Lake, WY; Jackson Lake Stones, WY; Brooding Skies, NV; Sun & Evaporation, NV; Crater Lake, OR; Clark’s Nutcracker, Crater Lake, OR; Bandon Beach, OR; Eastern Oregon Sky, OR; Big Sky Drive, MT.

Below is a short transcribed excerpt from his full talk at the New York Open Center on Psychedelics Reconsidered: Toward the Restoration of Scientific, Religious and Personal Freedom.

“For me, it gets down to freedom. And what are the freedoms? Scientific freedom: that’s the freedom to inquire, the freedom to learn about creation. Religious freedom: the freedom to experience the divine, to learn about the creator. Personal freedom: the freedom of self-exploration, to learn about yourself. Now, most of you know that the way drugs have been treated are at the core of the lack of freedom in these three areas.”

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Watch James Fadiman, one of the pioneers of LSD research, discuss freedom, psychedelics and the exploration of human consciousness in an excerpt from his lecture at the New York Open Center on April 13, 2007. A 15-minute excerpt of the full video can be seen in the Video section of lapismagazine online or click here for Part 1 and Part 2.

Christopher Bamford is co-director of Anthroposophic/Lindisfarne Press and author of many articles on the Western Mystery Tradition.

For Ralph White, who led us there.

There is an island there is no going
to but in a small boat the way
the saints went, travelling the gallery
of the frightened faces of
the long-drowned, munching the gravel
of its beaches ….
– R.S. Thomas, Pilgrimages

Beyond Llleyn, there is a small island occupied by some extremely devout monks, called the Coelibes or Colidei. Either because of its pure air, which comes across the sea from Ireland, or some miracle occasioned by the merits of the holy men who live there, the island has this peculiarity, that no one dies there except in extreme old age, for disease is almost unheard of. In fact, no one dies there at all unless he is very old indeed. In Welsh, the place is called Ynys Enlli and in the Saxon tongue, Bardsey Island. The bodies of a vast number of holy men are buried there, or so they say, among them, Daniel of Bangor (also known as St. Deinol)…

– Gerald of Wales

When it is rough, and the seas are high, you may have to wait a few days before you can make the crossing. When it is fine, however, Enlli lies only about a twenty minute spray-drenched boat ride off the northwest coast of Wales. It is a tiny, baby-shaped island, its back to the mainland, sheer and steep, its belly green and fertile, open to the west toward Ireland. In fact, in the evenings, after a fine day, when the sea is smooth and there is no haze in the air, you can see the Irish coast, as if a stone's throw away across the water.

There is something magical and sacred about seeing the mysterious outline of the Wicklow Hills so intimately you can almost touch them. Everything then becomes silence. The holy horizon draws you toward it. The soul is filled with longing. The face of Ireland seems so near, it feels like a lover's breath. You realize that Ireland, mystical Ireland — legendarily the piece of paradise that didn't fall when Adam and Eve fell — is right there and you are one with it. For a moment, you fantasize, you could swim over or, at least, row across in a small coracle like the old monks. It would be like going home or peregrinatio pro Christi – wandering for Christ — which suddenly is the same thing. Then you realize that is what you are doing right now , that you are already there. That Enlli, this tiny, humble, rocky spot, is the center of the universe.

In other words, Enlli is a place of pilgrimage, one of the earth's sacred places, where the veils between the worlds — between heaven and earth, inside and outside, body, soul, and spirit, heart and mind, time and eternity — become thinner and human experience becomes more whole. In such places, the trials and tribulations of "life in the world" drop away and fade into insignificance. One becomes almost pathologically happy.

The sun on Enlli sets over Ireland, warming the heart and gloriously suffusing the whole western sky with a heavenly glow — blood reds, rose reds, carmines, crimsons, blue reds, purples, golds. One evening, eating dinner outdoors as the sun set, we watched in amazement as the golden disk of the sun slipped, huge and close, down over the Western horizon. As it touched and began slowly to sink from view, a perfect cross of light appeared within its flaming heart. We all looked at each other and knew then that the great solar crosses of the Celtic tradition are not just cultural symbols but are somehow the thing itself.

Confirming this, there is a small chapel on the island which contains a cross, the heart of which has been cut right through a slab of stone. (The incised arms extend out to the periphery, passing through the great incised circle of the sun.) When the light penetrates the stone like a sword or a lightning bolt, illuminating the cross and rendering its substance luminous and filled with levity, you suddenly understand anew the meaning of Christ's incarnation as the encounter of "stone" and "light," as the transmutation of the one into the other — of time into eternity. Of course, you have to be there to see it. As R.S. Thomas, the great Welsh poet who visited Enlli often, wrote (of an experience he had on the island):

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
 
on to a receding future, nor hankering
after an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

On Enlli, everything speaks. Birds and seals abound — the island is, in fact, a bird sanctuary. The waves beat and churn against the rocks, filling the air with shape-filled song and spume . Listen carefully, and you will hear wisdom speaking; diffuse your vision through the spray, and beings will appear to dance before you. The air, then, penetrates you with its wind-spirit nature, and carries you out of yourself — over rocks, into heather, through light and dark, shadow and brightness, into rain cloud and brilliant sky blueness. The earth becomes gentler, softer, and pulsates infinitesimally.

There are the mists, too, that shroud the island, sometimes for days. And when the sun shines through them in a certain way, a phenomenon arises that I have never seen elsewhere and heard described only by Rudolf Steiner, and then in relation to ancient Atlantis: "mistbows." Mistbows are monochromatic rainbows. The bow arches through the sky — from earth to heaven and back to earth again — not in colors but in brilliant shifting silver-grey-blue tones. There is something ethereal, otherworldly, primordial about them. They speak of a different kind of covenant, more ancient, more radical, more innocent than Noah's. Seeing them I can easily believe that the possibility of the original, paradisal agreement between humanity and divinity still holds, requiring only that I uphold my end of the bargain.

Above all, the island teaches us about time, about a new way of living in time: timeless time, time eternal, the time of the heart. Perhaps this is why all the ancient sources stress the way in which time is different on this island. Anyone who visits it today still experiences this is so, as R.S. Thomas writes in his poem Pilgrimages :

There is no time on this island.
The swinging pendulum of the tide
has no clock; the events
are dateless . These people are not
just late or soon; they are just
here with only the one question
to ask, which life answers
by being in them… .
 
Earlier in the same poem he had asked:
 
Am I too late?
Were they too late also, those
first pilgrims?
He is such a fast
God, always before us and
leaving as we arrive… .

To meet God, then, requires a timeless place — speed will never catch Him/Her.

What this might mean is suggested by the Welsh story according to which Merlin, the primal seer, bard, and prophet of Britain, did not die but still lives, with nine companions and the Thirteen Treasures of Britain, in a glass house on Enlli. A similar tradition holds that Enlli is in fact Arthur's sacred Isle of Avalon, where he, like Merlin, awaits the hour of his return. Certainly, the dead are very present on this "isle of twenty thousand saints." You feel them everywhere. More than that, wherever you walk, you feel the presence of heaven on earth. There is nothing sensational about this. In fact, it is the very "ordinariness" of it that brings it home; the feeling that everything is just as it should be, in its right place and time, absolutely itself in its suchness.

In the old chronicles it is said of Enlli that not only did no one die except in old age and from old age alone, but that everyone died according to actual chronological sequence, no younger person dying while an older one still remained alive. St. Dubricius or Dyfrig, one of the earliest Welsh saints, the contemporary of St. David (the patron saint of Wales and St. Patrick's great partner in the Celtic Church) ended his days on Enlli:

The blessed man, seeing that his life sufficed not for himself and for the people too, oppressed by certain infirmities and by old age, resigned the laborious task of the episcopal office and resuming the eremitical life, in company with several holy men and his disciples, who lived by the labor of their hands, he dwelt alone for many years on the island of Enlli and gloriously ended his life there.

What does "gloriously" mean? The conclusion of the Life of Dyfrig makes this quite clear:

It has been for ages a proverbial saying among the Welsh that this island is "the Rome of Britain," on account of its distance — it is situated in the extremity of the kingdom — and of the danger of the sea voyage, and also because of the charm and sanctity of the place: sanctity for the bodies of twenty thousand saints, as well as confessors and martyrs, lie buried there: and charm, since it is surrounded by the sea, with a lofty promontory on the eastern side and a level and fertile plain, where there is a fountain of sweet water on the western. It is entirely free from serpents and frogs, and no brother has ever died there leaving one older than himself to survive him.

Imagine what our experience of life would be if we all died in the order that we were born! What a sense of rhythm, of order, of inherent rightness life would have. To live then would be to dance — to become the dance, the cosmic dance. It would be to live the meaning of W.B. Yeats' great lines:

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

To pilgrimage a while on Enlli is to taste that and, however briefly, know for a moment the unity of the world.

“Never forget–everything’s a mystery. Once it stops bein’ a mystery it stops bein’ true.” - David Mowaljarlai, Aboriginal Elder (from Dreamkeepers by Harvey Arden)

I was cold. Very cold. Despite the daytime furnace heat of Australia’s outback, a numbing nighttime chill invariably settles across the vast, shrub-dotted plains of the interior sending most living things-myself included-into a somnolent stupor. The silence was tangible-a Zen like void-slowly filling with a delicious anticipation of dawn. The star-filled blackness of the night sky gradually eased into a purple-gray halflight and then…slowly–ever so slowly–the sun rose in a great golden yolk of light and heat and Ayers Rock emerged, red and wraithlike, from the vast flatness. Colors spread in a slow tide across the desert. I was here–I was really here! After a long flight and a switch of planes in Alice Springs, I had arrived at last in the heart of Australia’s Red Center, at its very navel, and was about to experience the daily rebirthing of the world’s largest 1142 foot high sandstone monolith, set in the middle of over two million square miles of flat outback on the earth’s most ancient landmass, eroded to a virtual peneplain over three billion years.

Years ago, Bruce Chatwin’s unusual book, The Songlines, touched something deep within me. He was describing the Australian Aboriginal’s “Dreamtime” creation-stories in which an unformed world had been shaped by ancestral beings-a myriad of giant-sized kangaroos, lizards, birds, snakes, caterpillars, witchetty grubs, even sea creatures, plants and cloud-beings-that emerged from the void and journeyed widely creating all living things and all the features of the landscape-waterholes, mountain ranges, scarps, rivers-everything. Ayers Rock and the nearby Olgas cluster of thirty-six smooth-domed hills (now known jointly as the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park) remain today as physical evidence of the ancestors’ feats enacted in the creation or “Dreamtime” period. The Anangu-or Aboriginals-who today number around 250,000 throughout Australia, are the direct descendants of these beings and have the eternal responsibility of perpetuating and caring for the land through “singing” the ancient rituals of stories, songs, dances, and “corroboree” ceremonies along the Iwara (the dreaming tracks or “songlines” reflecting the ancestor’s journeys). The secrets of these tracks are passed on by complex initiations from generation to generation in the form of the Tjukurpa or Aboriginal laws that rigidly define the relationships between people, plants, animals, and all the physical features of the land. Chatwin wrote of the ancient ancestors that: “They wrapped the whole world in a web of song”, which I found a wonderfully evocative description of Creation, and he emphasized the heavy duty placed upon today’s Aboriginal ancestors to maintain the songlines through constant rituals, as “an unsung land is a dead land.”

As I read deeper into Chatwin’s book I knew that one day I would come to the Australian outback and learn more of its mysteries. And voila!-here I was-watching the sun turn Ayers Rock into a towering crimson reality and walking with a few others around its five and a half mile base as a guide told us the intricate Dreamtime tales of its creation, showed us hidden waterholes and led us under rock overhangs to peer at ochre-painted rock art created by Aboriginal ancestors over 20,000 (some experts claim over 50,000) years ago.

Despite all the charms of Ayers Rock and its modern Yulara hotel complex, I found the place far too overcrowded for my “Earth Wanderer” tastes and felt a need to pull away and seek out something less tied to time and schedules and tourist pick up/drop off points. Something that would allow me to explore the underlying realities of this wild region, those tantalizing flickers of perception that came to me when I looked into the eyes of Aboriginal guides and sensed whole timeless realms of knowledge and understanding that seem so alien to our contemporary rush-rush, what’s-next, affluenza-plagued lifeways. So I left the rock and “went bush” with a guide, Lynne, on a long, bone-jarring drive south along red dust tracks. The scrub-dotted desert, flat and seemingly featureless, makes you constantly aware of the vast enormity of the sky. Below is a infinite rust-red nothingness, a place where distances are measured by the earth’s curvature and defined by shimmering heat hazes; above is that arching sky dome so pure-blue it makes your eyes ache. When the occasional cloud appears it is a singular event. I watched as a huge thunderhead evolved out of the nothing in the west and ballooned ominously into an imposing object thousands of feet high which gave the sky even greater vertical dimension and seemed, by its very enormity, to compress the already-flattened earth into even greater insignificance. A thought came: how small, alone and utterly frail seems man against all this enormity. To survive here, to find purpose and nourishment here, you need the company of Dreamtime creatures, and the security of dreaming tracks or songlines for navigation, water, and bushfood. You also need utter faith in your one-ness with everything around you, bound unerringly by Tjukurpa law, laid down and maintained in perpetuity, celebrated, sung, and resung to provide finite edges and realities in this otherwise unreal, edgeless infinity. Even if there wasn’t a God, a greater creative mind, you’d certainly have to invent one and learn to understand his ways, otherwise your ability to survive here and find daily nourishment would be destroyed and your rapid extinction guaranteed.

The next few days presented me with an experience I’ll never forget. With Lynne as my guide and interpreter I lived bush-style in a small campground set against high, red cliffs at the edge of a vast mulga bush plain, studded with thousands of red-mud termite mounds. At night I slept under dazzling stars in the traditional bushman’s swag (a hefty roll complete with pillow, mattress, and sleeping bag, all wrapped in sturdy waterproof canvas) and during the days spent most of my time in the company of two elderly Pitjantjatjara women, Nganyinytja and Tjulkiwa, their husbands, Ilyatjari and Mutju, and members of their extended families. Nganyinytja was the spokesperson and explained how she welcomed visitors to her remote homeland: “I want to teach all people, black and Gadia-whitefellas-about the land and our way of living with it. If people will listen to our way then they will understand why we, the Anangu, still live in this country-our country-and keep the old ways, the Tjukurpa laws, and sing the spirit of our land. We want to increase understanding and acceptance of each other. The wind that blows across our country talks to everyone and they begin to realize that we all share the same spirit. We are all of one same earth.”

Nganyinytja spoke softly and gently. “I do not talk badly of those people who do not understand,” she told me, even though the terrible stories of her husband, Ilyatjari, about the mistreatment of Aboriginals by early white settlers and pastoralists, made me squirm with outrage. “There is a revival-people will come here from all over the earth and see how we live and they will learn that it is good-they will learn to care for the land again; they will take something valuable back with them.”

My initiation into the “old ways” came slowly, but it did come. The apparent void of the land began to give of its secrets. I learned where to find witchetty grubs (deliciously crisp peanut flavored snacks when roasted-honestly!) under the ground among the witchetty bush roots; I began to spot bushtucker in the sparse desert fruits-small bush plums, tomatoes, peaches, and figs; I could tell the difference between old and new trails left by rabbits, kangaroos, lizards, and snakes, and distinguish the liquid pre-sunrise calls of the black-and-white pied butcherbird and the chiming wedgebill from the rich dawn chorus of mulga parrots, cockatoos, willie wagtails, bowerbirds, and cooing crested pigeons. I even learned the crafty ways of honey ants whose false trails and chambers eventually lead to a deep, subterranean cavern of delights where they hang in hundreds, their abdomens bloated like little grapes, ready to be sucked clean of their delicious life-giving nectar.

Family members showed me how to use simple but effective hunter-gatherer implements-the digging stick, the spear and spear-thrower, the boomerang, the piti and wira dishes carved from mulga tree bark, and the grinding stones for making bread cakes from grass seeds. They explained how ancient dreamtime laws create a cohesive framework for mutual support and order; they told me how the constant singing and walking of traditional dreamtime tracks (each initiated member of the family “mob” has his or her specific totemic ancestor that defines tracks and sacred places to safeguard) combined spiritual duty with pragmatic land-maintenance through scrub-burning and waterhole-cleansing. I learned of their bush medicines, the importance of secret male and female “business” rituals, the crucial initiation of young family members to perpetuate the Tjukurpa laws, and their delight in ancient ritual dances and in creating elaborate sand paintings. These exquisite dot-filled Dreamtime artworks are now produced on bark and canvas by scores of Aboriginal artists in outback communities and can be found in galleries and stores throughout Australia.

Despite all my experiences and insights, I still felt I was floating on the edge of Aboriginal Dreamtime, sensing vast timeless mysteries. At first my pragmatic western mind dismissed the idea of supernatural powers possessed by Aboriginals as merely the ramblings of overactive minds entranced by the enticements of half-understood myths and superstitions. But the families’ openness and unhyped honesty began to make me wonder about such abilities as bodily transcendence of enormous pain and near-starvation, the life-and-death power of “bone-pointing” rituals, the transmutation of form (from human to animal and vice versa), the possibilities of rapid-healing using ageless bush remedies, the existence of widespread mental telepathy between clan members, the ability to “go invisible” or appear in multiple form, even claims of levitation and instant bodily transference from one place to another.

My slow acceptance of these possibilities came, not in any hocus-pocus, drug-induced or magical sleight-of-mind manner but only after listening to the families and observing their quiet certainty, their matter-of-fact-acceptance of such actualities as a natural outcome of their ability to instinctively tap deeper energies and powers-powers that we have long since forgotten or replaced with more tangible and pragmatic realities.

I remember one small incident in particular. At night when the families decided it was time to sleep they moved away from the camp fire to different locations in the mulga scrub. Following the first coloring of dawn, when the birds began their liquid chatterings, they would ease up out of their swags and sit in silence for a long time. I could see all the families doing the same thing-just sitting in silence, no one moving.

After maybe twenty minutes of the strange stillness, Mutju rose to stoke up the fire. I followed him.

“Why all that long silence?” I asked him. He smiled-a little benevolently-on this uninitiated outsider.

“We were talking,” he said. “I didn’t hear any talking.” He sighed-a kind of how-dumb-can-you-be kind of sigh. “Not word-talking. That kind of talking is not necessary. We know each other. We understand each other…”

He could see I was still a little perplexed.

“I am me,” he explained slowly, “but I am also each one of them. They are they but they are also me. We hear one another quite clearly because we are all part of the same thing-the same person. The silence you heard was full of conversation…” Then he laughed. “Help me with the fire. You’re hungry.” And he was right. I was very hungry. Hungry for knowledge and sad that my time in the wild bush was drawing to a close.

On my last evening Nganyinytya suddenly announced it was “time for dancing” and supervised the elaborate body dot-painting of herself, Tjulkiwa, and young children of the family. She used her own white dyes and twigs whose ends had been pounded to fibrous paint brushes to create ornate whorls and spirals of dots on their chests, shoulders, and arms. Within the patterns were ancient symbols of Dreamtime creatures reflecting the different songs that each member of the group is obliged to “sing” throughout their lives to keep the land and the law intact for future generations. The children were silent and serious as their bodies were slowly and meticulously painted. Nganyinytya smiled at their stern little faces. “They know this is not a game,” she told me quietly. “They will do the same with their own children one day.”

Then she and Tjulkiwa stood and, humming rhythmic, drone-like songs together, they led long, shuffling dances with the children as dust rose from the dry earth and turned the sunset into a mystical golden-tinged haze. They continued for a long time as dusk crept across the mulga. The monotone sounds of their voices and their stately movements were mesmerizing and for a while I felt I was living in pre-history times watching dances that had been danced by family ancestors for thousands of years. Willingly, I became a passive participant, sinking deeper and deeper into the old ways…into the Dreamtime…

Much later, when the dancing had ceased and we were all sitting together roasting just-caught rabbits on the campfire, Nganyinytja leaned over and touched my arm gently. “You are a little part of us now,” she murmured quietly. I nodded and held her hand. My eyes were watering and it wasn’t just from the campfire smoke.

Lesley Hazleton is the author of five books including England, Bloody England and Memoirs of a Fast Woman. She currently lives on a houseboat in Seattle.

The last thing I expected when I began to fly was that I would begin a romance not with the sky, but with the earth.

I was captive to the great cliché of roaring into the vast blue yonder. I thought of it as the great escape–that magical moment when lift counteracts gravity and the little single-engine plane leaps upward into release from the ground. Surely, I thought, this was the essence of flight.

But flying resists cliché. Takeoff is certainly very impressive: short, sharp, and powerful. Yet it's somehow too quick to hold the imagination. It's a practical business of getting into the air. Oddly businesslike and abrupt. Instead, to my surprise, I was to become utterly enticed by the process of landing. Long and gentle, at minimum power, landing becomes a sensuous toying with the very idea of coming back to earth.

I talk to the plane on final approach. Softly, but out loud: "Come on now, down you come, easy now, nice and smooth, yes, just a bit more, beautiful, that's it… "

My voice paces both me and the plane, for this drawn-out tension of the long glide in cannot be hurried. It's a matter of simultaneously controlling it and letting it happen. And then, just as you cross the threshold of the runway, of gently lifting the nose to let the plane skim over the ground, the wheels a mere foot or two in the air.

You hold it right there as though you could go on forever like this–as though the last thing you want is to touch down. And you tease the ground this way until the attraction between plane and ground becomes so strong that you can't hold it off any longer. The plane seems to land itself, to decide to stop flying and sink that final foot or two to earth. You sense the sink out of the corners of your eyes, bring the yoke back just a touch, and finally allow plane and ground to meet.

The perfect landing has a sweet inevitability, so smooth it seems utterly natural. There is just the merest squeak of the wheels on the tarmac, and sometimes not even that, so that you check to make sure you really are on the ground. Sometimes achieved, it is far more often not, and all the more treasured for that.

This is the high point. The rest is bringing your mind down to earth: the loss of speed in the rollout on the runway, the slow taxi, shutting down the engine. And in that moment of absolute stillness as the prop shudders to a stop, the earth reasserts itself in its dailiness, and you are suddenly aware of a certain sorrow at having lost lift, at being destined to move again in two dimensions instead of three. Yet together with this sorrow comes a poignant sweetness that has to do with being human, the antithesis of the fundamentally super-human act of flying.

I am convinced that flying is a supremely unnatural activity for man or woman. Lift is produced when slightly warped wings divide the air flow, creating higher pressure below, and lower pressure above. This is a law of physics, and the laws of physics are natural laws, but still, I feel that humans were not made to fly. And this sense of transgression is part of my entrancement.

Every time I go out to a plane, there is a touch of fear–a haunting sense that more than any other time, I am on my own. This eases as I go through the checklist, do the engine run-up, announce my presence on the radios. To my relief, it disappears entirely the moment my wheels leave the ground. Yet some part of me welcomes it as a reminder never to take flight for granted.

I watch birds–eagles soaring and circling, gulls swooping and diving-and imagine moving through the air with that same ease and assurance. And then I remind myself that birds too can stall: make a false move, turn too sharply, and plummet down to earth, out of control. That even for birds, flight is not automatic, but demands continuous control, a fine sensing of lift and gravity thrust and drag. Even birds can make bad landings.

Sometimes I fly with them. An eagle soars along with me in a mountain valley. Gulls tumble in my slipstream as I take off from a coastal airport. Or as I taxi down a tiny country strip, a flock of young swallows flies alongside the plane, taking it for some huge mother bird.

This is a world far removed from the sophistication of airline flight. It's a world of aging, sometimes even ancient, single-prop machines that you fly by the seat of your pants–by the feel of the air and the controls–not by the numbers on electronic displays. It's easy to take flight for granted in an airliner; cocooned so high above the earth that you hardly even notice it, you have no sense of motion. Flight becomes merely a kind of vacuum between one place and another. But small planes take you into a time warp, back to the days when flying was an adventure, even a privilege, and to fly was to laugh out loud in delight.

These are planes to be flown through mountain valleys instead of high above them. You can hear the wind rushing by as you pull back the power and nose down for a dive, and you know you're flying with the air, rather than merely through it. You begin to sense air in the same way as you sense water, a medium with palpable buoyancy and density.

I think of porpoises playing in water as I do gentle lazy eight maneuvers, tracing invisible looping ribbons that look like a figure eight from the side: climb up to the top of the loop, then just on the verge of stall, let one wing slice down in a moment of near weightlessness, and swoop in a heady earthward rush down the invisible ribbon only to do it all again in the other direction. I can spend an hour cradling the plane back and forth, up and down, this way, and think it is only ten minutes.

There is no purpose to this, no end or destination. Like dancing, it's simply movement for the joy of it.

The mountains orient me as I climb and swoop. I fly between two mountain ranges–the Cascades to the east, the Olympics to the west–and below me, Puget Sound, dotted with islands like huge lumps of moss. Sunlight streams through clouds in the long shafts a friend calls God's fingers, silvering the water. And above the clouds, a clear blue vastness where I rise to find myself the only human presence, just me and the snow-covered peaks of Rainier, St Helen's, Adams, and Baker, familiar presences.

As pilots must in this part of the world, I become an intimate of the weather. Sometimes low black clouds feather down, long tendrils trailing the earth like fingers trailing in water. They have the exotic name of virga, and I fly alongside them, seduced by such dark beauty. Flying in a clear blue sky is dull by comparison. Such skies are beautiful on the ground, but in the air, they pall easily. Too much sameness, too little sense of detail. Clouds seem to beckon: come up here, fly with us. In a clear blue sky, nothing beckons. And there are no rainbows.

Rainbows go every which way in the air: vertically, like luminous lines of connection between earth and sky; upside down, as though some giant had come along and casually flipped the arcs onto their backs: and sometimes even full circle.

Late one fall day, as I flew back to Seattle from Vancouver Island, the lowering sun shone in a golden haze behind me: ahead, the weather closed in, and as I neared Seattle, formed a huge black cloud over the city. I got on the radios, checking to see if I could make it into the city or if I'd have to land at an alternate airport, so I hardly noticed the two vertical rainbows to my left, glowing in the dying light. But rainbows cannot be ignored. The next thing I knew, those two vertical shafts had transformed themselves into a huge double rainbow circle shimmering around my left wing, with the wingtip at its very center.

I stopped checking alternates. How could I turn away from that ethereal circle of color? On we flew, the rainbow and I, away from the light, and for some fifteen minutes it seemed as though it were guiding me through the lowering sky until the rain closed in, the rainbow faded into the gloom, and I dipped down under the deck of that huge black cloud, flew through the rain spattering at the windshield, and snuck safely and gratefully back to earth.

David Yeadon is author-illustrator of eighteen adventure travel books and a regular contributor to National Geographic and other travel magazines. He is currently completing a book on the processes of “innerjourneying”.

“To live in one land is captivitie,
To runne all countries–a wild roguerie!”
John Donne

First a mood piece. As a writer of adventure travel books I’ve become accustomed to using unfamiliar and exotic places–”lost worlds” if you will–as a metaphor for self-exploration and the discovery of inner lost worlds. So join me briefly in one of my earlier experiences:

“I am on an island. An ocean of sloppy, slow-moving wavelets, shimmering in a heat mist; a fringe of low, bent palms offering welcome shade and a beach of the most beautiful pink sand I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world–a magnificent slowly-curving strand of talcum-softness stretching into hazy infinities in both directions. Untouched, unbroken, unspoiled by any sign of human intrusion. No buildings, no boats, no people, no nothing. Just this perfect place–this tiny island–this little lost world set in a turquoise ocean under a dome of blue sky. And its all mine!

I realize here, once again, that the magic of journeys and explorations is not to be found merely in the external adventures and discoveries–wonderful and terrifying though they are–but in the worlds that such experiences lead us to find within ourselves. Those ‘other spaces’ in the spirit, that beckon and tantalize us all, but in which we may spend too little time.

When I allow my eyes to really see, freed from the filters of the mind, I’m amazed at how much I don’t see most days. In the mystery and silence of this evening I’m tingling. Time doesn’t really exist anymore. My watch is stowed deep in the backpack and my body begins to respond to its own rhythms. Rhythms of which I’m too often unaware. I am learning to expect nothing–to expect no expectations. So what comes? Surprises, of course, all the time.

We have to be alone to touch our inner selves. And if we cannot touch ourselves how can we ever truly touch anyone else.

A question comes: ‘Who are you going to be today?’ And then a thought which I scribble in a sea-stained notepad:

Ah!

To have no rigid goals and plans

Except to be

All the am-s, I am.”

That was all a few years back but I still have the yellowed note today, tacked to the wall above my desk. When I first wrote it I wasn’t too sure what it meant but I kept it anyway and left my lovely, lonely island after days of slow mind-evolving, beach-wandering and moved on to Australia.

Things then became a little clearer while drowning.

It was near-death experience #4 for me (in 20 years of adventure travel writing, four is just about right) and the fickle riptides and wavecrests of the Western Australian ocean were whirlpooling me down for the third and final time. I was experiencing a very odd range of emotions as if a plethora of different people were inside me fighting for attention while I was very preoccupied with the process of drowning. One was a dour doomsayer convinced that death was nigh and flailing about in a panic-stricken state trying to grab a last breath before the final wet darkness; the second was a somewhat indifferent projectionist playing a crazed film collage of mostly forgotten head-clips of random, and often poignant, life events as the currents pulled me down; the third was the good old writer-journalist–I knew him pretty well–thinking what a great tale this would make if only he could keep notes–and stay alive of course. Then a fourth–this was a new me, a higher-me I suppose, that in the midst of the chaos and confusion brought enormous, quiet calm with an illuminating certainty that seemed to say: “There’s so much more to come…so many things you’ve never dreamed of…” (sorry–no tunnels, no bright lights and no visible angels in this story…).

Needless to say, I survived (thanks to the timely action of a true-blue, Baywatch-built, good-on yer-mate, Aussie) and when the nightmarish strangeness of it all had diminished I was left with one clear realization–that there seemed to be a heck of a lot of people living inside me and it’s time I met more of them and let them out into the world for a romp. Suddenly that little scribbled island note-to-myself took on fresh significance.

To be honest–the idea of the “multi-me” was not altogether new. My book compilations have taken me to some pretty odd places around the globe and put me in situations that, looking back, make me wonder incredulously at my naivete, stupidity and blatant bombast in the face of seemingly doom-laden situations. As each crazy adventure was surmounted by even crazier escapades, I’d gain fleeting glimpses of other me-s–unfamiliar characters who emerged unexpectedly to perceive something, say something, or perform some act completely out of character–and then vanish again into what I thought was the “real” me. On these occasions the consistent, unified “centered being” I assumed myself to be just kind of stood there watching in amazement and occasionally amusement. Who, I would wonder, was that? And who, for that matter, am “I”?

Dismissing chronic schizophrenia as something that did not appear to run in the family, I began observing some of these “other me-s” in more detail. At first it was like pursuing the tailend of dreams–you remember the emotive force but the rich shadowy details fade fast. But over time, a few of them became more familiar, even good friends, and I found they had much to say, much to teach that–given a more traditional life–I might well have ignored.

T S Eliot was right: “Each venture is a new beginning,” to which I would add–and a “new being”, a new range of insights and discoveries of the self, or rather, other facets or manifestations of this complex oddity we so curiously call the self. We all find–or certainly we would be wise to find–our own unique ways of exploring these inner-selves. We use the familiar stimulants of meditation, mystic meanderings, music, philosophical-theosophical studies, “altered state” devices in whatever combination seems to work best. For some odd reason, which I’ll leave others to explain, I chose travel as my stimulant of choice and catalyst of inner explorations. In my earlier life I was a city planner in England and later in various other parts of the world, and though I say it myself, I was a pretty good “urban designer”–mildly ambitious, with no complaints at all about inflated salaries, generous expense accounts, company cars and all the beguiling enticements of a ladder-climbing professional.

At that time my wife, Anne, also felt it was time for a sabbatical (from working with people with visual disabilities) and joined me in bliss-seeking odysseys. We discarded much of the baggage of our overdirected and driven lives and learned to enjoy a simpler, less cluttered existence. We became explorers–starting small in a VW camper (just a plain green bus–no sixties LSD inspired graphics on this one), writing a little, sketching, and exploring America’s great wildernesses. Books began to emerge almost by accident. We let our spirits lead us wherever they would. We had little money, no “security”, few possessions of any importance, no plans, and no unwanted ties–and we were ridiculously happy. We were–in the best sense of that overworked word–free–free of the parts we had thought to be ourselves, only to realize that these other selves had in fact been railroaded and ramrodded for years by forces and influences that were not of our choosing. For a while we were children again, children of the earth, delighting in its power and mystery and, in turn, the power and mystery of our own lives. We roamed; we rested on mountaintops and by quiet streams and lakes far from the churning confusions and clamor we had once accepted as life’s ransom; we talked, read avidly, thought, sang, wrote poetry, painted, celebrated new learnings and old philosophies (funny the things you find yourself doing when you “let go” and allow your other you-s to emerge)…and somehow books were written and illustrated.

Then gradually I realized that what I really wanted was the whole earth to explore–that great big beautiful blue ball to bounce and roll and smell and caress and curse and kindle as my catalyst of learning, my entity for endless explorations of cultures, lifeways, spiritual perceptions, secret places and “lost worlds”. And not only the geographical lost worlds that I love so much and now write about so avidly but the intriguing lost worlds within my own spirit–the other me-s–that such explorations expose in abundance.

This world-wandering earth gypsy slowly learned that, contrary to popular assumption, allowing oneself to be vulnerable, defenseless, non judgmental, non-scheduled, non-ritualistic, open-eyed, open-minded and open to totally unexpected options and opportunities, was the essence of true exploration–both inner and outer. Freeing yourself from the shackles of skepticism, fear, preconceptions and prejudice, and celebrating serendipity and uncertainty is by far the most effective way of releasing the inner you-s in you, understanding your experiences more and–most significantly–learning to accept the wonder, generosity and empathy of other human beings, other cultures, other perceptions of life and living.

A friend of mine who has experienced a series of death-defying illnesses and other catastrophes recently returned to life outrageously reinvigorated and told me with an idiot grin: “Dying’s not the risk–that’s the sure thing. The risk is not living.” So–for life’s sake–let’s live! It’s a risk we avoid at our peril for why would anyone ignore or discard the one truly free gift we have. And travel has nothing to do with it really. Others have “taken the risk” in far less arduous ways of innerjourneying than my haphazard ramblings across the globe. Even I find the constant need for movement and new experiences a little mellowed now. The inner journeys seem to continue quite happily at my desk, by the lake, or while performing the most mundane of tasks. My me-s emerge and move more freely now and as I meet and embrace each new persona (nuance, facet–call them what you will), and I find inevitably that I naturally embrace far more readily the multi-hued dimensions of other people I meet or new situations in which I find myselves.

In my wanderings I’ve seen and understood a little of these “global belongings” in microcosm. While recently in Australia, for example, I spent some time living in the bush with a group of Aboriginal families and learned the mysteries of the “songlines”. They talked to me of a web of songs and legends and perceptions that enveloped their world, a web in which time is irrelevant. Everything that is, was and will be is part of that web–everything in constant mutual interaction–everything in kinship within the web–all humans, all creatures, all mountains, rivers and steams, trees, even individual rocks–all animate and interrelated within an all-enveloping web–within the “multi-mind”.

Other realities emerged for me where things and individual people were not fragmented, labeled, separated, but rather bound together in a totality that melts the barriers of insight, merges the boundaries between things, and lets the incredible wholeness and completeness of everything come roaring through into previously blinkered, and now suddenly unlocked, perceptions. All the clever doodads of the linear mind–rationales, expectations, critical faculties, intellectual games, prejudices, fears, measurements, discretion, manners (you know all the rest) -seemed to drown in a deluge from some subconscious force that had laid dormant in me for too long and was now released with such vigor and clarity that the previous limits of my perceptions seemed to be easily breachable barriers–into the miracle of the now, the infinitely intricate web of a reality without time and without boundaries.

In these situations the inner self is turned inside out. It no longer resides with the head but transforms into a transparent openness, linking mind, ’soul’ (using Thomas Moore’s definition) and newfound actualities. I’ve experienced similar fleeting sensations before, particularly in spaces whose immensity seems to threaten the stability of the rational mind. It occurred when I was crossing the Sahara with the “Blue People” of Morocco, the Tuareg tribespeople. Sitting astride a camel’s back for hours above the infinities of sand, I found my mind at first desperately rushing around within itself trying to maintain the edges, the flimsy superstructure, of sanity. It was only when I learned to let go and become part of the rhythm and flow of the journey itself, to enter into its timelessness, that the antics of my overcharged brain no longer seemed relevant to the larger patterns of perception emerging out of that apparent nothingness.

And in many other places too–on the infinite plains of Venezuela’s Los Llanos where I lived with the mysterious Llaneros people; in the vastness of the Inner Mongolian grasslands; in the voodoo-villages deep in Haiti’s backcountry or with the Efe pygmies in the jungles of Zaire; across the white nothingness of India’s Rann of Kutch with the nomads; among the strange tribespeople of northern Thailand, and even with the sadhus in the intense head-blasting riot of stimuli that is Nepal’s Kathmandu… These are all places I traveled where nothing makes any sense until you stop trying to “make sense” and let the rich wholeness of each place and each person deluge and envelop you in its own overwhelming web–a web which many people I met seem to have internalized from birth and which formed a natural framework for all their perceptions and interrelationships. Over and over again I sensed a truly “mutual oneness” in which the multi-faceted richness of each individual reflected itself in the collective richness of the family or the tribe and the whole environment of which it was a part.

These and many other experiences on my lost world odysseys finally helped me understand something I’d once read in an Alan Watts book: “The greatest gift you can give the world is your own growth into consciousness.”

Walt Whitman put it more poetically:

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself ..

For every atom belonging to me

As good belongs to you.”

My journeys–my global explorations and writings–are my way of both evolving and sharing. As Marilyn Ferguson reminded us in her notoriously popular book The Aquarian Conspiracy: “We are discovering our capacity for endless awakenings in a universe of endless surprises.” And who better to sum it all up than Lily Tomlin as Trudy the Bag Lady: Maybe one day we’ll all do something together so magnificent that the whole universe’ll get goose bumps.

Sir Laurens van der Post is the author of numerous works of fiction, travel, exploration, and psychology, including The Lost World of the Kalahari, Flamingo Feather, and Jung and the Story of our Time. This article is edited from a talk Sir Laurens gave entitled “Wilderness” at the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1995 on the occasion of the inauguration of the Wilderness Trust in Great Britain.

The launching of The Wilderness Trust in Great Britain has a lot to do with one of the greatest battles, perhaps the greatest battle, that mankind has ever faced, which is the battle for our planet. The trouble is that we all have been exhorting people about this battle. We’ve heard statistics from people about this battle. They know all there is to know about the danger of it. And yet we have not managed to get through to the place where the battle must be won, and that is in the minds and spirits of human beings. We think that when we have saved a rare species, a rare plant, a strip of wilderness somewhere, that we have done the task which we face. But we have not, because we do not realize what a profound revolution in the mind and spirit and heart of man is demanded. The Wilderness Trust, has I think, a great deal to do with that revolution.

I want to talk about The Wilderness Trust and exhort you to do something. I think everything has a story, and by following our own individual stories and the stories which face the central issues of one’s life and one’s time, if one follows that, one changes things, without a word having to be said. The story will do it. I am going to tell you the story about The Wilderness Trust. It’s an experience I want to convey to you. I do not want to hurl a piece of my mind at you. That is the trouble, everybody is giving everything in the world a piece of their minds. Whereas what we want is not a piece of somebody’s mind, even the best mind, so much as an open heart and an open spirit.

So here is the story of The Wilderness Trust.

The inspiration for The Wilderness Trust came from the Wilderness Leadership School in South Africa. This School has grown over many years. It is a story of a man whose name is Ian Player.

Ian Player was amongst the youngest of South Africans who went almost straight from school into the last war. He trained in the Western Desert, then fought in Italy as a trooper in the 6th South African Armoured Division. When he returned home, he had no experience except that of the war. He felt completely lost and bewildered and somehow empty of meaning. What war does to people is, it makes everything suddenly important in life again. Perhaps that is one of the attractions of it. Everything becomes a matter of life and death. In war perceptions are heightened and they have an acute meaning. After the war Ian was faced with this great battle which people have to fight in peace. He could not find what his role was or what he was going to do.

And I think it is almost as if a kind of dream pattern took over. A kind of irrational pattern took over in his life, and he decided that he was going to go to the source of one of the great rivers, called the Umgeni. He went up to the source of this river and he came down it in a very perilous way in a canoe. And he wrote a book about it which is an inner and outer exploration.

When he reached the sea what was he going to do? He sat by the sea fishing endlessly. Then one day life produced a relevant coincidence, synchronicity as it is called nowadays. He saw in a newspaper an advertisement for the post of a ranger in a remote part of Zululand. He applied for it, and he got it. It is interesting that he went to the source of the river, a river is such a “symbol of life”, and then to the sea, which is the symbol of all being, all beginning, and all ending. And there, fishing, looking inside himself for the answer. And that advertisement took him to what was to be the answer of his life.

In Zululand, as a ranger, he met a very remarkable Zulu, Magqubu Ntombela, who was older than he, already in his forties whereas Ian was only in his twenties. Ian and Magqubu became great friends. Magqubu was a remarkable Zulu, because he had taken to the ranger’s uniform as a person who comes from a long clan of distinguished soldiers and statesmen. He had been an oral historian of the Zulu people. He spoke the most beautiful Zulu, what Ian and I between us called Shakespearean Zulu.

Magqubu had had a remarkable experience as a ranger. He was bitten by a boomslang tree snake. This is the most poisonous snake in the world. At that time there was no antidote for it. There was an antidote for other snake bites but not for the boomslang, and he very nearly died. He had a near death experience. When afterwards he told me about the death experience it was extraordinarily like the death experience that the great psychologist and Swiss philosopher and scientist, Jung, had had. This experience added to the natural spirituality of Magqubu, and he took Ian in hand, and taught him all that there was to be taught about the natural life and the natural history of the natural man.

And Ian suddenly had a great flush of meaning in his life. He was completely changed. He went on working faithfully as a ranger. He felt that if nature and the combination of natural man could change him like that, and rescue him from the meaninglessness of the state in which the end of the war had left him, he felt it could do the same to other people. He tried to do this within the structure of the Natal Parks Board.

Now at that time, when I was a boy in Natal, there were only twenty white rhino left in the whole world. They had been exterminated everywhere. In this corner of Zululand where Ian was they had undertaken the task of preserving and multiplying the white rhino, and Ian had already consolidated this to such an extent that, when I last had the statistics, they were exporting 200 rhino a year to other parts of Africa and the world, re-populating Africa with white rhino. It is one of the great success stories of conservation.

But Ian felt that what was important was that nature by itself, unaided and alone, if only one could experience it, could change people. While with the Natal Parks Board he founded the Wilderness Leadership School, because it was able to do what the Natal Parks Board could not do. In 1957 at his level in the bureaucracy it was a remarkable move. Then after twenty-two years with the Natal Parks Board he resigned to work full-time on wilderness matters. He created a movement where he and this remarkable Zulu, Magqubu Ntombela-he had become a sort of white Zulu and Ntombela had become a blackwhite man-raised money and started taking people, whom they thought would one day play a role of influence-a decisive role in the shaping of human societies in the world-to the wilderness and let the wilderness itself speak to them. And it was an immense success.

Ian couldn’t get the money fast enough, and there were so many people to take and there almost wasn’t enough wilderness to take the people to. And not only adults went, because he found that people who had problems, very often adolescents, who went to the wilderness suddenly found that there was a wilderness in themselves that responded. And this is what makes the Wilderness Leadership School and The Wilderness Trust different from all other forms of conservation. Of course, everything we do we hope aids the task of rehabilitating our sorely wounded Mother Earth. Everything that we do implies that as well. But our Wilderness organizations are much more concerned with the way in which wilderness brings the human spirit back to the instinctive and natural roots with which it has lost contact. And Ian found increasingly that he was doing that.

From this the Wilderness Leadership School grew to such an extent that when apartheid was at its worst, when South Africa was a kind of international leper, Ian organized a World Wilderness Congress in South Africa, to focus people on the wilderness. People came from all over the world. It was a resounding success. We followed it up later with a World Wilderness Congress in Australia. There is a remarkable wilderness movement in Australia. On that occasion Malcolm Fraser, who understood the idiom of the wilderness, declared one of the wonders of the world the Great Barrier Reef, a human universal heritage forever. It can never be exploited for commercial or other ends. That alone made it worth it. I could tell you similar examples.

We had a World Wilderness Congress in Inverness, Scotland, out of which all sorts of remarkable books and documents came. But one of the most remarkable documents came from a great psychologist who opened the Congress and who for thirty-seven years had been a collaborator of Carl Gustav Jung, whom I think is one of the greatest philosophers and spiritual influences of our time. Dr. C A Meier opened the Congress and spoke of wilderness without and wilderness within. He found a parallel in what we were doing and what he as a psychologist was doing with human beings who came to him with a sense of meaninglessness: The great problem of our time, neurosis. The great problem of practically everything that is happening, is this loss of meaning that has been inflicted on the human spirit. And there suddenly, through his patients’ dreams, this great psychologist found wilderness was alive. It was a tremendous confirmation of what had led Ian Player instinctively to start the Wilderness Leadership School, just with that object in view.

The movement expanded in America. It had an immense response in America.

Last year a World Wilderness Congress was held in Norway. It has had an enormous impact in Norway. And the Norwegians are doing now what we did first in Africa, in their polar and the Arctic regions. It is the same pattern, because it is not a South African pattern, it’s not Ian Player’s pattern, it isn’t my pattern, it is a universal pattern. It is a pattern in the spirit and imagination of every man. Now when Ian came to see me, many, many years ago now, what he said to me made instant sense, because I had a very similar experience to the experience which Ian had. I had a bit more of the war than he had. I had nine years of war. I had three fairly horrendous years of sort of straightforward war. I had a war within a war for three and a half years within a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and I went straight to more active service when I had almost another three years, in South East Asia, of a war that wasn’t a war. The worst kind of war that you could have. After three years I saw that what we were trying to do had come to an end, that we could not contribute any more, that in a sense what we had tried to do to bring the Dutch and the Indonesians together in Indonesia had failed, and that the Dutch were resorting to war on the Indonesians. I had hoped that a commonwealth pattern could have been created. I knew the date on which an attack was going to be launched, and I thought that I was not going to take part in this, I was going to leave it. So I took the plane to Singapore and saw my Commander-in-Chief, Neil Ritchie, and told him I was going. He said “But you can’t go like that,” and I said, “I’m going, there’s no more, I’m going,” and I went.

Ritchie had a very remarkable Chief-of-Staff called Dixie Redman who had been a very distinguished soldier in both wars, and he said, “You must let him go, he has done more than can be asked of people.” When I got to Cairo, on my way to report to the War Office in London, I saw a South African military plane, and I went over and spoke to the people, and I said how much I longed to go back to Africa. They said, “Well, jump in!” I was supposed to report to the War Office, but I flew off. I didn’t know at the time, but what I was doing was in a way what Ian had done. I was going back to my source, and nothing could stop me, and fortunately I wasn’t sacked as I might have been!

I arrived late one evening, after four days of traveling, on a cold winter’s evening in Johannesburg. I went to a hotel which I had always used in Johannesburg. The porter there nearly fell over backwards, because I had been reported missing, believed killed for so long, and they all thought I was dead. The staff thought they were seeing a ghost. But I pledged them to silence, and early the next morning

I went and got a truck. I took my gun and some ammunition, and two black people joined me, and without saying a word to anyone, we made straight for the bush. We went to a part in the Northern Transvaal where the Pafuri River and Kipling’s greasy Limpopo meet, on the borders of what was then Rhodesia, South Africa, and Mozambique. It is a wonderful part. A most wonderful heavenly part of the bush in Africa, very lonely. I remember the evening when I made my first camp with these two people from Africa. I went for a walk down towards the river, and out of the bush there stepped an enormous kudu bull. A lovely bull. It is one of the most lovely antelope, with great spiral horns. It looked at me and sniffed the air between itself and me, and I thought, “God, I’m home!” I stayed there for about three weeks, and only then could I go home. I never told my people of the experience, because I thought they would not understand. I just arrived out of the blue, and nobody asked any questions. It had such an impact on me that ultimately before going back to England I took my son to give him that experience.

So I came to the same conclusion that Ian Player had, that what is left of true wilderness, what is left of the world that is near to the original blueprint of creation, are the only true churches left in life. When you go into them, without a word being said, they bring alive this ancient pattern of oneness and partnership with nature and the universe. And I felt this very strongly, and I tried to express it in my writing.

When you live with the Bushmen you find that they are rich in a way in which we have become poor. They pass on something tremendous. They talk, and they say the human being has two hungers. There is the hunger for food, but there is also the great hunger, and that is to be part of the creation. I found that this is what wilderness did for me, and this is what wilderness has done in Africa, in Australia, in America, and all over the world.

Here I have something that I want to speak for me. Once I have read it to you, I’m not going to say another word, and I hope it will give you something of what Africa can give. There is something unique that Africa can give, why Africa is important and does something that no other continent can do. It is because it talks to a very ancient level, to almost a forgotten level in the human imagination, a level to which only the heraldry of Europe refers. You know, one of the things that always puzzled me in Europe was the strange kind of nostalgia that I feel in every country in Europe I go to. I feel it in Greece, I feel it in the Mediterranean, I feel it in Britain. There is a great kind of loneliness. A great kind of aloneness. And I suddenly realized it one day. This aloneness, it is because the animals that once were in Europe have all been eliminated. Europe and Britain were stocked with animals. Look at your heraldry, it is still a relic of that ancient world.

Now, I have here with me, something written by a person some of you may know as a great travel writer. He wrote a great travel book. It’s a lovely book, it’s a great classic, it transformed travel writing in a way, and it’s by Robert Byron. And he said:

If I have a son, he shall salute the lords and ladies who unfurl green hoods to the March rains, and shall know them afterwards by their scarlet fruit. He shall know the celandine, and the frigid, sightless flowers of the woods, spurge and spurge laurel, dogs’ mercury, wood-sorrel and queer four-leaved herb-paris fit to trim a bonnet with its purple dot. He shall see the marshes gold with flags and kingcups and find shepherd’s purse on a slag-heap.

He shall know the tree-flowers, scented lime-tassels, blood-pink larch-tufts, white strands of the Spanish chestnut and tattered oak-plumes. He shall know orchids, mauve-winged bees and claret-coloured flies climbing up from mottled leaves. He shall see June red and white with ragged robin and cow parsley and the two campions. He shall tell a dandelion from sow thistle or goat’s beard. He shall know the field flowers, lady’s bedstraw and lady’s slipper, purple mallow, blue chicory and the cranesbills-dusky, bloody, and blue as heaven. In the cool summer wind he shall listen to the rattle of harebells against the whistle of a distant train, shall watch dover blush and scabious nod… and savour the virgin turf. He shall know grasses, timothy and wagwanton, and dust his fingertips in Yorkshire fog. By the river he shall know pink willow-herb and purple spikes of loosestrife, and the sweetshop smell of water-mint where the rat dives silently from its hole. He shall know the velvet leaves and yellow spike of the old dowager, mullein, recognise the whole company of thistles, and greet the relatives of the nettle, wound-wort and hore-hound, yellow rattle, betony, bugle and archangel. In autumn, he shall know the hedge lanterns, hips and haws and bryony. At Christmas he shall climb an old apple-tree for mistletoe, and know whom to kiss and how.

He shall know the butterflies that suck the brambles, common whites and marbled white, orange-tip, brimstone, and the carnivorous clouded yellows. He shall watch fritillaries, pearl-bordered and silver-washed, flit like fireballs across the sunlit rides. He shall see that family of capitalists, peacock, painted lady, red admiral and the tortoiseshells, uncurl their trunks to suck blood from bruised plums, while the purple emperor and white admiral glut themselves on the bowels of a rabbit. He shall know the jagged comma, printed with a white c, the manx-tailed iridescent hair-streaks, and the skippers, demure as charwomen on Monday morning. He shall run to the glint of silver on a chalk-hill blue-glint of a breeze on water beneath an open sky-and shall follow the brown explorers, meadow brown, brown argus, speckled wood and ringlet. He shall see death and revolution in the burnet moth, black and red, crawling from a house of yellow talc tied half-way up a tall grass. He shall know more rational moths, who like the night, the gaudy tigers, cream-spot and scarlet, and the red and yellow underwings. He shall hear the humming-bird hawk moth arrive like an air-raid on the garden at dusk, and know the other hawks, pink sleek-bodied elephant, poplar, lime, and death’s head. He shall count the pinions of the plum moths, and find the large emerald waiting in the rain-dewed grass.

All these I learnt when I was a child and each recalls a place or occasion that might otherwise be lost. They were my own discoveries. They taught me to look at the world with my own eyes and with attention. They gave me a first content with the universe. Town-dwellers lack this content, but my son shall have it.

Come, and join with us in The Wilderness Trust, so that we can make certain that your sons and their sons, everywhere in the world, here and in Africa, also have it.