These Forests

Broken, slashed, lumbered bare,
How abused these forests are.
Hillsides scorched, soil exposed, gravel where.
Frozen trees, shrunken dwarfish bonsai cling to life.

We crept through woods without a bird, or sign of bear or deer,
And wondered where all the creatures went,
Cursed the lumbering, and acid rain.

Then as always,
we were astounded when grouse exploded from beneath our feet,
and came to a raven feasting upon a fisher’s kill, an otter’s tale, long in death,
hide rolled inside out and all devoured bones, skull crushed and swallowed.

A buck, all ten-spiked points of him sharp as pencils, pranced ahead of us
and turned back to match eyes with his, white nuzzle and giant neck,
grizzled grey unmoving.

Who dared think nobody lived here?

The Explorer and the Wanderer

Let's return to the subtle difference between ritual, and action with purpose, and inject into our hypothetical remote village of many centuries ago, two young visitors, who are there to go walking.

The first, an explorer is anxious to be the first to hike to the summit of a high mountain, overlooking a very remote lake. How should he get there?

The native people obediently detail to him the series of turns he will have to take, and the trails he will have to walk to get to that spot. Many have been to the lake, but not one has been to the top of the mountain.

It has never been climbed. The explorer is a conqueror. He wants to be the first.

The peak is a very long way, and his visualization skills are not perfect, he becomes lost. He breaks out of the jungle not at the treeless edge of a mountain, but at a beach on the coast. He finds his way back to base, rebuffed by the way events have turned out, yet determined to start again in the morning.

The second guest is a walker, who has no particular objective in mind. Upon arriving he asks, where should I go?

It is recommended that he make a journey to the coast, but on the way, he makes some other turns and ends up climbing the mountain.