The trail is dark and narrow. Our years of experience tell us Maine moose with large antlers prefer open trails to plowing through the woods when the light of day fades away. The trail cuts through American Indian land so Steve names it the “Enchanted Forest”. I am in the lead position and our family group’s elected trail guide and or most insane/adventurous idiot of the bunch. Still I take a vote, “Should we or should we not”. We are all bored from the continuous rains, we are up for adventure so the mission of braving the Enchanted Forest at dusk is a go. Three ATVs five miles away from “home” enter.
I have the memory of a chilly October morning ride, spotting them in the road and telling my daughter to turn the ATVs around now. There was the amazingly loud clack clack sound of antlers bashing each other in the struggle for territory, a mate or maybe prime feeding. The royalities from Natioinal Geographic were lost to the stupidity of “You didn’t bring the camcorder”? We both watched as they tore up sections of the logging road trying to gain footing advantage over each other. The scene lasted for about twenty minutes. We raced back to camp to collect the camcorder but ended up only picking up the coarse moose hair that remained from the now gone creatures.
We braved the Enchanted Forest but met none of the majestic creatures of the wild. In my half hour upon return from isolation in the Maine woods I sense a lack of the spirit which founded this country and the spirit that once made it great. More on this later.
Grampy brought his camper home. I found one your Matchbox cars in the sand by the campfire and also the remote control car Grammy bought for you. In our last rush to pack up we left it in the camp. I want a grandson to have a life, a normal life yet Grampy seriously doubts that might happen. I’m going to give him all of me in the time he/we have left.
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And it does not look good
and it almost never looks good if we even manage to notice it coming. It’s scary because it feels like we’re about to lose something, when really we often gain more then we lose. We just can’t see that till it gets here.
…the idea of a sudden, quantitative evolutionary leap.
It seems that species go along for what seems an interminably long period with little or no movement and then suddenly a large leap is made. The evolutionary leap which is now imperative, if we are to survive, is the evolution of consciousness.
When I look around at the average level of consciousness that I see on the planet today, any conscious, rational growth does indeed look impossible.
But then, for no apparently logical reason at the time, fish grew legs and walked on earth. I truly “believe” that this is the process in which we are now involved, in developing something as unthinkable as a fish growing legs.
Will we make it? Will we adapt as the evolutionary imperative demands? I don’t know. From the rational perspective, it does not look good. But then was it rational for the fish to grow legs?
So I hold onto the possibility of an evolutionary leap I cannot, from my present perspective, imagine.