Perhaps confusion is a natural state of mind for us. The condition never completely goes away.  We try to minimize confusion.

Civilization is the construction of a “world” to reduce our confusion.

The Natural world is given, not made by us.  Nature is a congerie of living organisms and inanimate “active” things.  An infinite number of things dead and alive, are all acting and reacting to preserve their life, or to assert their presence-of-being upon the surrounding environment.  A mountain or a pebble asserts a presence of being.  A mountain range acts,  just too slowly for our perception or our measurement.

We must take all of these factors sufficiently into account, in order to survive.  In the wild, if you lose attention for a moment, you could die.  I was reminded of this by a small wood cross memorial next to a precipice on a hiking trail In the Cascades a few years ago.  Someone lost focus, dying by distraction.

Not to be forgotten are the myriad of organisms invisible to the eye, which may live in your drinking water, or may insinuate themselves into a small abrasion.  They infiltrate us, live in our gut.  They count too.

Civilization has progressed from the fire at the mouth of a cave to the Starbucks in which I now sit typing away on this obsolete laptop.  Is this the last computer using windows XP?

Our ancestors believed that the wilderness was the abode of demons.  That is an apt metaphor.  If one must be at peak awareness in order to avoid a fatal accident or avoid contact with a mammal that is stronger, faster, and more hungry–that is an ultimate terror.  And against the unseen, –how long have we been helpless?

I suppose that we can relax now.  Civilization, the man-made-world is everywhere.  Wilderness, the zone of danger, of struggle, of unpredictability, of the unknown is limited to protected National Parks.  The view from twenty thousand feet in an ascending airplane reveals a checkerboard of civilization as far as the eye can see.

Really, is there any need to think about those tropical zones in the southern hemisphere, our former colonial subjects that are rife with unrelenting violence, chaos, hunger, and social insecurity?  There one can discover the effect of man-made jungle, a lawless zone of the anthropoid predator.  I refer to Central American countries and some of those in South America. They were stripped of natural resources, and indigenous political development by generations of colonial extraction and rule.

You and I ought to be feeling much better, euphoric even.  Do we not live in the best of times? So, how are you feeling?  Happy?

I am not in a positive mode of feeling; the intuitive sense of my prospects are not on the positive side of the scale…..

And you?

The fire at the mouth of our cave burns low.  Time to throw another piece of wood on the glowing embers.  Did you say that we are out of wood?