Why has the mystic and the natural world been intertwined with symbolic meaning and the path of awakening to a different way of perceiving life since the beginning of human experience? From the 1st of April 2020, Boyd Varty from Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa realizes a life long dream as he goes into the wilderness alone for 40 days and 40 nights to try and answer that question from inside that experience. - Episode 30: Day 28 "Call me Crazy" You would be amazed at how far crocodiles move at night. I found myself following the distinctive track for about 2 kilometers. I’ve spent a lot of time in the bush veld, but in this experience by nature of the experience I have been taken deeper. I have the will and the mindset to find out where crocodiles go. To be immersed in patterns that otherwise seem random. This is an understanding of a certain individuality to each creature. Of course even deeper is the fact that naming anything takes you a little bit further away from it. Zen Koan. A glass of water on the table. The teacher asks what is that? The students give linear answers. The master picks up the glass and drinks, making the point of pure experience. From a spiritual point of view, the other truth is that mind changes out here. The thought load of future and past is replaced by an immediacy of attention. Mind recruits the body, it is in a creative response to the body. I say that because I honestly tend to run pretty anxious. This is how we used to be for many thousands of years. While we can’t obviously live in trees in the wild, its worth noting that if we could most of us would be closer to enlightenment. There are really opportunities to questioning how we get off the progress train with nuance. We have to face the truth that not all progress is progress. Modern life ain’t it all cracked up to be. It’s certainly worth some of your capacity to innovate before you have kids and they become teenagers. Life architecture as an activism is a very engaging way to spend the blink of an eye we all get. Right now I’m reading two of the most beautiful books. Braiding Sweetgrass and Overstory. https://www.amazon.com/Braiding-Sweetgrass-Indigenous-Scientific-Knowledge/dp/1571313567 https://www.amazon.com/Overstory-Novel-Richard-Powers/dp/039363552X Both talk about the intelligence of plants. In Overstory, the trees start to call a total discordant group of people together. It shows how a forest is not a collection of trees but a living thing.