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One cannot claim to be born either an outdoorsperson or naturalist (literally, unlike a Spartic baby trialed on its first night alone on the mountainside, or Romulus or Remus and the She-wolf along the Tiber), just as one cannot prove to be born spiritual or religious, although one may quickly and early get a feel for the world, and a liking or disliking for it.
For me early was three and quickly was four and five and nine.
I was first and foremost a defeatist. As children it’s gentler to call them worriers and worrywarts, and that was the extent (in a freethinking and irreligious house) of any spiritual sense.
At the same ages I was linked with the crappies and sunfish my father brought home almost year-round, and the ducks in the fall; a red fox once (or twice); a raccoon. Dead all of them, but creatures (from ‘create’, as in ‘creation’) still. Then for myself seeing the swimming sunfish in the shallow water under the near end of the dock, and the next year fishing those sunfish a few baby steps further out, and hunting – without carrying a gun – with my father. In the spring sowing round red radish seeds and lettuce seeds like his tiny whiskers, and planting tomatoes and stalking asparagus. And in the summer there were berries and fruit and corn. Raw. Off the great stalks.
Then I was a youth. And as an act of youthful rebellion against myself, I tried to fight the defeatism, the nihilism, the fatalism.
I tried to be a transcendentalist.
Which manifested itself in trying to appreciate the Universe’s Garden, and in reading Henry David.
Along the middle north side of Pine Lake at the campsite that had the great pine trees – not a cathedral, but an abolitionist New England Hall of peace and emancipation, I went up the rise a ways into the honeysuckle and blueberries and lay in the moss and with the gnats and mosquitoes read in “Walden” for a small part of an afternoon.
And read in Ralph Waldo other times in the sun and shade. (But did not read in Emily, and maybe that explains my failures as a transcendentalist.)
I tried to be evangelized too.
But there was no reconciling the Evangelicalism with either what I did – trapping mink in the cattail ponds, hunting partridge and ducks and eventually deer, waterskiing and sailing and swimming with my buddies and sometimes with girls, ice fishing and full-contact broomball, and (for me) full-contact softball – or who I was: a brooding blackguard, a born wolf of the steppes in the suburbs.
So, I tried to be a mystic.
To find a union with God. To find Eternity in the Now. But when I hiked and walked alone, I walked and hiked with the voices of other Idols, with other voices, and bad voices in my head, and other Ghosts behind me.
And so much when you’re young and impatient is tedious (weeding the flowers or skinning muskrats) and suffering (shouldering traps and that special fox and this gun under the iron gray skies in the driving first cold snow of November) and burdensome (the portages) and struggling to “hump tent and pegs”, as the wounded old soldier of Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, said.
Then in Asia I meditated alone in my room on Zen and from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
That room in Southeast Asia, the first room – no, the second room I had of many rooms in Asia – had a tile floor and high ceiling and thin, hollow brick walls and there was a very big window that was always wide open and unscreened in the dry season and faced northeast and the big, slow mosquitoes came in in the mornings and evenings. There was always the smell of the secretions of cockroaches and that scent is enough to make one retch, and I will always remember that was the first time I’d ever been awakened by a rooster crowing, and that was in the swath of the municipality between the city center and the sprawling slums. And the dogs barked occasionally. And those were the Asian types of dogs where you couldn’t tell if they were domestic dogs or butchering dogs because they looked the same.
I even found myself, each time I would re-read “The Brothers Karamazov”, finishing the last chapter, the last page, the last words, becoming for a few brief moments Russian Orthodox. Or so I was convinced.
Go read “A River Runs Through It”, and it might happen to you on that last page, at that last sentence – you know the one. And you might become a Presbyterian dry flyfisherperson for a brief moment.
So then in middle-age I took up yoga for twenty days, but I found that when I did yoga I was stiff, paunchy and flatulent.
For me, ‘corsi e ricorsi’. It’s all just fleeting, proceeding into Chaos again. Me, for my freethinking thoughts and my unbeliever’s beliefs, proceeding There faster than most. Still, a creature triumphant.
“Hurrah! Karamazov! Hurrah!”
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