“If a man is not ready to risk his life, where is his dignity?”--Andre Malraux


Adventure

Looking back on it, the journey Geoff and I made into the Outback was not advisable. There was a great amount of risk involved with no certainty that we would make it out alive. It was, what Primo Levi called, “The bear meat” and, like Levi, “Now that many years have passed, I regret that I ate so little of it, for nothing has had, even distantly, the taste of that meat, which is the taste of being strong and free, free also to make mistakes and be the master of one's destiny.”

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“Better to be ashes than dust”--Jack London


Phillip Parker King’s Original Narrative on Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11203

I’ve had other adventures since then, hang gliding, riding a mountain bike solo up the Cape York Peninsula, free diving with sharks on Guam, hikes in the High Sierras of California, but nothing has come close to those transcendent months in the Kimberley wilderness. To walk for  weeks with no sound but birdcalls and the wind, to listen to the rain falling, was to be anywhere in time. That transcendence is just not possible in the modern world. We are always breathing sooty air. One thing I realized in the bush was how very short our lives are. If we go about doing all the things that our modern industrial society requires of us, we will have only scratched the surface of what it means to be alive. From the book...“It occurred to me that if you did not spend two months in the wilderness in your youth, you might never discover who you were; might fundamentally never discover your true self, stripped of all conditioning, ideology and belief.” I encourage people to get out of their comfort zones, get off the grid and out into the wild.