Terra Opulence

Many of you have had the opportunity to watch or even read the book "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer. It's about a well educated guy who leaves on a two year sojourn meeting the end of his life in the northern outbacks of Alaska. He grew up in the well to do suburbs of Washington, D.C. and the book chronicles the questions that led to his final demise.

It's a pretty inspiring read and one that strikes a cord with me personally. Shortly after his death in August of 92' readers of the first article published in "Outdoor" magazine, gave harsh critique of his ancillary inexperience or what some might call misguided bravado. I won't go into depth with the story's disposition, instead I want to explore what I just coined "Terra Opulence." I googled the phrase and nothing came up so I'm coining it as my own. Terra opulence in my view is the intrinsic design of nature within man at its most voyeuristic extreme. In other words, the optical beauty of nature beckons us to return with polarity to whence we came.

I've grown up all my life in urban Brooklyn, NY. Discount education, travels, work and relocation I am and always will be a city boy. But yet, I have had incredible urges to return to a place I never knew. I have dreamt the forages of foreign mountains as if they were the subway lines of metro New York. I could not categorize this yearning as wander lust for The Expanse and not The Road was my home.

"An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is THE ROAD." - Roger Miller Song

This penchant proclivity has caused me no less than a handful of trips into the wild, no pun intended. I crossed The Grand Canyon alone in the heat of summer and promised myself I would never again subject myself to such torture. Two years later, I found myself in the valley of desert heat at the bottom of the Grand Canyon for a second crossing. I traveled into Wyoming to hike into the Grand Tetons, I've done the Appalachians and foreign mountains as well. What is this desire that has led men and women alike searching in wilderness the protagonist of oneself?

Enlightenment.

Enlightenment not in the sense of Thoreau. Let me eschew Descartes' most famous line: "I think therefore I am." The power inherent of knowing thyself. There is great power in knowing oneself. Shakespeare's Ophelia to Hamlet: "Know thyself." Let me exposit further the premise of self knowledge, it is the offspring of a fundamental theology that involves creation itself. Genesis 3:4 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." Satan is speaking to Adam and Eve proposing that knowing good from evil will propagate the two as peers with God himself. Do I agree, of course not, neither does the billion plus Christians on this globe. But what Satan brings up though skewed, should not be overlooked. He is proposing that the knowledge of something, "good" or "evil" will produce power, that knowledge is almighty. Therefore, what is that knowledge?

To be continued......