Learning From The Jungle

I grew up quite literally inside a tropical jungle. For whatever reasons we need not inquire into right now, I have in fact lived inside two major Malaysian jungle tracts - the first place was called Taman Endau-Rompin, and the other, Belum-Temengor.

Taman Endau-Rumpin

In those days a lot of life was much slower-paced there, as well as in many other parts of the world. There were no tv programs to rush back inside to, the sun was fairly lazy... People went on walks. I certainly did from as soon as I could walk. There were two clever house dogs that accompanied me wherever I went and they barked whenever my mother called out and afterawhile she took to trusting the dogs implicitly and that meant I could go on long walks. Which I did do. Without other people around...

Look, it was nothing for me to go wander into the jungle and stay out from mid-morning to early evening. I mean it was literally true that if the dogs barked you could hear them from a mile away echoing through the crevasses and valleys. There were no machines, no cars, no buildings, no construction sounds. On a good day you could hear the water pumps and generators of the two chinese tin miners washing out the ore-bearing sands from out of the side of a mountain-stream incline – although they were deep into the thick jungle.

I learnt many things in the jungle but one was that there are places humans can go where nothing else can. A human can see, and ajudge, and consider the changing face of risk, and make decisions based on reflected expectations and a kind of creative positive imagining of outcomes. Animals always default to their fear factor, whenever the challenge meets their threshold capability and threatens to exceed it.

A human can go into that particular notch in the rockface, look behind that particular fan of ferns, go under and behind the noisy crashing waterfall – the crocodile will not, and tiger does not. And if you climb up the rocky sides, not even the sunbasking iguana is going to be able to chase you there if it wants to. The black panther might, but it sleeps in the day, the cobra or the python or the viper might but these can be avoided or beaten off with a stick – you can see them if you keep a good eye out for them especially where you are stepping. Spiders are not too great a problem if you know to look for them and besides they don't stay in the flinty rocky wet dark anyway. A strong loping vine will take you out across a hundred foot drop and back to the exposed bright sunny side. Monkeys hang out in moving troupes and they hate fire and I have a Zippo.

The jungle is a safe place.

Modern Shanghai

Great monsoons sweep a lot of things away... I have never personally seen wild animals attack each other when they are on the run from a huge disaster. Animals are fear-based priority responders.

The human civilized world is also a very safe place. Same reasons. In the wild there are occasionally crazed animals of course, behaving crazily; same as there are crazed people in the world.

 

Here's a symbol from the modern, advanced and civilized human world. The Spirit of Ecstasy, by Charles Sykes, carries the fairytale of a secret affair behind it. All round such symbols, a crazed world swirls of course. But such symbols, and the ideas behind them, are all-important to the intelligent mind!