Kinship With all Life

Excerpt: "Naked in Eden"

Cape Tribulation Beach

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever
let the last remaining wilderness be destroyed... We simply
need that wild country available to us even if we never do more
than drive to its edge and look in. ~ Wallace Stegner

Magnificent Daintree River

When I was young, the days that Dad came home from hiking or canoeing were his most peaceful times. His whole spirit exuded a calm contentment. Even as a little girl I knew he was at ease with the world. It was like he brought a piece of the wilderness into our home, a wild and untamed energy that clung to his broad shoulders and shone out his eyes. I think I loved him most then. His whole being sparkled with life. He smelled of sweet pine and green moss on wet stone. Without words and without me consciously knowing it that wildness burst through my deadness and spoke to my heart.

In the rainforest I began to understand Dad’s burning desire to be in the woods. Something larger than me, an elemental wisdom that knew me, beckoned me to go around just one more bend in the creek and to climb just one more hill until I’d traveled miles deep into the forest. I often felt that the rainforest owned me. She did. I didn't mind being permeated with love and consumed by such an enormous being. Like an enzyme her love broke down my defenses and made me digestible and more easily absorbed into the “whole,” or the mother organism.

Daintree River. Note the
bare hills where the forest has
been cut for cattle grazing.

Beaches of Cape Tribulation

Earth patiently awaits our return. Time is of no consequence. We have stored in our memory an indescribable kinship with all life. Can you feel it in your bones? I felt as if the forest had been awaiting my arrival for a long time.

I’d been shut down all my life. And as I started to awaken I saw the rainforest through new eyes. Everything appeared fresh and exciting, as if the forest could hardly wait to show me everything that "it is.” She called out, “Come Robin. Come and see who I am. Come and see before I am gone.”

~ (Excerpt Naked in Eden)

Rainforest Creek

Our own souls, the earth and the sky, are all we need.
To want more is to lose these things and be unhappy. ~ Pessoa

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