Bush uses the fear card on Iran, while this goes on in our hospitals. Read Jon Carroll today.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/10/18/DD1QSQTCI.DTL
It is no wonder I retreat to books about man meeting the cold and surviving or not.
I just finished reading George Grinnell's book, A Death on the Barrens. He is seventy and was just now able to write a story that happened in 1955 when he was 22. Six men set off with canoes to explore the uninhabited Canadian Barrens. One does not return and it is a miracle, many miracles that the other five do.
I am intrigued with this need in some to explore solitary, cold places. At one point, the men are saved because they stumble upon some Inuit, the first people they have seen in months. The Inuit feed the starving men caribou steaks. They are not able to swallow the barely rehydrated carrots offered in return.
Grinnell has this to say:
"On average, industrial cultures can support a hundred persons per square mile. Hunting cultures, like that of the Inuit, whose stone instruments lay at my feet, could support only one person per square mile. Today there are more than six billion persons on the planet, or about one hundred persons per square mile of land. In order to revert to hunting and gathering, we would have to kill off ninety-nine percent of the human population. The Inuit's was the last culture to survive in North America. Today, its remnants hang around the Hudson's Bay Posts, work the electronic cash registers, watch hockey on TV in the evenings, and drink themselves into an early grave."
We can't go back to those days, and yet, how do we navigate life now, and provide the inner-outer journeys we seem to need, the journeys that prove the need for connection and tribe. I continue to read that we can do it with meditation. It is the tool of our times.