Background Video On Chris McCandless and Into The Wild

Chris McCandless: A Young Man's Desire To Reconnect To The Natural World

A Modern Day Adventure: Hop, Skip, And Go Naked

It is more important now than ever before to be selective about what we are learning and how we interact with our natural world.  Armstrong closes her book with defining where we can still find the mythos we so desperately require.  She says, “If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world” (Armstrong 149).  Frye encourages us to push on in the creation of romance and closes his book by telling us that “it is not until we have shared something of this last Sabbath vision in our greatest romance that we may begin to say that we have earned the right to silence” (Frye 188).  In other words, we need to keep engaging mentally and spiritually in stories and myth that contain the power to transform and expand our awareness.  As for kindling our connection to the natural world, John Muir strapped himself to a tree in a windstorm so he could feel the rhythm of the wind, or you could ride a horse bareback, or watch a sunrise in a mountain meadow.  We have to become the hero or heroine in our own life story, forge our way through the “numbing despair and mental paralysis” that Armstrong defines as our current way of thought, and gallop ourselves forward on some friendly druid horse and into a quest for romance, mythos, and ancient wisdom.     

Thoreau: Foreshadowed The Consequences Of Detaching Ourselves From The Natural World 150 Years Ago

Frye and Armstrong are clear on the consequences of our departure from secular scriptures and myth, and roughly one hundred and fifty years ago, nature writer Henry David Thoreau foreshadowed the consequences of detaching ourselves from the natural world.  He believed that man was influenced by the grandeur of nature, that the uncontrolled wild reveals to man the infinite possibilities available in the human experience and that by being present in nature we can internalize these qualities and grow more alive ourselves.  He said, “Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.”  Thoreau thought the limitlessness contained in the wild set our spirits free from the structure and control of the civilized world, and that if we “wean” ourselves from the natural world we will become “a civilization destined to have a speedy limit” (Thoreau Walking).  But all is not lost, as Zimmer states, “the hero discovers then that he is bound (as all mankind is bound) to the maternal principle of Mother Earth, Mother Life, bound to the ever-revolving wheel of life-through-death” (Zimmer 84).  We have to remember that we are still learning and that we are proactive participants in the development of our world.

Karen Armstrong: Consequences Of Death Of Myth In Modern Western Civilization

Karen Armstrong, in her book, A Short History of Myth,” (2005) says that because of the lack of mythos in popular literature "We are facing something unprecedented.  Other societies saw death as a transition to other modes of being.  They did not nurture simplistic and vulgar ideas of an afterlife, but devised rites and myths that helped people to face the unspeakable (Armstrong 134).  She discusses the displacement of myth in modern western civilizations and tells us that, "We try to enter this dimension by means of art, rock music, drugs or by entering the larger-than-life perspective of film.  We still seek heroes. . . .The myth of the hero was not intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves.  Myth must lead to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation.  We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritually challenging and transformative" (Armstrong 135).  Armstrong and Frye parallel in pointing out the lack of depth in popular media.  Armstrong is specific and direct when she states that "purely linear, logical and historical modes of thought have debarred many of us from therapies and devices that have enabled men and women to draw on the full resources of their humanity in order to live with the unacceptable" (134).  Our current culture, according to Armstrong, has regressed because of our suppression of myth which provides the mechanism for our understanding of enduring questions, what Zimmer refers to as "a solution of the riddle of life and death" (Zimmer 83).  We have not yet come to terms with our destiny,  and how and what that means, and our current linear thought processes, and the value we place on the scientific over the mythological, romantic, and natural world, leaves us without the tools we need to understand and transform ourselves on the dramatic stage of life. 

Frye: Lack Of Depth In Modern Popular Stories

In the last chapter of Frye’s book, “The Recovery of Myth,” he discusses the lack of depth in modern stories.  He states, "The soap operas of radio and television are addressed primarily to a female audience, and feature a heroine plunged into the woes typical of so many forms of romance.  But while she continually struggles against a swarm of complications, the decisive polarizing of romance does not take place.  She never quite reaches what I have been calling the night world, a life so intolerable that it must end either in tragedy or in a permanent escape.  This is particularly so that the story, along with the financial support of sponsors, can last indefinitely, but there is another social dimension involved" (Frye 165).  It seems to me that the dimension missing is the heroine’s transformation, and that in general, we are no longer using stories and the natural world for spiritual understanding and growth.  

Jack Turner: The Abstract Wild

It’s important to note, however, that although the birth of Christianity has had some impact on our predominant attitudes towards nature, there are those in the world today who still embrace the belief that although humans have forgotten their intrinsic connection to the natural world, our “unitive companionship,” as Zimmer puts it, with the natural world still exists.  Jack Turner, in his book The Abstract Wild, (1996) says we have forgotten “the reciprocity between the wild in nature and the wild in us, between knowledge of the wild and knowledge of the self that was central to all primitive cultures” (Turner 11).  The “reciprocity” Turner refers to derives from our “primitive” connection to the natural world, our organic and historic connection to nature which is intrinsic because we are born from the same fabric.