The First Spring Rain

Odd how a man can forget about something like a season. The wind changed today, not in direction or strength but in attitude. I looked out this morning and saw that attitude coming. It was a light halo over the mountains. I could not put my finger on it right away. The air did not try to pull life from you, rather it gently kissed and enticed the hairs on your bare legs. The clouds settle in like a warm blanket and they are not noticed at first because they do not seem to be a discomfort. And then it comes. The sent of the air changes just as the sun sinks below the mountains. It is still hours off but subconsciously you know. Then late out night as you think about going to bed you notice that droplets on the window. You think it is snow and poke a conscious head out the door to see. The air is mild and welcoming and the gentle peck of a warm drop of water kissing your cheek makes you smile. You step out into the open air in the hopes of having another encounter with a beautiful rain drop. The smell of wet asphalt rises up to meet your nose and rain comes down. Light at first as if to prepare the world for what is to come. And slowly it builds and grows and washes away the months of dirt and grim that frozen water simple can do nothing about. The air fills with aromas awakened from their hibernation; the sweet decay of the fall leaves of years past, the rich fullness of good soil, the lightness of a grassy field, and the stinging sour of an old iron bridge. The world becomes alive with the pitter patter play of raindrops on the thankful ground. All of nature seems to give thanks for such a blessing. You linger longer than you normally would. Taking it all in you smile because you know that you will sleep warm and dry tonight and in the morning the world will have been washed clean ready for a new day and a new life. How could I have forgotten about something like Spring.

The human psyche

Introduction
A few weeks ago I had an idea for a story. A story that would look into the the make up of the human psyche. I wrote the key part of it the story about a two weeks later and then a sat on it for another few weeks. I'm not sure why but I thought I would like to mill the idea over a bit more. The idea behind it was inspired by reading parts of Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. He presents an idea that the human mind is not an individual thing. The Steppenwolf of the story sees himself as made up of two parts a wolf and a man. Hesse argues that this is not even enough to make up a fully functional emotional human mind conscious of its own existence. He argues that the human mind is made of a great many personalities who are constantly exchanging power of over the body they inhabit. I read this month before the idea for this story came to me. It was not until I combined the idea with the idea of a "strange loop," presented in G.E.B. by Douglas Hofstadter, that the story came to life in me and took on a deeper meaning. I had not planed on sharing the story with anybody until I finished it but as it has been weeks sense I have written for it I'm not sure I will finish it. Resent events have also lead me to believe that this idea has also helped me to come to terms with some of the part of myself that I do not like as much. The text below is in the form of a letter to the personalities that exist within me and without me. It dated because the rest of the story was to play with time and space and its relation to the human mind and emotional state. I hope some time to finish the story but for now I would just like to share this part. You will have to pardon the length of the following text it seems that I started writing and could not stop. I would recommended reading it in chunks I will try to break it up in to chunks that should not disrupt the read to much. Also this is a first draft and has never been edited (I never have liked editing) so I hope that the mistakes will not distract from the idea of the story.

The Letter
T. T.. Mt. Blue, Alaska, 23, June, 2014.

To those within myself,

The hopes of my legacy and the dreams of a life extended beyond that of this temporal body ride on this letter and I hope with all of my heart that it reaches all to whom it is intended. I lay now on the verge of dieing. Many of my contemporaries consider me to be a mad man. I can not blame them. I for a time thought the same. With this letter, my finale words, I hope to disband those accusations. I pray that this letter be read with an open mind and heart. That the information contained there in will constitute a legacy, that my lack of children and my incapability to believe in an afterlife or reincarnation, has forever banished me from having any other way but by that of knowledge. Read deeply these words and heed their meaning for it is their meaning that is the soul purpose of my life.
--
There was a long time when I thought – there is an uncertainty in the use of the noun “I” but I shall use it for the convenience of the language that falls from that term – that my mind was a unit. I was convinced that the conflicts that I had beheld in my life were in all reality conflicts between myself and society as a whole. I tried desperately to remove myself from society and for once have a peace which until then I had never known.

I grew up in the mountains of Colorado and learned the ways of the forest from my father before I was sent away for school. My parents wished for me to become a scholar of a man of science. They decided that for this I was to go to the city to be educated in a fashion that they could not create. This was What I considered the beginning of my conflict. I hated the city. An animosity grew in me towards my parents for relegating my to such tortures. I became a delinquent of my school and was often to be found in detention of picking litter from the school grounds. This was not to my disliking, on the contrary I found that I preferred to wander the school grounds picking up trash to spending my time locked in a lecture. The time I spent in detention was dedicated to reading. I feel that my dualities frustrated my instructors. I was a two sided coin to them. On face I was an intelligent and quick student who was unafraid to take the imaginative chances required to gain deep knowledge a subject. On the hand I was a miscreant and one who forced those around me to stay ignorant of the teachings that our instructors provided.

After a time my wildness became subdued. I began to retreat into myself more and more. I dove headlong into my studies, finding them to be the only way to diminish the wild pressures that once drove me. I progressed quickly threw the school’s materials, only attending class for exams. My instructors were pleased with my progress as the years pasted by.

My summers were spent away from school working with my parents in the mountains. They researched wildlife and as they were getting one in age needed help. By the time I was sixteen my parents were in their sixties. That summer we made an expedition north to Montana to study the newly reintroduced wolf packs there. It was during this trip that my parents were overcome by a Puma and all my efforts could not keep them from deaths grips. I knew not what to do. After their funeral I returned to school because I had no where else to go. I would graduate in the spring just before my seventeenth birthday. The winter passed in melancholy fashion and my animosity towards the whole of the human community grew deeper. I knew that after graduation I was expected, eagerly by some, to go to collage. I knew that I could no longer face the ignorant and the seemingly hateful regard the human race gave to the world on which they lived. I could no longer stand the way that people saw themselves as higher and better than the animals from whom they were descendant. I looked at the human race and I saw a predator more savage and unpredictable than the lion that had killed my parents. There was not left to but to leave this people to their own demise and seek out the truths of nature and the peace that was held, so preciously, there in.
--
I removed myself to the wildernesses of Colorado. I determined to work my way threw the mountains to the north. Threw Wyoming, and into Montana. To visit the last abodes of my parents and then to escape into Canada and eventually Alaska. I had not time line for this and I took very little: A good belt knife that had been my fathers, a pocket Swiss Army knife that I had had sense I was a child, a good pair of boots and a small pack with a few warm cloths, a good sleeping bag, a few books and my journal. I left my parents home in the care of a family friend, one whom I had become very close to in the past year.

I set out in early spring. I found the peace that I had been searching for in the first few days. It stayed with me for a time. I trekked north with no goal in mind and no destination in mind. If I found a place that I liked I stay there until I felt it time to move on. I often found myself in areas that people frequented. These weekend worriers seemed to penetrate the only a few miles from the road and I found that they were often ripe for the picking. I found myself smiling like a child when I happened upon a camp of college students taking a break from there summer jobs to party in the wilderness. I found these people to be oblivious to the world around them and I often enjoyed indulging their ghost stories with a real ghoul of the wilderness. I used these experiences to experiment with the human mind and the effects of unbounded fear. None ever came to harm do to my action but I would not be surprised to hear they did not return to the wilderness for some time.

It was midsummer when I reached the place where my parents had been slain. I decide to say in the area for the winter and I prepared for the cold. I made my first excursion into a small town to get an ax and a few more warm cloths. I build myself a small home that retained the heat of a small fire very well and would stand up a any number of feet of snow that might fall. I prepared wood and dried the meat of many small games that I hoped would be a good store for the winter. When the first snow finally cam I found myself prepared. I spent the winter chopping wood, hunting, tending my fine that I knew kept me alive at times and watching the wolves that lived in that array play in the snow, but most all I meditated on my own mind and the way it worked. After a week of hard storms and being shut up in small home I found that the conflict that I thought I had gained relief from, by removing myself from my advisory, had returned. I spent a great deal of time and thought on this and finally decided that the duality that had existed in me as a child had not truly gone. I reflected on a plot that I had once heard, about a man who believed himself to be in part human and wolf. I recalled my instructor talking about Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, and decided that Hesse had written about myself in a time long past. Now I had never read the book, perhaps if I had I would not have become so obsessed with the idea. I spent the rest of the winter trying to create a delineation between my two parts and reconcile them to live at peace in my singular mind. By the time the snows began to melt I had come not closer to completing this goal that defining it as a goal.
--
I again started north in the early spring, as soon as it was possible to travel more than a few hundred yards from my little shelter. I quickly found myself across the border and entering the Canadian wilderness. I found myself hastening to the north. I somehow had made the goal of Alaska and the goal of reconciling my two halves the same goal. I simple knew that my peace was tied intimately into being in the Alaskan wilderness. My haste was so great that the first snow took me by surprise. I found myself seeking the shelter of towering pine as the snow built up around me. I was surprised a awake not frozen to death in the morning. The snow was still falling and was already higher than my knees. I spent the day building a rough shelter in the hollow of that tree and cutting enough wood to last me the next few day. The first part of that winter was spent cold and struggling to provide myself with a means of survival. I spent many nights sitting in my primitive hut fearing that if I slept I would never wake. In these wakeful night my two halves argued. On half willing me to life and the other willing me to breath deeply the perpetual sleep that sounded to be such a relief of the pains I was now suffering. In this fights between one I found that their were more personalities taking part in the battle than the two part I had spent so long delimiting. I found a side that wanted to run home and a part that wanted to hunt out the girl I had once known in school and share her warmth once more. There were parts that wished to continue on north and parts that longed for the south and the comfort of fellow humans. A part of me that seemed to be bobbing on the ocean enjoying the sun.

Around the solstice I found my conditions started to become better and better. I had provided myself with ample supplies and found that I was becoming more comfortable with the winter that had so suddenly come upon me. In this new found comfort I set my mind to seeking out the personalities that seemed to be residing within me. My brush with a frozen death seemed to have breathed life into all of these beings that had never been. I began to wonder if they had not always been there. I was simple separated from them by veil that that this curtain had fallen to the icy grips of the winter. There was a time that I thought I was beginning to lose my mind. I thought that these personalities would start to posses me. When this did not happen, I realized that my awareness of the possibility would not allow it to transpire. By the time the snow melted in the spring I was pleased to see that the unity that I had once thought was my mind and the duality that had replaced it had expired. I now saw my conflicted with society was simple a conflict with myself. The I that I thought was really a society to itself. It was as if a group of people had been trying to convince themselves that they as a group were an individual rather than a group of individuals with a single goal. Furthermore, it seemed that each personality that was within me was a society of personalities itself. It seemed that there was an ever branching division of who I was and what made me.

By the time the snow was melted enough to travel again I had no desire to. I felt like I had reached a higher level of enlightenment in that winter hut. I found that I no longer saw the destination as the goal. It seemed like I had spent the whole of my life trying to get somewhere. I now saw that it was not the end of a journey that I had been looking for. It was the changed that the journey made to me that I had been looking for. My steps were what I needed not the place that they lead to. I decided to walk but in a different way. I stayed and built a little cabin not far from the hut that had sustained me for the winter. It was from this cabin that I explored the world both around me and within me. I soon found that that wondering of my feet incited the wondering of my mind. The world quickly took on a beauty that I had never seen before. Areas that I once thought to be empty and devoid of life and action became vestiges of beauty and the eventfulness.

I discovered the existence of a small town about three days to the west. I procured a number of items their. A map I bought told me that I had actually managed to find the closest town to my new residence and that I was in the southern end of the Northwest Territory, not more than a hundred mile from Alaska. I returned to my home with books and implements with which to write. Threw these and my wondering I found myself and the many personalities that make me who I am.

I spent a number of years in the solitude of this retreat and at the end of my fourth winter there I found a deep desire to pass my experiences onto the world at large. I set out once again to the place where I had been so driven to some six year prior. I had some misgivings about leaving my little home and the animals that lived near. My feet were driven though I had discovered something about human nature and the discontents that are inherent in the human mind. I could not sit idle and keep something of such importance from the world.
--
Trekking was far easier than I had remembered it. I delighted in the levity that my body seemed to have gained with the peace of mind that I had found. The one hundred or so miles to Alaska seemed little more than an extension of the wondering that I had done over the past years.

I entered into a small town, by the name of, Mt. Blue, and found a kind family to give me a place to stay for the night. The father, a Mr. MacIngle, seemed familiar to me but I was not sure. When he asked me how I had come to this remote little town I explained my story in a vague sort of way he told me about a man he had met some years earlier. He explained how that man had changed his life. It seems that they were both at a point in their lives that they needed a change. They had traveled together for a year and became very close friends. One day the man had simply disappeared and left MacIngle in this town in Alaska. MacIngle decided to stay and in doing so he found that part of himself was his traveling companion. Not in sense that somebody becomes endeared to a friend no MacIngle claimed that the companion and he were part of a whole that neither could describe. We spent the night discussing this and when finally I went to bed I did not rest.

I woke with from a dream of my death. I knew it to be turn without a the fainted glimmer of a doubt. I knew that I would not have time to tell that world of what I had learned a d I knew that I was not meant to. In what I have written here I have explained how I cam into knowledge. However I do not believe it is possible to put Knowledge such as this into words. My only hope, for these words, is that they might help others down their own paths.

I have one finally thing to do and that is to complete this journey of life. I know that the end of this letter is the end of my life and like everything they both must end. I need not have a reason for this death the reasons do not matter to me anymore. Like wondering in the forest I live life simple by placing one foot in front of the other. I know not what is to come but I know that where I am to die the personalities that make up who I am will live on and I would like to thank them for all that they have given to me.


May you mind be at peace in all you do,
Thorn Templeton