In Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival, bush hippie survivalist Cody Lundin says that being barefoot for over 20 years has enabled him to slow-down and pay attention to where he is going.

Surrounded by cyber-warrior modernists who are simultaneously texting, chatting on the cell phone, watching a dvd, and driving through a busy intersection, this statement appealed to my Luddite sensibilities. Combined that with my love of J.S. Bach’s seeming simplicity and Cage’s asceticism, it’s easy to understand how I can hear where Lundin is coming from. If you place his statement alongside the beat aphorism “We’re going nowhere fast,” or even “Fools rush in” you realize it’s a full inversion. We’re slowly getting somewhere. A far more rewarding proposition.

One of the things that have changed in my adulthood are the brakes I find myself applying more frequently. Some call it patience, but I see it as proceeding with caution. I twist a wrench slower, I press a button to a motorized device more sparingly. I believe lesser, more meaningful notes can make more music. It’s the path we all have to travel towards eventual silence, oneness…the final void. The popular conception is that sound, vision, reasoning, general sensations and sensory abilities all disappear with age. I think it’s perception vs. reality.

It’s not that sounds, for example, disappear. It’s that we have learned to progressively do more with less, until the pause between each note has stretched to such a daredevil length we have stopped hearing the music. Thus music hasn’t stopped: we just forgot how long ago the last note sounded, and eventually, we finally don’t make it to the next one.

Jeremy Wade and friend

I never understood hunters. Yes, I practiced vegeterianism for years, but returned to a well-rounded palette in order to learn cooking. I just never grasped the notion of leisurely destroying another living thing for pleasure and bragging rights, especially when one announced before hand: “She’s a beauty!” Personally, I’d like to know if wives of hunters worry when they are told they are beautiful.

Survival is something altogether different. I watch all of Discovery / Animal Planet survival shows with great anticipation. I wouldn’t necessarily drink pachydermal fecal water or sleep inside a dead camel’s carcass, but….it’s good to know. One wonders how victims of Katrina would have fared if they knew all they needed was bleach and fire (perhaps for boiling or to make charcoal for filtration) to sanitize and make storm water drinkable. Potassium Permanganate (from Hardware stores like Lowes, or pet / fish stores) + Glycerin (pharmacies) – instant fire. Catching a wild animal, gutting it properly, and consuming it…all necessities in emergency situations. I still think all meat eaters should kill each type of animal they eat with their own hands once in their lifetime. Just to understand what you are doing. I hate to say this, but human beings – in survival situations- can’t possibly lie down and perish, surrendering our position on the food chain purely out of humane reasons. In not flattering ourselves above the wild kingdom, we become a small part of the larger picture. Animals would eat us if they had to survive. In our anthropomorphic delirium, we fancy them noble.

That’s simply because we don’t know what they are thinking, since animals can’t blog.

Watching all these survivalist shows reminds me of my late father, a wild country bumpkin who rode motorcycles all around, outrunning the police on their Triumphs with his Nortons. He was a great fan of the Welsh / Scottish Outward Bound schools. Though he later became a teacher, he escaped – in his youth- into the dense rainforest for weeks during the Japanese occupation, refusing to suffer an invaded country or kill to defend it. After weeks, he returned, but the government denied him schooling, and he was subsequently raised by Irish Catholic monks.

As a result of surviving in the wild, my dad had a real feel of staying in touch with the grittier side our civilization has trained us to forget. Of all the fathers in my mom’s extended, posh family, my dad was the only one who took their kids out hunting in the tropical rainforest, wading through bogs, swamps, and rivers, and emerging with soiled rifles and bodies covered with bloodsucking leeches and a wild boar at the end of the day. It’s amusing to see some of my affluent cousins grow up to be men who turned their noses up at a life of luxury, choosing instead to go off into the wild to fish and rough it out in the jungle. They are really my father’s sons in that sense.

Of all the guys on Discovery, Jeremy Wade of River Monsters (originally from Animal Planet) is my favorite. Don’t get me wrong, just because I love survival shows, doesn’t mean I can go longer than 12 hours without taking a hot shower. Rivers and oceans frighten the heck out of me. If I wade in the seashore and my feet touches a seaweed, I will get a heart attack and die instantly on the spot (it’s happened many times before) I get icky just feeling sticky skin against cotton fabric on a hot summer day. But I LOVE Jeremy Wade’s scary show, which I watch, bulwarked behind a wall of stuffed animals. He is a blend of humane, erudite, inquisitive, tough guy, and teacher: all qualities I saw in my dad.

Some may say Wade is a handsome guy. But men are attractive to me by what they have accomplished, what they know, their fearlessness, and how they behave. You could look like the handsomest guy in the world, you can be physically attractive, you can have a gorgeous face, you can be well-endowed, you can be built, tall, gym-strong, you can know good wine, and use fancy words….but the internal engine, the soul that makes you tick, drives you to acquire (not manufactured products, but wisdom), defines you as a human being….THAT, is what enamors me to a man.