Tag: Coyote

The Wild is ever vigilant. Sleep, that deep, profound, dream-laden land of Morpheus, is forbidden The Wild by evolutionary design.

Pets are embraced by Morpheus (at least, should be. Some people don’t deserve pets) because modern pets – those not kept outside or in a barn – recognize the safety within the walls of home.

Their den, as it were.

When your cat purrs in its sleep, when your dog woofs and twitches, when your bird tucks its head under a wing, it communes with its kin through all time knowing such journeys undertaken are safe.

Not so in The Wild.

There evolution forbids deep rest because deep rest equates to being prey.

Western cultured two-Leggers have only enjoyed deep sleep (many, anyway. Definitely not most or all) for perhaps the past two-hundred years, basically since the industrial revolution, when group recognition fell from village or tribe and climbed to housing project or job.

Light sleepers’ non-conscious minds remember The Wild and pay attention.

Do you?

 

Last time I mentioned the need for broad attention in The Wild.

Often there’s a lot going on and even those who’re trained in situational awareness techniques need help from their friends.

In The Wild, this often takes the form of scouts.

Any predator species which recognizes group identity sends out scouts who report back what’s going on where. Doesn’t matter if it’s ants, bees, coyotes, wolves, …

Group survival requires a pooling of knowledge, of information, of what happened where, when, and if possible, why.

Humans, for the most part, do not employ scouts. We call ourselves a predator species, we like to think of ourselves as apex predators, and that’s an amusing deceit we employ. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of the population doesn’t know how to monitor situations beyond what’s for dinner, what do you want to watch tonight, how’s my job going, who’s picking up the kids when, …

These are nice, yes, and hardly qualify as survival issues.

Unless you’re under fire or threat.

Repeatedly.

Ask someone who’s a war zone, or works undercover, or in espionage, or intelligence.

They well know the value of scouts.

And as a species, as we learn more of what’s in our universe, as we discover more potential threats real or imagined, the number of scouts multiplies.

Until everyone is a scout.

Scouting on each other.

Ala 1984 or McCarthyism or … umm … (and dare I say it?) … Trump?

 

To survive in The Wild, one must pay attention.

Two-Legs pay selective attention. We devote the majority of our neural resources to whatever interests us at the moment.

Which is why we – the modern “we” – don’t do well in The Wild.

Pay too much attention to any one thing and some other one thing snatches you.

Pay too much attention to any dozen things and some other dozen things snatch you.

One learns to be broad-minded, accepting of all information, in The Wild.

It’s a survival thing.