February 10, 2021 by Dymphna

How to romance the mystery

I’m thinking about starting mystery adventure tours…

I remember when I was younger I didn’t understand the Greenies.

I mean, I could understand where they were coming from. Trees are nice. Forests are nice. It’s nice to have them around. Absolutely.

But when you’re working the land, you have a different relationship to it. It feels like a different dynamic.

I mean, it doesn’t feel like as a human you’re the all powerful conqueror, making the entire natural kingdom bow down before your power.

It actually feels like nature kicks your arse every single day.

Turn your back for a sec. Bam. Camphor Laurels. Have cup of tea. Boom. Lantana. Look the other way for a moment. Nut grass.

It takes every ounce of your effort just to stop the whole show getting away from you.

(But I do get that humans have got this down to a fine art now, and there’s an awful lot of us, so nature is on the back foot these days.)

Anyway, what I found interesting when I was younger was the way Greenies seemed to romanticise life in the natural world.

You can actually see this in the property market these days – in those tree change areas like the Sunshine Coast or around Byron Bay.

People bought large plots of land, let most of it go to camphor, and then planted 40m Eucalypts right up to the front door.

Living in the heart of the forest sounds great until you have to deal with falling limbs, no sunlight and a constant mould problem.

Anyway, what I think is interesting is the way we romanticise our enemies once we conquer them.

Living in the bush seems incredibly romantic to someone sitting in an inner city café. Being a pirate sounds romantic to someone who’s never had scurvy or had to live off beef jerky for a year.

But looking forward, I wonder what we’ll romanticise about living at the dawn of the 21st century?

My guess is that we’ll miss the mystery.

We want to tame the mysteries of the universe the way we tamed the natural world. We want to bring them under our control. We want to bend them to our will.

And for now, the world is full of mystery. How on earth do we make sense of quantum uncertainty? How do our thoughts and expectations influence reality? How did this all just come dancing out of darkness?

These are incredibly mysteries.

And my guess is that we’ll miss the mystery when it’s gone. We will pine for it, the way city-slickers pine for the wild woods.

And we’ll realise, that we actually need it. We need to escape into it – find solace into it. Go camping with a few friends in it and forget that the outside world exits.

This is my guess. We won’t realise how precious mystery is until it’s gone.

So my advice is, savour it while you have it. Enjoy the mystery. Enjoy the unknowing. Bathe in it. Breath its fresh and rejuvenating air.

The mystery is a gift.

And we have no idea how precious it is.

DB.