Getting comfortable with the unknown

I think that what I am finding most fascinating about this trip is that this is a part of the world I really have very little understanding of.  This is from a piece by Lee Dyer, the man in charge of our research work in the forest in Ecuador.

I thought of our collective ignorance of the ecosystems that humans are a part of and how my initial fears were driven by an ignorance that no amount of books, lectures, and carefully planned experiments could remove. I realized that, both as a scientist and a naturalist, learning basic natural history in the forest is a hands-on, at times gut-wrenching process. The more I personally experience this forest, the more I love its terrifying complexity and understand how it might be managed-and saved.

The rest of the article is here.

I have lived around Brooklyn for a long time now & I grew up in suburban Long Island, not a deeply-forested place.  We grew up with this odd fear of nature.  I never really appreciated this until I I was on a bus ride in Patagonia ten years ago.  I was watching the countryside go by, the moon rising over the scrubby outback desert and I felt this fear rising in my chest and I grew really anxious as I realized that I was just inside of a bus in the middle of nowhere.  It was a well-traveled road for those parts, nothing more than a day away in any direction.

After about 15 minutes of nameless panic, quiet and internal as I sat in my bus seat, looking out at the world around me with an intense fear of isolation and, well, I had no idea what.  And in that moment, I feel like I started to let myself embrace that kind of uncertainty.  The plain fact is that you'll almost never know what is going to happen to you from day to day, in familiar places or not.