Yes, I have a special connection with tigers. I grew up at a time and in a place where there were tigers in the wild. I was eight years old the first time I saw a tiger in the wild. This is how it is engraved in my memory: I saw the tiger,  the tiger saw me; and the tiger smiled. I walked back to our vacation house in a daze of glory. Tiger is for me what totem animals are for Native Americans.  Tiger protects me.

I write about Nature and ʻall my relationsʻ, as native Americans said. All the beings and aspects of my environment that I relate to: the feathered people, the four-footeds, two-legged; trees, plants; weeds; storms, sunshine, wind, rain. And I write about people I have learned from, people I admire and animals and plants I have learned from. The fascinating beauty of the chaos that is Nature, its infinite interactions -- everything related to everything else.

And sometimes I write to remind us to be moderate: what there is is all there is.

Born here, lived several theres, worked here and there, married, children (grandchildren, great grandchildren), degrees, appointments, disappointments. Yes, all of that. I think of myself as a human who belongs to Nature more than to Man’s world. I’ve had an exciting life, traveled, lived and worked in many countries. Speak a few languages -- which is essential, I think, for understanding more than one point of view. As I age I feel more and more obsessed by simple. Doing without rather than getting more. One of my favorite authors, Ursula K. LeGuin, writes "Owning is owing; having is hoarding." Very true, very wise.

The human world is not simple. The world we made is a tangled disaster of rules and bureaucracies that make us be what we were not born to be. We may think we can but we cannot own this planet. We are as much part of the planetary ecology as a virus or a tree. What we call civilization is a top down system designed to  always MORE. Obviously impossible. We invented power we can no longer control. And with that power we abuse and destroy this planet, our only home. Poisoning its precious soil, the water, the air all beings need to live. Destroying we are eradicating thousands of species; gone forever; an impoverishment we cannot restore. Mother Earth needs to be honored and nurtured --  today it seems we cannot stop controlling everything natural; again, obviously impossible.

We humans are being forced into a manmade culture that rarely allows us to be who we were born to be.  But we can break out of that.  Look around, it is happening. We can change the way we think about ourselves and how we relate to what is.  Change, as growth, must be from the ground up. Leaders do not change the world. It is we who must change our thinking. What it is to be human.

People tell me they need hope, but hoping that somehow we can live as we have learned to live now is not hope, it is foolishness. Our now is unsutainable. My hope is that we can learn -- in time -- to live with less, much less. And therefore happier.  For the first  hundred and some thousand years we knew to adapt to the Earth as we found it. My expectation (not hope) is that we will learn again to adapt to a new Earth, and never again try to change the Earth to satisfy our wants. Grow WE cultures,  leaving our many Iʻs behind.

Enjoy.

The Big Island called Hawai'i, january 2013

    you can reach me at:  <  robertjanwolff at gmail dot com  >  I try to answer all messages