I started reading a wonderful book - The Great Soul of Siberia by Sooyong Park.
The filmmaker who wrote this beautiful book spends months - I think half the year, the coldest part of the year - in 2m by 2m stakeout bunkers from which he hopes to film Siberian Tigers. The other half of the year is spent on expeditions in the Ussuri region tracking Tigers and trying to establish where they will go in the winter.
There are many things I love about the book. Firstly, he is not a Westerner and so he is culturally disposed to regard all things as connected. Nor is he afraid of expressing his wonder, his aesthetic responses or his acceptance of the Indigenous people's animistic beliefs. He participates fully in the world he inhabits.
Yet he is not a romantic. He sees and accepts the harshness that is as much a part of life as is the beauty.
He seems to be my ideal of an engaged explorer into our shared world.
There is one section in which he recounts how important it may be not to see. He tells a story of a friend of his who had a Magpie nesting in his garden. The man was enchanted and kept on going out to look. After a few weeks, the Magpie left, leaving dead eggs. In contrast, a monk saw a Jay nesting at the temple. He acknowledged the Jay's fear at being seen and deliberately turned away. For the time the Birds were there, the monk studiously ignored them. They raised their chicks who fledged and flew away.
Of course, Park is filming Tigers, but he knows how vital it is for him not to disturb them. They cannot know he is there. Maybe there is some hypocrisy in this... or maybe he is just pragmatic. I think neither: I think he loves them and wants them to survive. This is his way of expressing love and encouraging others to value them. He achieves this without upsetting the balance of their lives.
This is an example of what matters not being an issue of right versus wrong - it shows contextualism, nuance and how we have to 'feel our way' to what is truly ethical - not logically ethical.
If you have a login to Vimeo, you may be able to watch this film about him.
So glad you gave the Vimeo link. Just finished watching the film. Very moving x