The Adventurer Addresses The Institute For Exploration

Inspired by Othello's Monologue Act I.3, l.128-169 My trusted colleagues and sponsors, Alone, I have walked calmly and swiftly through the larger world this Institute is pledged to protect. I have swum in lakes of warm yellow waters, home to dozens of predators and prey, myself a cunning visitor. I have crossed mighty rivers at flood-tide as if by magic. Hills and mountains posed no obstacles, I leaped to their summits and raced through their valleys. Water-falls and fire-falls crashed in my path. Clouds thick enough to roll in carried me across the pink sky at dawn, red-orange clouds at night covered my sleep. I saw huge storms of lightning in dry deserts, I watched from low hills fires ravage prairies that stretched for hundreds of miles. These things I witnessed and recorded, and never was I fatigued or fearful or depressed. The journey itself restores needed strength... In low places and on plateaus, I communed with familiar and strange beasts, whose howls, bellows, whines, whose whistles, cries and songs were eloquent past imagining. And I replied by reciting Shakespeare and Yeats, and we bonded. The animals nestled against my body when they sensed my departure, and I shed human tears over their hides, fur and skin, when I embraced them at departure. Such were the adventures of a lone man returning to the community of nature. All forms of natural life accepted me in these times of natural peril. How will we answer their curiosity, their wonder, their companionship?