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Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. We’ve almost reached the ending time of the dry season. Today is a bloody hot day, temperatures are now rising 100°F. My hat is soaked, it should lasts me another fifteen minutes. The rest of my clothes are starting to dry. I distinguish the stream of my own sweat surrounding me while I walk back from Lake Alexander. The soil is cracked, red and dusty with rare wallaby’s carcass. I am smelling them more than seeing them. Wherever I am, I feel heavy, smelling death even though there is no breathe. And too many flies to remain calm. They are constantly getting all over my mouth and my eyes while I walk, following me with their constant buzzing chorale. Since I put a foot in this wild territory I feel the living essence of every beings multiplicated. The sound of the Galahs in the trees at night, the geckos screaming always less than nine times, the thunderstorms scratching the sky before the rain start pouring for hours, in the wet season. There is here a sense of danger specific to the North. I have to think about hazards I am not use to. It’s impossible to swim in the sea, full of saltwater crocodiles. Harder to go for a proper tramping due to severe risks of dehydration. Unless you reach Berry Springs, Litchfield or Kakadu, green and blue oasis areas. It’s different from what I know. And for that it’s delightful. It seems that being alive has more importance here like a deeper, more intense experience, directly connected to those extremes ; the modern and the ancient, the wild and the secure, the death and the life. Navigating through Darwin as I am getting lost into my mind nebula, I can see in the atmosphere a vibrating intensity. Maybe it’s just the heat coming from the concrete. Or my emotions taking over as my departure is approaching. But it makes me think, every time I reach the beginning of Mitchell Street, that this contrasted land represents really well our ambivalent reality. Literally coming from the outside world, I wonder how the first people born here has been settling over no matter what, between the red desert and the crocodiles, living a traditional life until white people started to come along. How did these tribes did to keep their unquestionable love for their land, staying and squatting this difficult territory meanwhile white people started to build and desecrate their spiritual way of living. It’s not about the tons of concrete used to create this compact city center with charming fountains and palm trees all around. Or the lagoon with its modern waterfront with fancy opened cafes and surf clothes shops. We need modernity, science and technologies. We also need the power of a nature bath, spirituality and feelings, things that are completely intangible. In Darwin we have both life choices represented. Entertaining ourselves with consumption and modernity instead of learning and transmit some ancient knowledge and values. In Darwin you can’t forget colonization. Here, the former aboriginal tribes are now the homeless surrounding the streets, waiting for their Wednesday financial aid to get drunk. Poor attempt to forget. We have homeless people everywhere in the world but it’s more complicated to understand when you bump into natives in the streets of such an extreme land, and so, during the twenty-first century of our human existence. As the northern harshness comes along my thoughts and feelings, it’s teaching me how to surrender to what can’t be controlled. Accepting with faith or whatever it is. Like I shall have done with the flies. Browsing around a last time, I realize that life has been taught to me in my western side in a wrong way. Being so directly confronted to the gap between outside world and society, I found in the Australian top end, my northern star. Without pretending to know what I don’t, Darwin actually taught me to be. Not only live. Facing people or nature’s whims but resolute and yet, quiet imperturbable. Like the aboriginal tribes, still there at the -top- end. Darwin, perfect catalyser of the human genesis.