This site is one that represents “ways of being/seeing oneself.”

This site is named for an encounter between a European explorer and a group of Native Americans. The encounter appears to have been brief, inclusive of goodwill and hospitality. It speaks to an apparent mutual understanding of exploration, journey, and search (though the implicit issues of New World exploration, which are understood best in hindsight, were not at the time addressed, which would not be expected). As he was exploring the Great Plains, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye encountered “…a tribe remarkable for stature and symmetry…”; his journal of October 9, 1742 refers to them as [the camp of] Les Beaux Hommes.  That would be his perspective, of course, and a journal entry perhaps criticized as sounding more superficial than the encounter may have been. 

The encounter, however, was a mutual experience, and though the written record of it is brief and one-sided, there was real interaction among people. What such an encounter allows us to acknowledge is that there is a humanness that all men share; an empathy to the condition of being Man. 

The encounter is a cameo example of exhilaration as more than making out the geography of the world, but also of stretching our understanding of who we are as people and humans, and as specific individuals and groups of people with a sense of identity. 

And with interactions of diverse people’s and identities and ideas we expand – not because we become less of our selves but because we become more of ourselves. As we question our lives and our world and our place within it, we become engaged in a conversation whereby we learn that to be a typically human sense of wonder. As we participate in the conversation we learn how to ask the same questions of ourselves and of others in different ways. 

Differences in perspective and the greater skill at questioning and the more diverse palette of understanding that arises… These are the flourish of diversity. 

As we journey, to respect the natural beauty of all people, to live simply and without need for possession beyond knowledge and experience, to live authentically and justly, to give to the public, to share with one another and care for one another, we could comfortably and resolutely accept the brevity and immensity of the gift of life together, now.  

The world human population as a singular organism is, as yet, unexplored; its powers  not yet understood, and it potential not yet realized.