A Wild Return

We are fallen mostly in broken pieces...but the wild can still return us to ourselves.

Robert MacFarlane

I love this picture of my Polar Bear, love the joy and vitality on his face and in his body. His presence nourishes me, offers me respite, as does Forest Paddock and the peaks that surround it. I am reminded of John Muir's reminder that everybody needs beauty...places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul alike. In today's post I share a reflection I wrote a couple of years ago, on the wildness all around us.

I stand on a muddy, grass-covered flat just below the dam bank. It’s covered with green, and Polar Bear makes for it like a bee to honey, emerging later with brown slick up to his fetlocks. The water level is low, the mud exposed for a long way beyond the waterline. Here below the bank, the reeds to my left grow higher than my head, and an old pine stands on a smaller bank to my right, so that I find myself in a shallow emerald hollow, surrounded by the more muted tones of summer vegetation on higher ground, some of which is yellowed and brittle.

There’s a kind of alley between the reeds and the eastern bank, where the grasses give way to the water; darters and Egyptian geese glide slowly across the water in the early-morning cool.

If I keep my range of vision within this magic circle, I can imagine myself out along the edge of a lake somewhere remote. And although I am only a hundred metres from the road, and a short walk from the suburb bordering the farmland, there is wildness here. Robert Macfarlane speaks to this when he notes that he became “interested in this understanding of wildness not as something which was hived off from human life, but which existed unexpectedly around and within it: in cities, backyards, roadsides, hedges, field boundaries or spinneys” (MacFarlane, The Wild Places, p.226).

This presence of wildness everywhere – in my garden, Forest Paddock, the woodlands at the bottom of our village, the sky fading to dusk, the sound of thunder on a March afternoon – is an anchor for me, a reminder that I am never far from an echo of the solitary places I love.

A number of years ago I listened to an interview with John 'o Donohue, in which he says that it’s not just a matter of the outer presence of the landscape. I mean, the dawn goes up and the twilight comes, even in the most roughest inner-city place. I find this thought helpful, that no matter where I am - even in the long snaking line of traffic at peak hour on the highway - I can look up at the sky or pay attention to the sound of the wind.

With appreciation,

Carri.

P.S. The interview with 'O Donohue is well worth a listen, and I've returned to it more than once. Also, the above reflection is part of a collection I am working on and hope to publish in future. The picture of Polar Bear was taken by Amy Moses, and you can find more of her work here. I have a short post, Wild Medicine - also in reflection on Macfarlane's words, over at Cloudlight.