There are no small adventures

Lately, I've been reading about ambitious adventures into the wild (Wild by Cheryl Strayed, Wild: An Elemental Journey by Jay Griffiths and The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane).

As well as vicarious experiences, I'm looking for insights. How do others connect with the wild? How do I channel grief at the loss of wild places into healing for the land and for myself? How can I belong to the immensity of nature? Is it possible to penetrate that frustrating barrier between myself and what is outside of myself?

Albert Einstein wrote: “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
             
David Abram said, "the deepest impulse in my work...is to renew the experience of being immersed, embedded, in the depths of a living world."

The writers whose work I've been reading seem in their various ways to be seeking a relationship with the wild, in order to find the wild within themselves. (At least, that is one lens through which I read their work.)

Unlike these seekers, I do not climb mountains, drink ayahuasca brewed by Amazonian shamans, or skinnydip in glacial lakes. My adventures are of the micro sort: A red fox or a deer by the river. An indigo bunting foraging in a flash of blue on the edge of a field. A chipmunk zipping between my bicycle wheels. The scent of decaying leaves or oncoming rain or sun-dried sweet grass lifting on a breeze.

Must I journey to the mountain? Is the wild "out there," or hidden in plain sight all around us?

Toward the end of The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane writes,“But I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had once been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing organic existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these were wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake.”

I find myself questing for the same things that these writers quest for, seeking some of the same answers. I welcome them as mentors, guides and companions. Their words, and the words of many of you, keep me company as I wander.

And yet, even the most beautifully written words are only words. Words can revive our longing, articulate our grief, link us back to the landscape with power and magic; but they cannot take the place of immersing our physical selves in that landscape. Just as even the most evocative photograph can offer us one dimension of experience--bereft of sound, or scent, or the touch of the wind on our faces--only an echo of a living, breathing, depthful place.

So, I walk. With appreciation, in gratitude.

This is the adventure outside my door, and I find myself, as N.D. Wilson writes, like an ant trying to assess the cathedrals of Europe. It is more than I am able to encompass.

“We are not exiled from the garden of Eden but living in it still. Paradise is not in the past or future but only in the present, this Earth an untamed heaven, a wild paradise garden.” --Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey

“I imagined the wind moving through all these places, and many more like them: places that were separated from one another by roads and housing, fences and shopping-centres, street-lights and cities, but that were joined across space at that time by their wildness in the wind. We are fallen in mostly broken pieces, I thought, but the wild can still return us to ourselves.” --Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

Photos taken on the Mississippi River bluffs along West River Parkway.

A Tale of Albion

“Let the rich life run to the roots again.” —Robinson Jeffers

Monday, I am leaving for London, where I will be living for two months.

Can I say that it’s kind of a big deal?

You may remember about my job lay-off. Well, back in August, Lee floated an idea: How about if I stuck it out at the job until “severed” and then took advantage of the payout and job-free status to live overseas for a while on my own?

This man knows me. He presented this idea like a luscious slice of mocha cake perched on a periwinkle blue plate. He wanted to light me up. Because he loves me, and that means he knows what I love, and one of the things I love is exploring European places, which I have spent far too little time doing.
I think I may have just blinked at him silently for a solid minute. It took me several hours to wrap my mind around the possibilities, and a little longer to make it okay with myself. Could I really say yes?

Would it be selfish? Would it be irresponsible? Would it be stupid?

Mulling it over, I realized those questions were mostly a manifestation of fear, brought on by just the thought of going outside my comfort zone.

But if I ask myself better questions—such as, will this help me grow? Does the prospect fill me with joy and a sense of possibility? Does it feel expansive, like what wants to happen right now, does it feel like "everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes"?—yep. Yes, it most certainly does.

I’m going to London to encounter what’s there, to experience whatever I will experience, to be open and present to what’s coming at me. I’m especially excited by the prospect of going to the V&A Museum, devoted to design and the decorative arts, walking over a carpet of English bluebells, and hearing live trad music in one of those pubs where Londoners have been quaffing ale since before there was even the idea of a United States of America.

But I’m fully aware that until it happens, I won’t really know what it is I’ve been most looking forward to—and THAT’S what I’m most looking forward to.

Once I get settled next week into the studio flat I’m subletting, I’ll be back here with stories and photos. Please keep me company on my wanderings! A girl might get a little lonely, even in the midst of a grand adventure, even with Skype.

(And if there are places or things you love that you wish to recommend that I explore in England, I will be glad to have them. Feel free to post below.)