The
Brady Archive
Where
is the Wild?
By
Robert Brady, (KJ 62)
"I love
the wild not less than the good," said Henry, in the Higher Laws
chapter of Walden, and “In wildness lies the preservation
of the world.” Henry was wild about wilderness, just couldn’t
stop talking about it one way or another, and who can blame him, he
saw it disappearing.
But that was a long time ago, over 150 years now. The interesting thing
is that even back then, when the wild must have still been pretty much
all over the place, Henry was already condemning its decline, already
lamenting the relentless incursion of the artifactual.
His were admirable early sentiments, though they fell on mostly deaf
ears in those times of righteous conviction regarding clearcutting of
the greater soul. Walden wasn’t a big success until well
after the results of manifest destiny had become manifest.
Since then, it seems we still haven’t realized that the wild is
the counterpart, the balance, to the wild we carry in ourselves, every
cell and sinew in our bodies; remove the wild from our outer lives and
in our hearts and souls we suffer, our compass goes awry. All who still
revere the wild know this, as Henry did; he recognized it as the greater
part of the soul. So now, some 150 years later, where has it gone? Is
it out on the lawn? On the hiking trail? In the Winnebago window, the
satellite image, nature video, national park, endangered species, inner
child, urban shaman, modern warrior, rabid zealot? Is it caught on the
Net? Can it be seen with commuter eyes?
In our nowadays, with government keeping us anxious about government,
business keeping us unbalanced and selling us the next step at a discount,
the further we get from whatever wild there once was, and the more we
are isolated and channeled by the careers, garments, incomes, appliances,
habits, sciences, arts, rebellions, religions, schools of thought and
mannered ways we think comprise us, the less we are the creatures of
creation, one thrust of all the universe, and the more we are the static
but remarkably lifelike exhibits in that big fancy museum of our own
construction we call modern life.
Commensurately, the less informed we are by what is ever ongoing in
the currents of the universe: the sun that is shining, tides that are
flowing, moon rising, spiraling stars, galaxies whirling, blooms that
are opening, seeds that are falling, scattering on all the winds and
swelling with the rain; we are no longer fed by the wild, that in us
is ferally fertile, and so do not germinate, let alone grow into what
we were all engendered for, which is beyond dimension, in the seed of
wildness.
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held by the author
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