Where is the wild?

Written by Lauren Goodey

Oct 9 2017

"Is it the longing in my heart that is wild, or is it the standing alone in the forest listening to the moss grow?"

Sometimes I long to be in the wild. I feel the distance, and the longing for uninterrupted connection, I feel a gap between what I want and where I am.

What even is the wild anyway? I find myself asking this question again and again. Is it a place free from humans and their meddling? Is it the billowing wind rushing through my hair and shaking my skin? Was it that moment when I looked upon a woman playing a magical instrument and sat with wonder and awe for the wild creature that sat before me? Is it the longing in my heart that is wild, or is it the standing alone in the forest listening to the moss grow?

For me the wild is often over there... It is often a place i´ll eventually get to when the conditions are right - the time, the place, the right emotions etc. But that is not what I want. I want the wild now. I want it in my fingers and toes as I walk through the concreted city streets. I want to learn to connect more than I want to be on top of a windy mountain. I want to perceive in a way that allows me to experience the wild where I stand, wherever that may be.

Some of my most profound experiences and connections of ´wildness´ have been in the garden at Gaia house - a meditation retreat center in Devon. It´s a beautiful place, but not particularly wild. I spent days and days there following flocks of mistlethrush around the garden, relentlessly trying to learn who they were and what they did. I spent hours sat by a Holly bush listening to their soft electronic internet connection sounds as they munched on berries. I remember the wildness I felt branches brush across my face and my cheek and my eye. What was happening there in that garden that wasn´t happening when I was high up in the Spanish Pyrenees where the boar and deer and fox roamed free? In that garden I was training my perception. Training to be able to see and perceive the world around me in the way I chose to see.

Perhaps wildness is in the looking.