everything was wild, once
“But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”
Richard Powers, The Overstory
The Wilds of the world have long since been bound by borders or plucked like pesky garden weeds.
Since the end of the last ice age — 10,000 years ago — we have cleared over one-third of the world’s forests. Since 2010, the UN FAO (United Nation’s Food & Agriculture Organization) estimate 10 million hectares of forest were lost each year.
I’m not here to spout statistics at you. I’m just here to say how sad it is that everywhere I look, I see un-wilderness. Thickets that may have been home to nothing short of a million flora and fauna is stamped down for being “unsightly”. Plots of land once home to life giving processes are uprooted, moved, and replaced with grass cut weekly. Nothing grows. Nothing lives.
It’s not that I suddenly came to this realization at the ripe age of twenty, sitting up bolt right in the middle of a college class, rushing outside to stick my toes in some dirt and rub my face in leaves. It was more of a slow, silent creeping. A glance here and there to mark the receding line; where once stood a mighty forest now lies a patio home development; the color of the air turning sickly yellow-gray and having a feel inside the lungs, smoky instead of crisp.
Terribly upsetting, I know, but there’s something grandly enlightening about acceptance. “Ah, there it is. The bottom… I wonder what’s down here.”
I don’t even think I came to it of my own volition–there was already a path in the underbrush waiting for me when I got there.
My journey is inspired heavily by a filmmaker named Beau Miles, who finds beautiful adventures in the most “mundane” of tasks. I originally found him on YouTube through my husband and was just in awe of the grace in which he viewed the world–he’s obviously a lot more famous than I realized. Apparently award-winning.
I can’t owe it all to Beau; a more acute slap came from watching a documentary for a class grade (thank you, Professor Kanthak, for your part). My inspiration also came from something as simple and wonderful as a British filmmaker creating crazed contraptions to observe wild bees in his backyard; aptly named My Garden of a Thousand Bees. I think I cried each time I got to see a bee from the front.
“If we think something is risky, adventurous, misadventure, beautiful and ugly, it is, regardless of it being true or not. Where we go, what we see, and how we shift and manipulate our understanding of what we’re doing is an exemplary power of the human psyche.”
Beau Miles, Why I walked 90km to work
To sum it all up: I noticed that we (at least the American perspective) have to find an excuse to go outside. Taking the dog for a walk; going hiking; mowing the lawn; photographing; painting–it’s dumb, and I reject it. This is me writing what I’ve seen and thought since.