Wilderness

The roots of the word…wilderness are wil, plus der (of the) and…ness which means place…”the will of the place”. Wilderness has its own periods and ways. Cultures since the advent of agriculture nine thousand years ago have striven to conquer the will-of-the-place. Yet we have continued…to long for the excitement of will-of-the-place that catches us up as a vital part of itself.
Bruce Wilshire: Wild Hunger, the primal roots of modern addiction (p14)

Within the plan of a Permaculture garden one area is always left wild. Usually its the part furthest from human habitation where the proliferation of non-invited plants won’t cause too much of an impact on the more tamed areas. In this area there is no human intervention apart from the observation of natural eco-systems and cycles.

Until recently I lived in a house whose land bordered nature park one one side. At times this proximity to nature was less than easy to live with: With the first winter winds gorse seeds filled my freshly-dug flower beds where they settled to wait for spring - their development easily outstripping that of anything I had deliberately planted in the stony, sandy soil; The wild boar came to ravage our newly created terrace walls, leaving huge craters where they had dug for roots; Freak hurricanes snapped the sapling oak trees we had nurtured; Locust -like creatures munched their way through the rose tree in a night.

For all that it was a privilege to live there: Wild mountain goats sat contentedly on the wall of the ruin below our land and the young males frolicked and locked horns as practice for their imminent adulthood; In spring the whole hillside filled with a multitude of brightly coloured flowers and the stretches between the olive trees were carpeted with lavender; Hundreds of butterflies chased each other amongst the herbs and the whole valley throbbed to the hum of honey bees.

Self-worth resides in a firm sense of the vast Whole in which we are small but vital parts…our vitality depends on rootedness moment by moment in the sensuously given world around us…Bruce Wilshire: Wild Hunger, the primal roots of modern addiction (p14)

More than just a picture of bucolic harmony, being in that environment had a profound and - I hope - lasting effect on me. For the first time I understood what it meant to be at one with my surroundings: The immensity of the mountains behind the house and the vastness of the milky way above my head gave me a sense of scale against which to measure my insignificance in the universal scheme.

I watched the goats with fascination. They lived beside us and yet they seemed to exist in a completely different universe; a universe to which, in a distant time, mankind once belonged.

Studying those goats, something deep within me remembered what it was to be wild and I felt something like longing for that forgotten state.

We are all filled with a longing or the wild…No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Women Who Run With the Wolves