my own wilderness

When I was around the age of 12 or 13 my family decided to at least once a month, visit a nature preserve instead of attending Church. We were practicing Roman Catholics at the time and I thought it was great to get outside and run around instead of getting dressed up and sitting and kneeling in a stuffy church for exactly an hour. I think I was old enough at the time to understand that even though the rule was that we were supposed to go to Church, it was ok to miss it in this way because we were still on some level, doing what was intended and communicating in a more natural way with what might be the supernatural.

The first article from the Dictionary of the History of Ideas touches on the numerous definitions of the natural and how it's gone through several evolutions according with movements of science and religion. I found myself agreeing with most of them and understanding how now, in contemporary society, it is becoming more and more the social norm to understand that nature (not Nature) is something understandable and changeable.

My work lately has inadvertently incorporated several things that the first article touched on. For one, understanding what is natural and coexisting with it in a way where humans don't come to dominate or control but live with and within. Westerners, especially Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries have a particular preoccupation with dominating and conquering land that had millions of years of history before their arrival. It's only lately that I think western society has made advances in the way that we approach living with nature or coexisting with what is really wild. The designated areas of wild or less tamed land, can come close to what actually might be a wild and untouched earth. But I do feel that even by taking a simple measure of the Co2 in the air on top of a mountain that the earth can no longer be called completely wild.

The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder led me to think about all the occasions when I thought I was amongst the wild or was myself being wild. The article didn't change what I thought I was doing at the time. But now I think I understand a little more about where the idea for wild comes from.

As a human, I might not be completely wild, but the systems that make up my body, that allow me to live, are still inherently wild. They function instinctively and without my knowledge or consent. And though my mind doesn't function this way all the time I think I am aware of instances where I've let the wild in and tried to cherish it. For example, I let a wound heal on it's own while on a photo shoot two weeks ago. Though it was a small wound, there was something that made me feel like I was a part of something else, letting it do it's own thing and bleed and clot without my intervention.

In the last part of the article, Snyder refers to the etiquette of the wild world and how it requires "not only generosity but a good-humored toughness that cheerfully tolerates discomfort, an appreciation of everyone's fragility, and a certain modesty." He goes on to give examples of how emptying oneself to the point of having absolutely nothing leads to great insight and quotes a Tibetan saying that "the experience of emptiness engenders compassion."

It seems to me that we could all use this wisdom a little more living in a city like Chicago in a country like America. The city is very well insulated. But what comes close to actual wilderness isn't as far as one might think. I drove 10 hours to get to the Smoky Mountains and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is about a 7 hour drive from Chicago. In the UP, I realized after driving on a one lane road for about 15 miles that I was in complete and total wilderness and that I hadn't seen a house or even a telephone pole for the past half an hour. I had zero cell phone reception and when I got out of the car all I could hear was the wind combing through the fir trees and the dead silence behind that. It freaked me out.

Albert Bierstadt
Looking Down Yosemite Valley, 1865

Bierstadt's painting shows what looks to be a pristine and majestic natural land that is yet to be conquered and fortified. He over indulged though in awe-inspiring, painterly techniques such as the use of the dramatic, raking light of dawn and mist or fog. Though his paintings are the quintessential example of a genre of painting that valued the land and took great strides to understand and explore, the paintings lack a certain depth that might examine why such views are so important to look at in the first place.