WHERE IS THE WILD?

"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.

But that was a long time ago, over 150 years now. The interesting thing is that even back then, when to our now-eyes the wild must have been everywhere, Henry was already lamenting its loss, already bemoaning the insidious spread of the artifactual. His were admirable sentiments, and fell on mostly deaf ears in those times of civilized righteous conviction regarding clearcutting of the greater soul, he sold about 2 copies of Walden.

Henry was speaking of what he knew as wild, and apparently it was still there. So now, some 150 years later, where is it? Where is the wild, either out there or in here? Who saw it last? Where has it gone? Is it out on the lawn? Is it in the Winnebago, the tv, the hot air balloon, the haircut, the high or low fashion, the pierced navel, the inner child, the urban shaman, the modern warrior, the rabid zealot? Is it on the Net? In commuters' eyes?

In the times we live in now, the further we get from whatever wild there once was-- the wild that Henry was already yearning for-- the more we are clothed in and walled by the garments, jobs, incomes, possessions, habits, sciences, arts, names, rebellions, religions, and ways we think we are, the less we are in our minds the creatures of creation, the less we are the thrust of the universe, and the more we are the static but remarkably life-like exhibits in that big fancy museum of our own construction we call modern life, and the less relevant we are to what is ever going on in the undercurrents and overcurrents of the universe: in the sun that is shining, the tides that are flowing, the moon that is rising, the blooms that are opening, the seeds that are falling, scattering on the wind and swelling with the rain; we are no longer integral with what in us is ferally fertile, until now the rare looker looks around the ambience and sees nothing but clothing and vehicles and communication media, arts and business and photographs of flowers, documentaries of mountains, a narcissistic repository that for a great many people has become reality, and so they do not bestir themselves to germinate, to grow to what they were engendered for, which is far beyond dimension, in the immeasurable realms of the awesomely simple.