Count Your Blessings #59 – Touching Wildness

Yesterday I left the house on one of my regular walks; down the road, right onto the path into the woods, down the hill and along onto the lane at the back. Just as I stepped through the kissing-gate a Kestrel burst out of the long grass opposite. I had obviously disturbed its breakfast, which it carried off with it. Swooping majestically into a nearby tree.

This morning when driving back from the morning prayer meeting at church I pulled into our road and turned the corner. There in front of me a Grey Heron was stood majestically silhouette on the roof of the house in-front of me.

There isn’t a single square inch of land in England, where I live, that hasn’t been touched by man in some way or another. There isn’t a place that you could go to that is truly wild. I doubt that there is anywhere you could go where you couldn’t see a building, a road or a wall. There are very few places where you can go and not hear the sound of vehicles. But the wild isn’t happy with that situation and is just waiting for man to turn his back before it begins reclaiming what it has lost.

The Kestrel and the Heron are symbols of that reality which touched me, and enabled me to touch the wild.

People seem to react in different ways to the wild. Some people have to dive in and get closer, others seem to spend their entire life getting as far away from it as possible. I’m closer to the ‘dive in’ side than to the ‘getting as far away’ side.

I live in a suburb and go to work for an employer in a large organisation. It would be easy for my life to be relatively safe, but not safe in the good sense of the word, safe in the dull, predictable, monotonous sense. Touching the wild reminds me of past adventures and challenges me to new ones. These little glimpses of the wild are like seeing a gate to a secret garden. They are like going through the wardrobe. They are calling me out of the safe and into the wild.

The wild isn’t neat and tidy, it’s wild. The wild isn’t sure and reliable, it’s wild. The wild is out there, not in here. The wild is beautiful. The wild is magnificent.

When was the last time you reached through to the wild. I’m not talking about reaching through to nature, I’m talking of reaching through to the wild and the wild can be found everywhere, especially in peoples lives.