When the Wilderness Calls

I could very calmly go wild . - Annie Dillard

I recently found myself in a garden, wild and unkempt, waiting for the pharmacist to ready my medication as instructed to wait outside. And merrily I did so, absorbing so entirely this magnificent green patch of heaven. Truly, these days, there are few things that bring me unrivalled joy as much as an overgrown garden left to its own universal design.

And only days before, I had attended an exhibition entitled 'Fire and Ice' featuring photographs of Iceland. I was spellbound. Utterly bewitched really. There was something beckoning me... To that landscape so harsh and yet so beautiful. Beyond taming.

Strange as I seldom experience a profound wanderlust, but there I was wishing I could book a one way ticket to no return. An isolation in a glistening wasteland, a beautiful and bewitching wasteland, just me and my writing.

And I have long been in love with the escape of Georgia O' Keeffe in Ghost Ranch in the desert wilderness of New Mexico, beyond being a great admirer of her exquisite and bold work. White sands and cacti and deafening quiet. Oh how I've dreamed....

I guess I resent all the more these days, the constraints of our society. The endless pressures to be This, and do That. And I find myself so very often wishing to disconnect from social media and all its shiny peripheries. I wish to escape from the chainstores for my loaf of bread. I wish to escape the mall for an item I need like a wooly jumper or pair of walking boots.

Although it must be said, I rely less and less on such tedious encounters more and more in my life.

Just the other day, I found a warm jumper, a charming summer tee and a pair of pajama bottoms and a neat and small slingbag and a thermal flask at the charity shop my gran's retirement village for a song, a gem of a shop and a veritable outpost I find refuge in. All items aside from the summer tee, all items I had desperately needed but waited until I found them, on my own terms.

And I remember so fondly now, the stays in a farm cottage on the plot of a friend of my mother's. In the dust of the Klein Karoo. Waking with the crowing of the rooster at 4am like clockwork each morning to whittle away on my short stories. Resting for siesta when the midday heat became all consuming. Making a fire to make dinner by nightfall. Whittling then some more on my writing while their brood of kittens played the night away and me saving baby bats from their treacherous youthful playfulness.

But I wasn't always so.

Once upon a time I loved the city. I thrived on the city. And in return it welcomed me into its bosom. Hustler by day. Hustler by night. And after that, well, dancing away whatever was left of the dark until the sun dawned on a new day.

Perhaps that is the restlessness of youth.

But now I crave the wilderness. The untamed. The outpost.

I come too, more and more, to study nature in all I can get my hands on in the library. I envy the horticulturalist for all they know and for all I do not.

And as I live in a state essentially homeless, with every wild space I encounter, I pray for a garden of my own one day, a wilderness after my own heart even if it's just a small patch I can plant and water and tend, but most of all, simply admire as the dandelion comes up to meet me with the advent of spring... As the clover comes to enrich my soil as I leave the lawn utterly unattended... As the nasturtiums lend their peppery leaves to my salads and embolden my patch with their bright orange cheer, growing all the more...

My very own wilderness. My very own outpost. With only the bees and butterflies and scuttling beetles my kin. My visitors. My neighbours. In my patch of wilderness.

Yes, indeed, I am becoming a very different creature indeed. And I am not afraid of stillness. Although, truly, many a wilderness is deceptively teeming with life, lives that have just as much of a right as I, maybe more so. The arctic fox of Iceland for all he's so sneaky. The sun-lazied lizard of my dessert. The brown moth I love most of all of my own green patch, my one day.

And yes. Indeed. I could very calmly go wild.

Solace by Anita Nowinska