Wild Longings
When longing overtakes me, my mind’s eye is drawn to deep forest, mountain wilderness. But then I wonder, what does wild even mean?
When longing overtakes me—overtakes like a wave, except I can’t get up and stumble back to shore because I’m in deep, blind, the air bubbling out of my lungs slowly, amid undefinable sound, soft then loud then soft again—at such times, once my ears clear, what they want to hear more often than not is Irish music. Especially the ballads. “The Irish do longing well,” I observed once, to a husband.
I do not know why that is. Generations of longing for Irish self-determination and political union? Or further back, as old as the landscape—glimpsed in fragments through Atlantic rain and fog, does it seed a longing for the whole scene in one go?
When longing overtakes me, the object of my yearning may be lost across geography, across time, or it may be intangible, even unknowable. When longing overtakes me, my mind’s eye is drawn to deep forest, mountain wilderness. But then I wonder, what does wild even mean?
A jet plane passes overhead, the soot of its engines’ fires drifting in its wake.
Wild is a word spoken by people who imagine themselves separate from the workings of this planet, our home. Take the “be” out of “belonging” and what’s left is “longing.”
The poet in me would stop here, but the essayist cannot—surely, more detail will enrich the point, as a velvet lining enriches a winter wrap, though it doesn’t change the cold outside.
On British Columbia’s Gabriola Island in May, I stopped at a marina whose store featured a large bookshelf on which every book was written by a resident of the island. This is a real place, not a dream.
Browsing the memoirs, children’s stories, poetry, history, graphic novels… I was drawn to one book in particular: In the Name of Wild: One Family, Five Years, Ten Countries, and a New Vision of Wildness (On Point Press 2022). Ethnographers Phillip and April Vannini, with their daughter Autumn, sought to learn how people from Iceland to Tasmania understood the notion of a place being wild.
No surprise that they heard a lot of different answers. Nor that the Indigenous folks they met tended to think they were nuts.
Western industrialized cultures who see nature as little more than raw material for profiteering eventually spawn a few fringe characters who say, Hang on. Say, Let’s save some of this before it’s gone and we don’t even know what we’ve lost. Lines are drawn and vast acreages set aside, historically with little thought for those who’d been inhabiting the place from time immemorial.
On the Vanninis’ visit to Kluane National Park in southwest Yukon, they “realized it was no wilderness, if by ‘wilderness’ we mean an uninhabited place. This was and is a land with stories, with ancestral presences, with resident lives enmeshed in a deep kinship that binds animals, plants, and humans… a being, with personhood and a life of its own.” (p. 223)
During a conversation with members of the Kluane First Nation, heritage manager Mary Jane Johnson laid it out nice and clear:
People are part of the wilderness; people are part of the land. My body does not survive day to day without being part of that land or without being part of that water… ‘Wilderness’ is just a goofy word [from] somebody that lived in a concrete block for twenty years and came out and saw the wild leaves for the first time, or a moose or a bear for the first time. No, we’re not above this land and we’re not below the water. We are part of it. (p. 226)
A place can only look like wilderness to a person who has no connection to it. Previously, I've quoted Johann Hari, from his book, Lost Connections (Bloomsbury USA 2018), with respect to connections with people. He also explores the natural world.
I coughed and explained to Isabel [Behncke, the evolutionary biologist with whom he was climbing a mountain] that I don’t do nature. I like nice concrete walls, covered with bookshelves. I like skyscrapers. I like subway stations opening out onto taco trucks… (p. 123)
But the climb was her terms for agreeing to be interviewed. So. Halfway up the mountain, she marvels at the view of lakes in the distance. Hari confesses that it looked like “…a screensaver. A lovely screensaver.” He had the itch to press a laptop key.
Study after study has shown that time in nature improves symptoms of anxiety and depression, Hari writes. Explanations range from increased physical activity to the shrinking of ego. Isabel, who grew up on a farm in rural Chile, touches on a deeper notion, learned through her work with bonobos that became depressed in captivity: “Don’t be in captivity. Fuck captivity.”
Hoping to better understand this state of longing and the wildness it would have me seek, I’ve been reading Susan Cain’s Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole (Crown 2022), thanks to a tip from Maria Popova in The Marginalian. Cain writes about the “tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curious piercing joy at the beauty of the world” (p. xxiii). Has she been spying on me?
Perhaps so, because in one of the notes at the back of the book, she describes something I’ve wondered about for a long time: an alternative to the hero’s journey popularized by Joseph Campbell, which has always sounded like an inherently male experience of the “great human narrative.”
But we’ve forgotten our other great narrative which we might call the “Soul’s Journey”—in which we realize that we’ve come into this world with a sense of exile from our true home, that we feel the pain of separation from the state in which we loved and were loved beyond measure, and that the sweet pain of longing helps us return there. We crave beauty because it reminds us of that home; it calls us to that journey. (p. 257)
Well then. Here's to beauty, to untrammeled Earth, and to the power of longing to make us whole.