Over centuries, explorers, mystics, and seekers from many traditions have sought inspiration in nature and solitude. Many of them not only spoke about the wilderness, described it, but also lived from it, bringing back to us a message in living, wild words.
This little book gathers sayings and stories from a selection of women and men who sank their roots so deeply into nature that the wisdom they created can still serve us today. Here you will find stories and sayings of the well-known Egyptian “desert fathers” (and the lesser known “desert mothers”) as well as the voices of Russian forest hermits, Sufi mystics, Scottish mountain explorers, European novelists, wandering Chinese Taoists, Kashmiri hermits, Japanese Zen masters, American naturalists and scientists, and other generally rebellious eccentrics.
Many of them balanced time between solitude and society, challenging the status quo of their time. So the word wild here also means: unexpected, not obeying a pattern that their cultures took for granted. They found themselves as society's outliers, or even outlaws, by choice or constitution. For this reason, some needed to communicate indirectly—in metaphor, poetry, or story.
Of course, many voices here rhapsodize about nature's beauty. But just as many celebrate the untamed, seeming chaos of nature, in which the edge between life and death is small and sharp. Wild nature's embrace of both the light and shadow of life also led many to feel that, just as humanity is embedded in nature, nature is embedded in a greater reality that is not merely beyond or above, but rather all around us and within us. They concluded that we are part of the wilderness (or wildness) we are looking for.
At heart, what unifies these voices is their insistence that one can bring inner nature and outer nature together. They weren't satisfied with simply thinking or emoting about nature. Instead, they dove into nature and attempted to dissolve the inner boundaries separating them from it. Then they decided what to do next in their lives. For some, this meant staying in the wilderness. For others, it meant returning to community and speaking directly from their experience.
As the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde says simply, returning to society after being jailed for homosexuality more than a hundred years ago:
“It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little . . . . We call ours a utilitarian age, and we yet do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the earth is mother to us all . . . . Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer. But nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.”
Instead of organizing the sayings, stories, musings, and poetry by philosophical, religious, or spiritual tradition, I have chosen to bring the speakers' voices together by the settings in which they found themselves: forests, mountains, deserts, rivers and ocean, and with nonhuman companions—fish, birds, animals, and insects, to name a few. One can see the effects of these different environments on the way our explorers express themselves.
To an overwhelming degree, we share the same bodies, the same ways of breathing and making sound, the same potentials for sensing nature. Each individual, of course, varies in subtle yet important ways. We differ first in our relationship to different environments and the unique ability we each possess to express this diversity. Of course, family upbringing and culture, including education, philosophy, and religion, immediately jump in between us and our direct experience; otherwise there would be too many impressions to take in at once. Yet family and culture also evolve over time from our collective relationship to some environment, actual or virtual. In this little book, I have chosen the voices and stories of those who, in one way or another, broke through these familial and cultural walls (or at least rattled them). This is why people remembered them.
Indeed, many recent voices are doing the same with increasing urgency, expressing what people have called eco-poetics, eco-spirituality, or eco-psychology. Our world's “house” or oikos, to use the Greek derivation of the word, does face grave threats. By choosing voices that are at least fifty years old, and some more than several thousand, I want to call our attention to a simple truth: we have a different heritage that can be followed—a lineage of ancestors worldwide who predate the increasingly virtual, homogenous, globalized consciousness that has overtaken us in the past few generations. Their prophetic words can presage a positive change in what has been the ever-changing story of human consciousness.
The first section, Into the Wild Wood, introduces us to a conversation between North American, Asian, Middle Eastern, and European voices. The dense, lush expression of their sayings, stories, and reports reflects the diversity of forest, woods, meadows, and marshes. It takes time to wend one's way through the woods. Paths don't proceed in straight, unimpeded lines, and often no paths exist. Here 19th-century American transcendentalists find themselves talking with 4th-century Taoists together with 7th-century Syrian mystics and 18th-century Hasidic storytellers.
Section two, Taking a Mountain View, brings us into the rarefied air and far-reaching views of mountains, hills, and valleys. Perspective is a unifying theme here. So are the awakened senses: taking care with each footstep and noticing the rocky, nearly impossible places in which life can choose to thrive. We also find here voices reflecting profound stillness and the experience of merging with the living rock of the mountain itself. As the early 20th-century German-Swiss novelist Hermann Hesse writes, while lying on a slope of the Alps:
And so for ten thousand years I lie there, and gaze into the heavens, and gaze into the lake. When I sneeze, there's a thunderstorm. When I breathe, the snow melts, and the waterfalls dance. When I die, the whole world dies. Then I journey across the world's ocean, to bring back a new sun.
The mountains also evoke in some of our seekers unbridled ecstasy, as in the words of the 8th-century CE Chinese poet Bai Juyi:
I climb alone the path to the Eastern Rock.
I lean my body on the banks of white stone, and
with my hands I pull down a green cassia branch.
My mad singing startles the valleys and hills.
The third section, Desert Sole, takes us into the singular experience of being “alone with the alone”—those who sought, often in extreme ways, the experience of emptiness, inside and out. These explorers, hermits, and solitaries express the desert's uncompromising extremes, their words often stripped of grace and style, almost gnomic, like the desert after a sandstorm that brings sudden, irresistible change. As one of the secular voices, British military explorer T. E. Lawrence reflects:
Individual nomads had their revealed religion, not oral or traditional or expressed, but instinctive in themselves. And so we got all the Semitic creeds with, in character and essence, a stress on the emptiness of the world and the fullness of God. And they were expressed according to the power and opportunity of the believer.
Section four, The Magic of Water, brings us into the presence of those who spent time in communion with streams, rivers, and oceans. Their love of water's fluid strength and constant variation balances their cautious awareness that the overwhelming power of water can bring death as well as life. As the early 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil reflects succinctly:
The sea is no less beautiful to us because we know that sometimes boats sink. On the contrary, it is more beautiful.
Others comment on the similarity between water and the way thoughts flow through our minds, as in the words of the 4th-century BCE Taoist Chuang Tzu:
When water is still, it is like a mirror, reflecting everything, your chin and eyebrows. And if water obtains lucidity from stillness, how much more will the faculties of the mind? The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, of all creation.
Section five introduces us to the Wild Companions that share the world with us. Our explorers reflect on everything from a flea to a fish, from bees and wild swans to dancing swifts. These voices express the uniqueness of the other living beings that surround us as well as our own impermanence. In the words of the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir from 1916:
This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere human beings were made, and whole realms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere humans appeared to claim them.
After human beings have played their part in creation's plan, they may also disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.
Section six, Speaking Wildly in Society finds many of the same speakers returning from their explorations and, through word or action, delivering the messages they received from their time in nature. Some of them were received kindly in the corridors of power, many were not. Some offer critique, others display an “overcome by yielding” approach. Speaking to an audience in 1954, American scientist and naturalist Rachel Carson linked human treatment of nature with its spiritual life:
I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man's spiritual growth . . . . Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.
Section seven, Reading the Book of Nature, could also be entitled “hearing the songs of nature.” Sight, hearing, and all of the senses reveal to our seekers a larger vision of the life that humanity shares with nature. This chorus of voices from all parts of the earth expresses wonder, joy, awe, and fear in the face of the mysterious unity of human nature with its environment, as well as its collective unity within some larger, unnameable mystery. This rich, complex relationship seems to be a common human understanding that even those brought up in “modern” civilization rediscover. As the 19th-century American author Henry David Thoreau writes:
If I were to discover that a certain kind of stone by the pond-shore was affected, say partially disintegrated, by a particular natural sound, as of a bird or insect, I see that one could not be completely described without describing the other.
I am that rock by the pond-side.
Finally, the last section, Wild to the End, finds our community of explorers reflecting on what nature tells them about death and other possible journeys beyond our time-limited human life. Some voices here have returned to solitude in nature after a life of work in society. Others continue to look to the wild for guidance up until the end, as in the words of the 14th-century Kashmiri forest mystic Lalla:
One moment I saw a river flowing gently.
The next, all bridges washed away.
We are like snow falling in a river—
a moment white, then melted forever.
Selections you won't find here: indigenous voices from native cultures around the world. First, whole books have been rightly devoted to these voices from Africa, South and North America, Australia, and Oceania. Seek them out. Those voices express more whole, integrated views of nature than what are prevalent in the so-called developed world today. The diversity of the indigenous languages, syntax, and grammar, often including musical tone and nonverbal art, stands in stark contrast to the much more limited modern and postmodern ways of understanding life.
The voices I have collected here all come from North America, Europe, and Asia (including West Asia, aka the “Middle East”), areas that today contribute massively to our ecological problems but that can also contribute greatly to their possible solutions. Perhaps we can hear our own ancestors' voices as prophetic rather than merely exotic.
Some ancient stories and accounts of these pioneers come from hagiography, legend, or story. This includes those of the Egyptian desert fathers and mothers, as well as the Sufi mystic Rabia of Basra. However, this does not diminish the wisdom passed down by word of mouth, often authorless, rather than through written history. At the end of the book you will find an appendix that contains thumbnail sketches of each of the voices as well as a bibliography for further exploration. Where possible, I have given exact dates for each selection, but sometimes only an approximate century is possible.
What you also won't find here: more. It's a little book, by definition and by design. It's designed that way to perhaps substitute (in size) for the digital device to which you'd like to give a rest. For an hour, or a day?
Also not to be found: agreement. Some selections may elicit a nod, others a vigorous shake, still others a scratch of the head. Maybe those that raise disagreement, or more questions, can kick-start your own process of finding the harmony between chaos and order that wild nature represents.
No doubt readers will have their own favorites. This is a personal, rather than any sort of representative selection (what would be representative of nature's extreme diversity, I wonder?). Some voices reappear, others are heard only once. Rather than sending me your favorites, why not compile your own anthology of ancestors who inspire you? Then travel with them into nature, take some time to breathe and just be, and write down (or draw or sing or dance) your own reflections.
• • •
Heading into the hills above our Scottish home, at the entrance to the nature district, I recently passed a van owned by the local woodland trust. Stenciled on the side of the van in large, block letters was the simple message “WE ALL NEED TREES.”
Given that this particular nature district is a “mixed use area,” including farmland for grazing and planting as well as open-space forest, meadow, hills, streams, burns, and reservoirs, it occurred to me that different people would hear the word need differently. Need for raw materials, need for food, need to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, need for clean air and water, or need for inspiration. I suppose that the simple phrase “We all . . .” covers it well enough to elicit an inner “yes” from whoever sees the van.
With all the valid, pressing concerns about the environment today, one area we usually overlook is the role that nature plays in the ways we actually think and feel. The latest research about our genetic inheritance reveals that the genes in the human body do not encode our future health to any exactitude. They act only as a blueprint or an outline. Our environment interacts with our genes, causing them to turn on and off at various times and to express themselves differently in different people. The field of research is now called epigenetics. This is why uncovering the “secrets of the human genome,” a project so touted twenty years ago as the cure to all disease, didn't quite pan out as envisioned.
It may be obvious that a child raised in an intensely urban environment, who seldom sees or touches trees or grass, will grow and develop differently from one raised in the country. It turns out, however, that all our nervous systems are biologically wrapped around and interwoven with our environment. Critical damage to this environment impairs humanity's actual ability to think and feel clearly and to envision a positive, healthy future for itself.
Which brings us back to ourselves. Retreating in nature, working in the garden, even sitting on a park bench for a few minutes, can refresh and balance lives mostly surrounded by the products of human culture. Hopefully, hearing the voices of some of these early natural explorers can whet our appetite for our own wildness. It might also help us remember not only what the natural world offers us physically, but also what it inspires as food for our inner lives.
—Neil Douglas-Klotz,
Lomond Hills, Fife, Scotland