Resting in Wild Places
The Liberating Paradox of Melding Into Nature
Sometimes I need to rest in wild places.
Places with no other humans in sight.
Where it is quiet, serene and calm.
Where the only sounds are that of my own breathing; the feel of the wind as it brushes against my face, and moves the leaves in the trees; the sound of birdsong and insects buzzing.
When I am in a wild place, I feel free. Bigger. More expansive.
It is like my body relaxes, takes a deep breath, and folds into the landscape.
I can feel myself. Feel me. I am here. I exist. I am part of the whole.
I become one with it all.
One of the many. One of all the other living creatures, large and small scurrying around, minding their own business, just existing.
As well as feeling bigger, paradoxically I also feel smaller at the same time. The two things together, side by side.
As I lay at night and look up at the night sky and the millions of stars of The Milky Way sparkling down on me, I feel small.
I am aware of my insignificance in this magnificence called Life.
My total nothingness.
How tiny a dot I am that barely registers on this earth, and matters absolutely not at all in our galaxy, and registers not at all in the millions of galaxies that exist.
I am nothing.
Feeling absolutely more real, more connected and more me, at the same time as realizing my total insignificance is totally liberating.
It takes all the pressure off me to perform. To be something. To do something. I can just be. I am just me. And that is enough.
It is enough for the bee. For the insect. For the bird. For the tree.
It is also enough for me.
“The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
― Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
