Make Way for Wildness
New Outdoors Highlights, Month #13
“Great Nature has another thing to do . . .” So begins the fifth stanza of Theodore Roethke’s poem, “The Waking.” That line came to me several weeks ago as I saw how the El Yunque Rainforest in Puerto Rico has so vibrantly recovered from the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria.
The line came to me again as I mused on the recent dramatic flood/freeze/thaw cycles on our pond in Maine. I repeated Roethke’s words to myself yet again as I read Carol Labuzzetta’s story about the ice going out bizarrely early and the loons somehow being able to adjust.
Nature knows exactly what to do. What nature doesn’t do is conform to our expectations or desires. These ideas are also central to Marlena Hirsch’s story about nature wisdom, intuition, and plants and to Wyatt J. Dagit’s reflections in his piece, “The Subversive Mulberry.”
More nature wisdom can be found in Josh Porter’s piece about a Kenyan man who has a refreshingly non-western relationship with nature and in Emily Gibson’s poem celebrating a woman who fiercely protected the wild dunes near her Northern California home. Vida Mercer contributed the first piece in a series on how trees can enrich our lives — if we do well, we also enrich theirs.
