I live in the city and I love it. However, something about living this way is not quite right.
I grew up in the suburbs. The backyard of my family’s house came up to a woods where we neighborhood kids spent a lot of time getting lost. We made hideouts, buried treasure and went on long explorations. If we explored really, really far we would get to the other side of the woods and arrive at a street corner with an ice cream shop. To my 9 year old eyes, those woods were practically endless.
That was my initial taste of wildness. Those years were followed by TV, Nintendo, classrooms without windows, cars, shopping malls, air conditioning and cubicles. The wildness went from the expected to the other. You may be familiar with “the other”. It is that which is different from your daily experience. We tend to fear the other and make up excuses. Dangerous, unknown. You could get kidnapped, or eaten by a bear. The other is uncomfortable. Humidity and bugs. Excuses or not, I want it. For my sanity, I probably need it.
Henry David Thoreau wrote:
We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things by mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
“In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World”, is a photography book by Eliot Porter published in 1962. The title was taken from a passage by Thoreau. The book is a masterpiece of color nature photography. It is a statement about the lure of wild places and a celebration of the beautiful in what we mistake as common. And here we are, decades after Thoreau and Porter.
And here am I, living a life after wildness – after Porter’s book and after a time when the wild was a regular part of society. At the same time, I am after wildness – after, as in “in pursuit or quest of”. There is a struggle between my contemporary, city life and my need of the wild. This has been gnawing at me for the past few years and I suppose will be for some time. Looking at my recent photographic projects, the pursuit of the wild was there waiting for me to realize that I have been searching all along.
This need for wildness in my life is now strong enough that it requires a name. At the same time, this blog needs more focus (photography pun, hah). Blog, I christen thee, “Searching After Wildness”. May we all learn something worth living for.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Ok, I understand the ‘you could get eaten by a bear’ part, although bear attacks are actually pretty rare. I have bears wander by my home, and I worry more about the cougars than the bears.
But what’s with the whole ‘you could get kidnapped’ bit? Kidnapped by whom? The greatest risks you face are caused by proximity to other people.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:24 pm
I don’t think being in the woods is any more dangerous than people’s usual routines. The woods are probably safer. What I’m referring to are people’s excuses for not getting out into nature. These excuses may be real or imaginary, but they’re there.
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:31 pm
‘Kidnapped by whom?’
Think ‘Deliverance’
June 14th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Having been raised in a major metropolitan area as well, I too have a longing to partake in and truly continue to have a nature deficit. I would experience nature during occasional camping trips at neighboring state. However, I was plunged headfirst into more rugged natural settings when I moved to Southern New Hampshire for business and lived on 8 heavily wooded acres. Here, I sought after anything of the non-urban persuasion and continue to do so having now lived in mid-southern Indiana.
Andy, I understand your deficit and your work continues to inspire me.