The Weight of the Wild
Why do we insist that the wild must be somewhere else, tucked away in a distant, unmapped corner of the map? We build our walls and pave our paths, convinced that we have successfully partitioned the world into the civilized and the untamed. Yet, there is a persistent, heavy grace that refuses to acknowledge our borders. It moves through the edges of our settlements, indifferent to our schedules and our architecture. Perhaps we are not the masters of this landscape, but merely guests who have forgotten how to be quiet. When we encounter that which does not belong to our human story, we are forced to confront the fragility of our own dominion. We look into eyes that hold no recognition of our names or our histories, and for a fleeting moment, the illusion of control dissolves. If the wilderness can exist within the shadow of our own homes, what does that say about the parts of ourselves we have tried to fence in?
Ronnie Glover has captured this quiet tension in the image titled Bull Moose. It serves as a reminder that we are never truly alone in the spaces we claim as our own. Does this encounter make you feel more connected to the earth, or more like an intruder?
