What is Your Relationship with Wild Places

I’ve been, again, pondering the concept of our relationship with wild places. I’m offering just a teaser here to help provoke some thought on your end. I’d love to hear what yours has been or what you wish it to be. Email or comment here or on FB as desired:

Various relationships may come and go but those that are memorable or that we continue to nurture, may in part be the engagements in which we are free to roam without contingencies. Not just a freedom to literally move about as we wish, but outside encouragement for an unfettered roaming of the mind. An unsystematic perusal of one’s self. Yet I haven’t sorted out whether its possible for humans to fully support unconditional freedoms for humans, whether they be strangers, others with whom we interact, or even ourself. This is an ambitious aspiration as our tendency is at minimum, to inject our view of what ours or others behavior should be in order to contain it in some manner we can understand. Or perhaps, to just have an opinion on how it should be contained. At most we may try and shut down or interfere with another’s actions. If these projections are so, then what are our chances if any, for interactive physical and more importantly mental, free roaming options?

Hanging out for a portion of each youthful summer in Yosemite National Park taught me early on

about the possibilities of a long-term, no-limits, and often fiery relationship with wild places. At first glance I thought the attraction was just on the surface; the pull of natural beauty, the smell of clean alpine air or the lively sound of rippling water. But as the years rolled on and I played, then hiked, then ran over granite slab after granite slab while sleeping under thick starry skies and bright glowy moons, I intimately got to know the depth of this special place.

The granite walls placed no restrictions on the person I could become nor did they dis or condone who I had decided I already was as an impressionable young girl. Yet they began to feel like a familiar, coveted friend. What I didn’t know then is the strong role this friend would play in my evolution as a woman.

The external voices and media white noise in civilization may work hard daily to slant our perception of who we should be or what we should look like. But they are non-existent while in natures womb because wild places and wild beings are indifferent to the way the human mind molds and shapes reality.

In this, Yosemite offered me even more than just a lovely respite from man-made-ness. It embodied that reprieve we grapple with as women or men—an intermission or complete break from our well established perceived self. An unfettered roaming. Wilderness has a generous way of allowing us to fashion our authentic view of self while nudging us in getting that there is no such thing as, should.

What does your relationship with wild places offer you?

– Terri Schneider