Place: Part IV– Untamed Place

Redwoods

Land is intrinsically wild. It’s unownable, unpossessable in its essence. We can never really totally own it physically because sooner or later it will pass out of our hands. We can’t own it emotionally or intellectually because its essence is beyond our human limits. As an ancient and living presence it precedes us, and it succeeds our own bounded existence. It’s unreasonable to think we can own the landscape. There is a wildness to it, a part of place that can’t be tamed, brought under our control or into our possession. We humans are too fleeting. We can only drink from its well as we pass through.

“…being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.”

Rainer Maria Rilke Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus– “The Ninth Elegy”

Drinking at its well means drinking down the mystery of it along with its beauty and scars and story. For these reasons, if no other, we do well to reverence Place, our formidable elder; wild, untamable and mysterious.

Several years ago I traveled back to my home state of California. I stayed at a youth hostel in the northern part of the state, at the edge of the Red Wood forest. It was at a place where the forest opens up to the Pacific Ocean. I spent some time at the shoreline as I do whenever I have the chance. It’s a sanctuary for me, its vast sense of omnipresence and steady drum of living waves reminds me of the place of Spirit in my life. Later, I hiked into the Red Woods. I was alone – except for the towering witnesses, the Giant Sequoias, breathing out their mist in faint rays of light.

I was struck dumb. The presence of those ancients spoke holiness to me as no cathedral ever had. I was humbled, almost undone. These Giants; unspoiled, unhindered, couched in overgrown ferns and a tangle of growth that are constantly coming to life and dying in the shadow of the Giants’ great presence, brought home a sense of my fleeting nature and my utter incapacity to contain it all.

In addition to a sense of reverence amidst the Giant Sequoias, there have been times in my life when in various places of wildness, I’ve sensed qualities just as stunning in the landscapes.

The Valley of Fire near Las Vegas is a 40,000 acre treasure that according to an article titled, “Tour a desert masterpiece millions of years in the making” at valley-of-fire.com, was “born from Aztec sandstone.” The ancient red landscape filled with trails, paths and archways seems to breathe fire in the hot summer sun. The earth beneath my feet, with the heat rising up to meet me seemed to issue questions beyond mere linear conversation, questions about destiny.

On the West Highland Way in Scotland, as I hiked beside the lochs, up the switchbacks and through the valleys, as I pushed on every day through rain and cold, I felt the landscape issuing a challenge. I dug down deep, down to the bone over the next one hundred miles for the fortitude to finish well. After eleven days of hiking, minus a few pounds and a couple of toenails, as I came in to the last town, I felt it was the Scottish landscape in its wild and untamed beauty that had cheered me on to a rewarding finish

What gifts have you received from untamed places?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Fleeting Humans