A Place of Wild

How many of us sometimes feel that we are scratching at the walls of this life, seeking to find our way into a wider space beyond? That our mild, polite existence sometimes seems to crush the breath out of us? – source unknown

My place is not a place of perfect lawns. Granted, there are a few houses in the neighborhood that sport weedless front lawns and, based on how much of the yard the house takes up, no backyard to speak of. But as ‘perfect’ and nondescript as the lawn is, one never sees these people out on it.  That says something, I think. Most yards here are just a little messy, a little unkempt, making room for old, original-forest trees, for the marshy, boggy bits because of the underground streams; for the trumpet vine and vicious blackberry vines, the wild geranium and buttercups that are all just a little more obstinate than we are.

Though my place is changing, and in ways I am not wholly comfortable with, evidenced by more and more of those perfect lawns, I have hope. That hope is the access lane at the end of our back ‘forty’.  A space of about 30 feet that separates our property from that of the people on the next street over.  The ironic thing is that it is in no way accessible to the city – or to anyone else. It is a place of wild that runs the length of our road and has become a wildlife corridor. It is overgrown with scrub and brush and ‘weed’ trees. It is the highway of skunks, and raccoons, and coyotes, the occasional deer, rats, squirrels, owls and hawks, and last year a bear (who visited – and destroyed – our birdfeeders). At night, the stars in the sky above are matched by glowing green and red ‘stars’ below.

My hope is that it is a place of re-wilding.  A general definition of rewilding is: to return to a more natural or wild state; the process of undoing domestication. A more intense definition by Peter Michael Bauer, an artist, author, and teacher is:

“to foster and maintain a sustainable way of life through hunter-gatherer-gardener social and economical systems; including, but not limited to, the encouragement of social, physical, spiritual, mental and environmental biodiversity and the prevention and undoing of social, physical, spiritual, mental and environmental domestication and enslavement”.

To me, Re-wilding is about connectivity. The animals and plants re-establishing in places that had originally disrupted them, and our connectivity with that nature and ethos that occurs.

In addition, my neighborhood takes the sign in my front yard seriously – and doesn’t complain about the dandelions.