What is Wild?
“ When faced with no distractions (no people, no phone, no books), no routines or decisions (no dressing, no cooking), no tasks, not even time-tracking (just the sun), something magical happened. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
I started paying attention. Once I accepted and got past the boredom that naturally arose, a whole new world opened up. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
I started seeing connections in nature, my senses became more sensitive and I started seeing bigger systems of how things are connected. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
I started seeing all the small details of things I had no idea was there and realized not only how magical everything is, from a “simple” blueberry to myself, but I started seeing, and more importantly feeling, how it’s all part of one system. How WE are all part of one system. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
I started calling it true presence to myself because it felt more real. I wasn’t just there as a person observing an item or an experience, I WAS the experience.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
In that presence, in that state of mind, lived only joy and love. I was blown away. Actually, after a while, I started laughing. Laughing at the irony of how we’re all walking around half miserable seeking happiness when all we have to do is stop and start paying attention. To ourselves. To other people. To all the beauty around us, and inside of us. A #NatureQuest can really be a life-changing experience. It surely was for me. If you’re in Sweden and want to know more, head over to @naturacademy”
Philip
In a Nature Quest you get connected to something that is self-willed, autonomous, self-organized. Basically, it’s the opposite of controlled. You can see wildness in the movement of glaciers, or you can track it in star-forming regions in the Orion Nebula. Wildness is everywhere. It starts with microscopic particles, and it goes more than 13 billion light-years into the cosmos. It’s in the soil and in the air, it’s on our hands, it’s in our immune systems, it’s in our lungs — where there are two thousand bacteria per square centimeter! In a certain respect, much of what we consider us is in fact not us. We breathe, and wildness comes in. We don’t control it, it can be the Coronavirus”.
Real wild places allow you to sit quietly with few distractions, away from advertising, entertainment, and the rest of the modern mind-flood. I recommend going to a wild place for a week or two for a Nature Quest solo, and without bringing along anything, not even a book or a journal, like Philip did. Just be open and be present for everything. Smell, hear, sense, taste, and see life going on. For people just beginning to do retreats of any kind, the mind is in a state of turmoil for a while. But if you stick with it, you quiet down, and “something” begins to settle.
