The Beauty of the Wild (Excerpt)

John Daniel

John Daniel’s biography appears with his poem "In Praise” in the first section. "The Beauty of the Wild” derives from a longer essay, "Toward Wild Heartlands, ” published in Audubon (1994). In its present form, the essay has appeared in Timeline (1995) and in Resurgence (England, 1995).

Though we Americans flock by the millions to the landscape splendors our national parks and other natural areas, it seems to me that our experience of natural beauty is for the most part rote and passionless. I feel only a dull grade of pleasure when I stop at a scenic overlook, and I rarely see enthusiasm or even animation in the other watchers — I see bored children and impassive parents showing the scenery to their cameras and video recorders. Though drawn to nature, we are somehow insensible to it. Our lives are so far removed from the wild land that it’s become just a picture, an image to be captured and taken home. As tourists we may not damage the land as mining or timber corporations would, but in one sense we what they do: we value the land for one of its extractable qualities. We have reduced natural beauty to postcard prettiness, another commodity to be consumed in our dogged pursuit of happiness.

There’s a different beauty of the land, a deeper and far more lively beauty, that we have largely forfeited. To know this beauty requires more than eyes alone and can’t be done at a distance. It takes legs and sweat, hard breathing and time. It requires that we approach the land on its own terms, that we enter it respectfully and yield ourselves to its presence....

Wilderness, the word, shares roots with willfulness, the condition of being ungovernable, beyond authority and control. When I ask myself what wilderness most truly is, what its beauty is most made of, willfulness is what I find—a vast, unconscious willfulness that bodies forth mountains from seas of magma, dreams the dark chaos of soil into forests of spiring trees, fashions meadowlarks and black bears from the long weaving strands of evolutionary time. In this willfulness I am something small, rightfully small, refreshingly small. Out of my house and vehicle, away from typewriter and telephone and buildings and roads, removed from the busyness and trappings both worthy and worthless that compel our attention and delude us that our human affairs are of paramount importance, in the wild I experience myself and my kind in something like actual scale. And except perhaps for a few willful mosquitoes or one paramount pebble beneath my sleeping bag, I am happy....

"Talk of mysteries! ” wrote Thoreau. “Think of our life in nature daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, tree wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! ” If you follow the physicists, the actual world is composed of willful little particles with names like quark and gluon that dodge into and out of existence, enlivening a universe born billions of years ago from a single source, a form-seeking universe that has made itself into nebulas, stars, planets, and Thoreau with wind on his cheeks. If you follow others, you get other accounts. There are many good books, but even the book you most believe in can tell no more than a glancing passage of the actual story of being—the story that spirals through DNA and the snail’s shell; the chambered nautilus, through the grain of junipers and the great spinning storms and the swirling arms of the Milky Way, and so joins itself to the infinite.

We are privileged beyond measure to be part of the story, and twice-privileged to be conscious in some small way of the orders of being we are joined to. We can’t see far. What we call Nature, meaning all that the cosmos brings to birth, will forever elude the grasp of our science and philosophy and poetry. We belong to a mystery that does not belong to us, yet it is freely available to all who desire it. Though we distance ourselves and fail to see it, it is granted everywhere and all the time. It does not fail us. To rest on a mesa still warm with sun and watch the stars brighten to their fierce glitter, a little wind stirring with the smell of sage, and far away a coyote giving up his cry ... In this beauty, this mystery, I am glad to be alive. This beautiful mystery makes me whole.