The wild

...and other questions

Yesterday in our first Writing into Being Writing Hour, I offered prompts about the wildness out there and inside ourselves, pondering lately on connecting and integrating the inner and outer, love and freedom, rewilding the self and the land, wondering if that somehow might perhaps help us to rewild our writing. For me, it involves welcoming whatever’s there, questioning it all in the spirit of a warm intimacy, alert to the natural reciprocity that arises in our lives when we resist self-absorption and stay aware of our ecological, embodied nature.

A small group of us focussed intently for a fifty-minute hour and in our brief review afterwards it sounded like people had wandered fruitfully in the wild thickets of their own minds and discovered new terrain to keep exploring in their writing.

Always wanting to go back to the roots, I was left with questions about etymology and later, looking up ‘wild’ in the dictionary, found that the definitions are as free-ranging and elusive as a hare glimpsed in the woods. They reveal the human ambivalence and prejudice about ‘the wild’ – source no doubt of the fierce opposition to the very idea of ‘rewilding’.

From Chambers English Dictionary:

wild wīld, adj. being in a state of nature, not tamed or cultivated: of an undomesticated or uncultivated kind: uncivilised: uninhabited: desolate: tempestuous: violent: fierce: passionate: unrestrained: licentious: agitated: shy: distracted: very angry: very enthusiastic: eager, keen (with about): strong and irrational: fantastic: crazy: disordered: unconsidered: wide of the mark: fresh and natural: (cap.) applied to the extreme Evangelical party in the Church of Scotland (hist.): (of a playing-card) having any value desired.

Also adv. – n. (also in pl.) an uncultivated region: a wilderness or desert (also fig.): an empty region of air or water (poet.).

n. wīlding that which grows wild or without cultivation: a wild crab-apple: a garden plant self-sown, an escape. – adj. uncultivated, or wild.

adj. wildish somewhat wild

adv. wildly

n. wildness

adj. wild-born born in the wild

wildfire a sweeping, destructive fire: a need-fire: a composition of inflammable materials: Greek fire (like wildfire extremely fast): lightning without thunder: a disease of sheep: will-o’-the-wisp

Wild Hunt in Germanic legend, a host of phantoms rushing along, accompanied by the shouting of huntsman and the baying of dogs; Wild Huntsman their leader

wild mare a seesaw: an instrument of punishment, the horse

wild-water the foaming water in rapids etc.

wild-Williams (dial.) ragged-Robin

[O.E. wilde; common Gmc. word.]

wilderness, n. a region uncultivated and uninhabited: a pathless or desolate tract of any kind, as an extent of sea: a part of a garden or estate allowed to run wild, or cultivated in imitation of natural woodland: conditions of life, or a place, in which the spirit feels desolate (fig.): the present world: a large confused or confusing assemblage: wildness (obs.)

v.t. wilder (prob, formed from wilderness; poet.) to cause to stray: to bewilder. – v.i. to wander wildly or widely. – adjs. wildered; wildering. – n.wilderment.

– crying in the wilderness see cry.

[M.E., – wilderne, wild, wilderness – O.E. wilddēoren – wild, wild dēor, animal.]

‘the present world: a large confused or confusing assemblage’? Is the wild too clear a mirror to see our own faces in? 

There’s a sense though that something’s changing – a slow, uncertain opening to our dependence on a world beyond ourselves, to the fact of change itself and natural, inevitable imperfection. There have certainly been developments since Dr Roget compiled his Thesaurus in 1852. My copy – rebound some years ago by a clever friend – was a present from a beloved for my 16^th birthday and has been a trusty companion ever since. Although now it’s feeling more like a historical curiosity than being helpful ‘…to find the word, or words, by which [an] idea may be most fitly and aptly expressed’ (Roget).

From the Index:

wild appears under Abstract Relations (Section 8: Causation):

also under Volition (Division I: Individual Volition, Section 3: Voluntary Action):

Isn’t it the nature of the wild that it can’t be classified or defined? Both outside and inside, isn’t it context-specific, always in process, often mysterious, infinitely diverse, beyond the grasp of the rational mind?

Always more questions… one leading to another… and us all here asking and improvising answers, ourselves part of whatever the wild might be.

The next opportunity to ask questions and play with words in the Writing into Being Writing Hour is on Tuesday 14^thNovember 4 – 5pm BST. November’s New Moon is on 13^th at 9.27 am in Scorpio, said to rule intensity and sensuality – another sort of wild.

Just let me know in the comments here or via the contact on my website if you’d like to join us and I’ll send you the zoom link. Do share with anyone you know who might be interested in this sort of quiet creative resistance.

Go well.

L

x