# The Wild Places >[!info]- metadata >*`= this.tags`* >- Online Rating - `=this.onlineRating` | My Rating- `=this.personalRating` >- Status - `=this.status` >- Progress - `=this.currentPage` of `=this.pages`  ## Summary `=this.description` ## My Thoughts >[!quote]+ My Review >`= this.review` ### Highlights * Snapshot: * Author: [[Robert MacFarlane]] * Status: [[In Progress]] * Date Finished: * Rating: * Recommended by: * **Tags:** [[Book]] [[Nature]] [[Ecology]] [[Wildness]] [[Memoir]] * Literature Notes: * Two narratives of wildness: to be conquered, and to be revered. * [[The Wild Places#^OBJPPQ5fQ|This basic definition of wildness has remained constant since those first appearances, but the values ascribed to this quality have diverged dramatically.]] * Thinking about the idea of living life as an interested person, and how that can feel like letting a path unfurl before you. Navigating ancient & immediate contingencies at the same time: the things we're immutably drawn to and the things that are in front of us. It's all about being present, and appreciating the urgency of Now. You can't know your way if you don't watch the horizon, you can't stay on your feet if you don't look down. Something like [[Middle-distance gaze]]. * [[The Wild Places#^INpoqfBN3|Limestone, I found during my time in the Burren, demands of the walker a new type of movement: the impulse to be diverted, to wander and allow the logic of one's motion to be determined by happenstance and sudden disclosure. We learned, or were taught by the ground, how to walk without premeditation: turning corners when they came, following bends in valleys, our paths set by the ancient contingencies of geology and the immediate contingencies of footfall, our expectations quickened — ready for surprise when it happened.]] * Two contradictory ideas landscapes encourage us to hold: we are at once valuable and superfluous. ^KG3JngYkw * [[The Wild Places#^SL-EO6-nl|To be in the Burren is to be reminded that physical matter is simultaneously indestructible and entirely transmutable: that it can swap states drastically, from vegetable to mineral or from liquid to solid. To attempt to hold these two contradictory ideas, of permanence and mutability, in the brain at the same time is usefully difficult, for it makes the individual feel at once valuable and superfluous. ]] * This idea reminds me of a passage from [[Hyperobjects (2013)|Hyperobjects (2013)]]|Hyperobjects (2013)]], specifically about shared sensual spaces that exit on vastly different timescales. * ![[Hyperobjects (2013)#^dino|Hyperobjects (2013)]]|Hyperobjects (2013)]] * Highlights: * This basic definition of wildness has remained constant since those first appearances, but the values ascribed to this quality have diverged dramatically. ^OBJPPQ5fQ * Limestone, I found during my time in the Burren, demands of the walker a new type of movement: the impulse to be diverted, to wander and allow the logic of one's motion to be determined by happenstance and sudden disclosure. We learned, or were taught by the ground, how to walk without premeditation: turning corners when they came, following bends in valleys, our paths set by the ancient contingencies of geology and the immediate contingencies of footfall, our expectations quickened — ready for surprise when it happened. ^INpoqfBN3 * To be in the Burren is to be reminded that physical matter is simultaneously indestructible and entirely transmutable: that it can swap states drastically, from vegetable to mineral or from liquid to solid. To attempt to hold these two contradictory ideas, of permanence and mutability, in the brain at the same time is usefully difficult, for it makes the individual feel at once valuable and superfluous. ^SL-EO6-nl * My sense of a landscapes wildness had always been affected by the gravitational pull of its geologic past - by the unstillable reverberations of its earlier makings by ice and fire. The wildness of the gryke, though, was to do with nowness, with process. It existed in a constant and fecund present. * Generally, people noctambulise because they are in search of melancholy, or rather, a particular type of imaginative melancholy. * We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us - the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. on almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world. * The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. in so many ways, there has been a prizing away of life from place, and abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. * We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world - It's spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits - as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical forms of the world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination. ^_mrOKJXbO * Such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt. There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon a sun warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snowfall irrefutably upon one's upturned palm. * One idea above all emerges: that the self-willed forms of wild nature can call out fresh correspondences of spirit in a person. Wildness, in Coleridge's account, is an energy which blows through one's being, causing the self to shift into new patterns, opening up alternative perceptions of life. * Whatever the combination of causes, I had started to refocus. I was becoming increasingly interested in this understanding of wildness not as something which was hived off from human life, but which existed unexpectedly around and within it: in cities, backyards, roadside, hedges, field boundaries or spinnies. * I felt a sense of wildness as process, something continually at work in the world, something tumultuous, green, joyous. * Happiness, and the emotions that go by the collective noun of "happiness": hope, joy, wonder, grace, tranquility and others. Everyday, millions of people found themselves deep into dignified by their encounters with particular places. Most of these places, however, we're not marked a special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. * I want all my friends to come up like weeds, he had once written in a notebook, and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don't want the kind of friends one has to cultivate.