Inner Wilderness

Summer and the Recovery Moon

Speculating further after my post on Wild, Wildness, Wilderness. Wilderness is a place where humans rarely go, a place where the ebb and flow of life depends on plants and animals, not the artifice of roads and streets, buildings and houses, stores and parking lots. (I’m bracketing the climate change influence for the moment.)

Thought about cancer. Realized that the interior of a human body, even, perhaps especially, your own body, is a wilderness, too. Rarely visited by humans, very, very rarely by yourself-colonscopies, imaging work, sonagrams, echocardiograms being exceptions, of course, but in those cases the boundary of the wilderness is not opened. It’s penetrated by beams and rays and sounds.

As my old internist Charlie used to say, “We’re all a bit of a black box inside.” The inner world is not all that’s hidden from others; the inner world of the body is hidden, too.

We carry wildness and wilderness with us wherever we go.