Anam Cara

The Beauty of Wild Distance

Outside there is great distance. When you walk out into the landscape the fields stretch away towards the horizon. At dawn, the light unveils the vast spread of nature. Gnarled stones hold nests of fossils from a time so distant we cannot even imagine it. At night, the stars reflect light from the infinite distance of the cosmos. When you experience this distance stretching away from the shore of your body, it can make you feel minuscule. Pascal said, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” There is a magnificent freedom in Nature; no frontier could ever frame her infinity. There is a natural wildness in the earth. You sense this particularly in wild places that have never been tamed by human domestication. There are places where the ocean praises the steady shore in a continual hymn of wave. There are fresh, cold streams pouring through mountain corners in a rhythm that never anticipated the gaze of a human eye. Animals never interfere with the wildness of the earth. They attune themselves to the longing of the earth and move within it as if it were a home rhythm. Animals have no distance from the earth. They have no plan or programme in relation to it. They live naturally in its landscapes, always present completely to where they are. There is an apt way in which the animal who always lives in the “now” of time can fit so perfectly into the “where” of landscape. The time and mind of the animal rest wherever it is. The poet Wendell Berry says, “I come into the peace of wild things…. /…For a time / I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”