Andy Lord on Wild Places

Andrew Maynell writes: Recently I was sent this reflection on wild places by a friend, Andy Lord, who gave me permission to quote him:

"Throughout his writing, Robert Macfarlane has been seeking to connect soul and land. In his writing on “wild places” he comments on what he sees as a primary idea of Coleridge: “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.”[1]

Personal life is opened up by attention to nature in ways that stir our spirits. An example he points to is the immense sense of life found in limestone gryke’s, small vertical fissures of up to ½ meter in width.[2] This life is connected to the friendships he has, notably Roger Deakin with whom he visited a number of the places spoken of in the book. Life is communal with all creation – human and nature alike.

Macfarlane had started out by seeking the wild places in the world that seemed to be lost and found the wild in the abundance of life that exists everywhere:
“As I had moved south, my own understanding of wildness had been altered – or its range had been enlarged. My early vision of a wild place as somewhere remote, historyless, unmarked, now seemed improperly partial… I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had once been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing organic existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun.”[3]"

[1] Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (London: Granta Books, 2017), 209
[2] Macfarlane, 168
[3] Macfarlane, 316

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