As I sit here deep in the moorlands I’m being serenaded by a circle of skylarks who are stragically placed to protect their own patch and their respective ladies from pretenders. The greening grasses of summer tickle my skin as I lie on my back, taking in the surround sound of symphonic sky dance.
I marvel at the 5 pinpricks of song that punctuate the cloud dressed blue, their songs eddy back and forth on the high heather breeze like a tideflow of liquid voice.
Each skylark does his usual thing of ascending to a distant dot and then dropping down in stages before landing softly on the peaty bogland. Apart from one. Can you spot him in the shot above?
He is crazy wild skylark guy!
Occasionally he descends in the time-worn manner of steps and hovers but often he simply folds his wings against his tiny tawny body and plummets earthwards like a stone. My heart is in my mouth as I watch his breakneck roller coaster drop and I feel a flood of relief as he spreads his wings a couple of handspans from the soggy ground. Again and again he does this. Perhaps he too gets a buzz from the fall. Oh to be wild again!
Nature often does the it’s own thing just for the crack. Many times I’ve watched as a flock of crows launch off a tree during a gale only to be blown backward many hundreds of feet before they gain control and return to the same treetop on outspread pinions. Then I would hear a huge round of crow laughter before they did it again, and again. Nature having fun.
For me this is wildness. This is freedom. This is our birthright which we can grasp hold of with both hands. Having fun, playing out, getting dirty, dancing in the downpour, whiling away sunshine time.
Somehow much of modern society seems to have become divorced from this inheritance, living a life of box ticking and grey conformity. I feel that now is the time to reclaim our wild spirit, indeed our earth needs us to.
The Harmony of Wildness
The thought of being wild has been perverted to mean loss of personal control and care for others but don’t get me wrong, true wildness is not chaos, living without boundary or consideration. Wildness is all about living in harmony with our natural selves. We don’t need to become rebellious and self-centred in order to reclaim our inner wild, after all nature is none of those things. What we can do though is cast off those unnecessary self limiting thought patterns and habits which have been imposed on us by centuries of represion by an elite minority.
Choose what guidelines will help us be the best we can be, serve our fellow community and care for our home planet and have a long hard think about the restrictions that stop us from doing all of the above. Like the rest of our nature brethren find your wild twin, the one who was cast out soon after your birth, and make a home for her in your heart.
Embrace your humanity and also your naturalness. Stand oak strong and step wolf like into your rightful being with character and style. Don’t let the blocks of others tie you down. Lead by example, show what a wild life can look like.
If you’d like to deepen into this exploration we still have places left on our Rewilding residential workshop where the ancient wild beasts will speak to us, from their bones to ours. This may be your only chance to become a 30,000 year old cave bear!
by Jason
That grabbed me and made it so real.
Thank you Paul. Glad it worked for you.
Brilliantly penned my friend, you should write a book, you have poetry in your soul. Thank you.
Thank you Anne. Who knows! One day maybe…
Jason I could not see the skylark but have you noticed the small cloud towards the bottom left of the picture to me it represents the British Isles so clearly is this an Omen that all will be well in our Country?
Ah doesn’t it look like our green and pleasant lands! And wouldn’t it be good to think that. The skylark is quite central in the image and a bit below the British Isles!