Wilderness therefore is for everyone—the hardy hikers as well as the vast majority who have never known what it means to carry a pack… Wilderness is more than camping or hiking; it is a symbol of a way of life that can nourish the spirit.
– Sigurd Olson, Living Wilderness (1968)
Update about Spiritual Formation in the Wild here.
Life is wild. I am wild. Wilderness is powerful. Wilderness is dangerous. Wilderness is in me. Wilderness confronts me. Wilderness calls me. Wilderness points me home.
The idea of wilderness—and the material stuff of experiences that we call wild—are brimming with vitality, complication, and invitation. This is what Sig Olson was talking about when he wrote that wilderness “is a symbol of a way of life that can nourish the spirit”.
I was paddling on the Wisconsin River with my dad and my friends John and Peter. This was several years ago, but I remember it vividly. We were paddling downstream into a fierce wind that was whipping up waves, and that all but reversed the current. Cold rain stung my eyes and cheeks. It was precarious. It was tohu va bohu—the chaos of wildness that precedes creation in the origin myth of the Hebrew bible. It was glorious.
I was in the stern of one of our two canoes. I was responsible for keeping the boat rightly oriented to the wind and the waves. A touch too much in one direction and the wind would catch the bow and twirl us broadside to the waves, which would swamp us with one gulp. But if I kept our nose pointed into the waves, we’d ride through, soggy but afloat.
My mind was empty of all but the task of holding this balance.
I say mind, but there wasn’t time between gusts for conscious calculation. My whole body—my whole sensory self—partook in the task. And for all of their ferocity, the wind was not a foe, nor the current, nor the waves. They were companions in this play of balance.
Each tilting wave informed the way I angled my wrists and thereby angled the blade of the paddle in the water. Each gust that I felt on my cheek informed how I leaned my torso; informed the muscle that I put into each stroke, or my restrained pause between gusts.
That dance with the elements, that’s my understanding of spiritual formation.
Spiritual formation is the wild practice of living in balanced relationship with every element and quality of human nature. And wilderness—above all—is a venue for that practice.
