My Own Wilderness
Returning to Eden
And the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by The Accuser; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.[1]
We all need to allow ourselves to be led into our own wilderness, there to be taught what we most need to know, and to be healed where we most need it.[2]
One of the root meanings of “temptation” is “to forget.” Jesus is tempted to forget his baptism: his immersion into the life-giving stream of healing energy available in the wilderness. We, too, are tempted to forget our true identity, our own wilderness.
My own wilderness was an unincorporated area of Lake County, Indiana, a still semi-rural area called Black Oak. We lived off of Colfax Street, down a gravel road in one-half of a duplex sitting on about 3 acres of land. Our landlords, the Hershbergers, lived in the “big house” on Colfax Street. A large grassy field separated us from their home. We were surrounded by woodland to the east and north. To the south, across a barren field, lay a soon-to-be-developed shopping complex on Ridge Road. There was a retention pond, probably the size of football field, on the north end of a barren field (which would later become a parking lot behind the shopping center).
This was my wilderness, an enchanted place where I lived from the time I was a toddler until I was eight years old. In the spring, my parents and grandparents planted a big garden in the back yard: tomatoes, peppers, corn, onions, radishes, watermelons. If my memory serves me, there was a little stream that ran through a particularly dense patch of woods and then underground, east of the grassy field. In the summer, bushes grew thick with wild berries that you could pluck and eat, still warm from the sun. We could fish in the retention pond (not anything you would want to eat), and I remember tootling around on the pond in a little inflatable boat with my mother. In the winter, you could ice skate on the pond and build snowmen in the fields.
I would explore the woods and fields alone for hours. On the other side of the woods, there was a farm with horses, and I loved to wander over to watch them in their paddock. I am an only child, and I learned early on how to entertain myself. Solitude suited me, and my curiosity and imagination had free reign in my own enchanted wilderness. Long before the Sony Walkman, much less earbuds, cicadas and birdsong provided the symphony that was the soundtrack of my early years. As a child, I had a frequent, reoccurring dream of flying over the grassy field I played in during the day. In that dream, I felt free, powerful, and deeply in touch with the transcendent source of life.
Solitude was, and remains, profoundly healing for me. Already I was beginning to understand that my father was not well. His alcoholism was the one note of uncertainty and fear in an otherwise bucolic idyll. Some would say that my wilderness was not really wilderness, marked as it was by human presence. But that would be to assume that humans are other than wild. And that would be a mistake – perhaps the mistake of modernity.
We are part of nature. That was the lesson taught by my wilderness that I most needed to know, and this knowledge remains the foundation of my healing. However alone and alienated I began to feel as I grew up, I was given to know that I am fundamentally at home in the world, an inseparable and necessary part of creation in all its wonder, beauty, and terror. I was meant to be here, and to play my small part in the great work of continually renewing the world. It was a lesson I would forget, and remember, over and over again.
The “dreaming innocence” into which we are born, our own wilderness, is the Eden from which we are all eventually driven in the course of growing up. Self-consciousness develops and, like Adam and Eve, we discover that we are naked – vulnerable – and cover ourselves with shame. We become separated from the regenerative power of our wilderness. We forget what we once knew. But we cannot entirely escape our wilderness, which is the source of our resilience and the guardian of memory. We can remember. We can become whole again.
I am back in Lake County, visiting my mother in the subdivision where she now lives. When she first moved there, it was a new housing development in surrounded by farmland. The back yard of her house abutted a golf course, which closed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the two years since the golf course closed, the land has reverted to prairie. It has become a wilderness again, home to deer and coyote. I can hear the symphony of cicadas and birdsong now competing with the sound of traffic on I-65 nearby and the encroaching suburban sprawl.
I find great consolation in this small example of the recuperative power of nature, in the possibility of the human ones returning to Eden – albeit an Eden changed by our long alienation from it. We cannot undo the past, but we do not have to be defined by it. We can continue to grow, to evolve, to realize something genuinely new in a reconstituted harmony between our inner and outer wilderness.
Unfortunately, the abandoned golf course was recently purchased by a housing developer. We remember our wilderness. Then we forget. This is the great struggle of our time. The Climate Crisis is revealing our vulnerability to us in an unprecedented and global manner. This realization can drive us into deeper alienation and despair, or it can remind us of our true nature and reorient us toward the regenerative power that we share with all creation.
We are being led anew by Spirit into our wilderness, the wildness that surrounds us and lies within us. Deep within us there is a longing to come home to the world, to feel our connection to each other, to the earth, and to God. The disenchantment of nature and the modern effort to control and manipulate it has left us alienated, lonely, and spiritually lost. The spiritual life, the pursuit of human meaning and purpose, became separated from its roots in the beating heart of wilderness. But we still can hear the call of the wild if we listen.
What is your wilderness teaching you that you need to remember? There is a memory deep within you, an inviolable touchstone of belonging and resilience. Recall the shape of your wilderness: the color, the smell, the sensation of your wild aliveness. What is the healing that it provides for you? Acknowledging the ways in which we have become separated from our wild aliveness and made to feel ashamed of it is the first step on the journey back to Eden.
May you be led back to your own – and to our collective – wilderness. You will find wild beasts waiting for you there, and angels. They always are found together in an integrated life.
[1] Mark 1:12-13. Satan is literally “The Accuser.”
[2] Gerald May, The Wisdom of Wilderness: Experiencing the Healing Power of Nature (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), p. XXIII.
Beautifully written. It feels very close to my life at the moment. Thank you for posting.