Kernelled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life-generous as water, as inspired as air. To me, the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. Everywhere, too, I learnt of songlines, how people who know and love a land can hold it in mind as music. From West Papuan people, I learnt how freedom is the absolute demand of the human spirit. From Aboriginal people in Australia, I learnt the belowness of deserts, how land is heavy with significance and how it sings. From whales and dolphins I learnt how much we do not know, the octaves of possibilities, the maybes of the mind.
From Inuit people in the Arctic, I learnt something of the intricate ice and how all landscape is knowledgescape. In the end – a strangely sweet result – I came back to a wild home.įrom shamans in the Amazon, I learnt something of how the wastelands of the mind, its dark depressions, could be navigated, and from them I learnt to see the world through the eyes of a jaguar. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. I wrote notes by the light of a firefly anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept ate witchetty grubs and visited sea gypsies. I went to places which are about the worst in the world to get your period. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelize them. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. Part of the journey was a green riot and part a deathly bleakness. I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy.
So I began this book with no knowing where it would lead, no idea how hard some of it would be, the days of havoc and the nights of loneliness, because the only thing I had to hold onto was the knife-sharp necessity to trust to the elements my elemental self. It is elemental: pure freedom, pure passion, pure hunger. Wildness is resolute for life: it cannot be otherwise for it will die in captivity. I was looking for how that will expressed itself in elemental vitality, in savage grace. This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel – take flight . Every mountain top intrigued my mind, for the wind at the peaks was the flautist, licking his lips, dangerously mesmerizing me with almost inaudible melodies. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the colour of ice an invitation: come. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night.
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