Where the Crawdads Sing (Owens, Delia)
- Your Highlight on Location 2737-2743 | Added on Sunday, April 12, 2020 9:13:08 PM
A poem by Amanda Hamilton said it clearly. Child to child Eye to eye We grew as one, Sharing souls. Wing by wing, Leaf by leaf You left this world, You died before the child. My friend, the Wild.
This poem is by a fictional character in the Owens novel. The death of the Wild, like the death of anything else, seems both inevitable and impossible at the same time. Upon the passing of a friend a couple years back I came to question what death meant. So much of his presence was still felt in the world. Upon meditating at his grave I came to recognize that what was dead was but a body, not a person who still lives in the mind.
And the spirit of the Wild can be no different. Somewhere, deep down in each human, at a molecular and genetic level, we are Wild. But our culture has boundaries that suffocates our Wild, so much so that few have consciously tasted it, that it dies in most before childhood ends, and few are able to resurrect it.
I describe myself during my vagabonding days as ‘feral’ a bit tongue in cheek, but only a bit. I took part of a different Culture, a much more Wild one, where what I was doing, living without an address out of 2 door car with 3 bikes on it was within the boundaries of ‘normal’.
The Wild’s cultural values put importance on the Freedom to roam and the Freedom to spend extended periods outside, connecting with Nature. Mainstream culture places more value on comforts, conveniences and an increased sense of ‘stability’. I’m not judging the difference between the Wild and mainstream cultures, saying one was better, just that they had different values.
Now I’m at a crossroads. I’ve been away from that Wild culture for ~5 years now. But I’ve exhausted the responsibilities that returned me to the mainstream and now face a choice. I can reconnect with the Wild, the thing that hasn’t completely died in me, give it breathe once again. Or I can keep it repressed by accepting another load of responsibilities that seems a more direct path towards what I have determined as my Purpose. The Wild is romantic and Free. But I recognize the wisdom is Pico Iyer’s quote:
‘Freedom is best enjoyed between limits…. The boundaries of life are responsible for the beauties of life.’
I also understand what Ryan Holiday is saying in ‘Ego is the Enemy’:
“Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries…..Purpose is about pursuing something outside yourself as opposed to pleasuring yourself.” Ryan Holiday
It’s easy to say there is way to compromise and balance the two, but having experienced taking on the responsibility of the PhD, I know that balance is not even. And one can say I can do one now and go back to the other in the future, but there is no guarantee in that.
There is comfort that staying in the mainstream will be an adventure in and of itself, fitting the travel writer Rolf Pott’s description that ‘adventure is stretching your boundaries. It is more of a process than a thing, and involves a certain amount of hardship, and is the travel rather than the end.’ And I know the Wild can not die.