Leaning back to breathe in the cold blown from great walls of ice cracking in chromium light. The river banks are quicksand, the river a bottomless hurl of glacial milk, chin dribble of fresh chewed mountain.
There's a wilderness outside and inside, a place that no machine or word or idea can access. Even if you've never been in the wilderness, you've felt it when the tv says the hurricane, tornado or blizzard is on its way. You've felt it when the plane hits too much turbulence. You've felt it when your dreams tumbled off during a catnap and you relived a moment in your life that somehow changed everything. You've felt it in the crush you had or are having.
Wilderness, like happiness, is a feeling. It is the feeling of being free, because you've entered a place where anything could happen, of your self stretched out as far as your perception can take you, over peaks and valleys, permanent and strong. You feel at once tiny and inconsequential yet magnified by allegiance with the biome and elements. The feeling of wilderness, of being small and limited, inspires respect for life: the life of the biosphere en masse, and the single life we are living. From this feeling of miracle comes the ethic of conservation, of keeping living
The reason it is important to leave the world behind from time to time and enter the woods and the wilderness, is that a part of your self that is not called upon elsewhere awakens there. It your wild side, from the side of your family that goes back to the earliest hunter and gatherers. We are creatures whose bodies have taken shape over billions of year; and, as a species, have lived the superhighway strip mall way of life for about fifty years. Industrial civilization has flourished for only three hundred years, but in that short amount of geological time the world as we know it has been constructed. The construction of the industrial world required, and continues to require, the wholesale destruction of nature and wilderness, but there are obvious signs that
Our sensory and motor abilities are unexercised in the world we drive around in. But when we train and use these abilities, a beautiful world appears of watersheds and biomes, and a self that recognizes its biotic connection to
Biocitizen exists to walk them both.
