A Wilder Self

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by David Stalling
I do not go into the wild
to find myself.
I go there
to lose the self
I’ve been carrying.
The schedules,
the names,
the small machinery of certainty,
the voice that believes
everything must be measured
before it can be loved.
Out there,
the mountain does not care
what I call it.
The river does not ask
for my interpretation.
The wind does not arrive
as scenery.
It arrives
as something older than me,
something that enters my body
and rearranges what I think
I know.
That is what the wild gives.
Not answers,
but a different kind of knowing.
A knowledge that comes
through cold water,
through dust in the lungs,
through the silence before dawn,
through the sudden movement
of an animal that never needs
to be seen by me.
I have learned
that wildness is not a backdrop.
It is not a photograph
we carry home.
It is not a trail sign,
a designated boundary,
a word stamped on a map.
And wilderness is not truly wild
because we have decided
to protect it.
Sometimes we protect a place
until nothing unpredictable
is allowed to remain.
We give the mountain a name,
the river a number,
the forest a management plan,
the animal a population count.
And somehow,
in our desire to save the wild,
we forget to leave it alone.
I have felt the difference.
I have stood where the human world
begins to fall away
and something older takes its place.
No audience.
No explanation.
No promise
That I will come back unchanged.
Only rock,
weather,
fire,
water,
sky,
tracks disappearing into snow.
And that strange feeling
that I am not standing
outside nature at all.
I am inside it.
For a moment
I am not a visitor.
I am not a tourist.
I am not even separate.
I am breath.
I am hunger.
I am fear.
I am food,
I am animal.
And the wild looks back
without needing to know my name.
That is the experience
we are losing.
Not simply forests.
Not simply wolves,
grizzlies, rivers,
mountains, or deserts.
We are losing
the part of ourselves
that remembers
we belong to something
we cannot control.
We keep trying
to make the wild safe enough
to consume.
To photograph it,
name it,
package it,
sell it,
manage it,
bring pieces of it home.
But the wild was never meant
to be possessed.
Its gift is precisely
that it refuses us.
It refuses our certainty.
It refuses our control.
It asks us instead
to become small enough
to listen.
And perhaps that is why
I keep going back.
Not because the wild
belongs to me,
but because every time
I enter it,
something in me
that civilization taught me
to silence,
begins to speak again.
The mountains remind me
that time is older than ambition.
The river reminds me
that movement does not require
a destination.
Wildlife reminds me
that they do not need our permission.
And the silence,
the silence tells me
what no book ever could:
I am not separate.
I never was.
I am not here
to conquer it,
to preserve it as an object,
to stand above it
and call it beautiful.
I am here
to belong to it.
To walk far enough
into the unknown
that I remember
what I am.
To let the wild
make me wilder.
To leave some places
unmapped.
Some rivers
uncontrolled.
Some mountains
unconquered.
Some animals
unseen.
Some silence
unbroken.
Because perhaps
the greatest act of conservation
is not to keep the wild
for ourselves,
but to leave enough of it
alone
for the wild to keep
something of us.