anywhere else

1 Commentblog

i just realised
that in my imagination
the wilderness is always somewhere else;
a foreign landscape i actively have to enter
in the act of being faithful.

truthfully,
the wilderness is always where i am
right now
and faith is the courage to stay with it
when i’d rather pretend i am
anywhere else.

1 Comments

  1. Rohan

    My first New Testament lecturer talked about the wilderness as desolate, barren, forbidding … as in the Holy Spirit booted Jesus out into the wilderness for forty days, or the Baptiser in his hair shirt surviving on locusts and wild honey.

    I offered to take my highly-urbanised lecturer bushwalking sometime to experience the alpine wilderness that is teeming and richly vibrant with creation, alternately foreboding and uplifting, unconscious of and largely oblivious to our little human footprints.

    Without the comforts of home and our familiar patterns, we are undone – we become more self-aware, more attuned to the cycles and rhythms of nature, both more self-reliant and more collaborative, more appreciative of a few small comforts, more aware of everything around us, and of our own insignificance in the cosmos.

    Sharing the wilderness with a select few friends gives us the freedom and courage to step out of the every-day, and simply be …

    … and to be incarcerated without hope would tear my mind and corrode my spirit.

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