| Do you read the The Sun? This month’s issue (April 2007) features an interview with author John O’Donohue. I love what he has to say about wilderness:
“Sometimes you see a beautiful woman who quickens your heart. Then you meet her again years later and she’s become a domesticated relic of who she once was, and you think Where is the dangerous vision I saw in her? The same happens to men.
I think it is more interesting to be with somebody who still has his or her wilderness territory – and by that I don’t mean bleak, burned-out, damaged areas where wounding has occurred; rather I mean genuine wilderness.”
- John O’Donohue interviewed by Diane Covington in The Sun, April 2007
I’m wholly taken by this idea of wilderness as an inner, human state. But what’s he actually talking about? What’s “genuine wilderness” to a human? Aren’t humans, as social animals, domestic by definition? And why is wilderness desirable? Is he talking about sex? The forest? Danger? Mystery? Instinct? I’m not sure. Curious though.
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