Wild and Domestic
Experiences of the homely and unhomely, and two pieces of news
I spent last weekend in the woods. With a group of friends, my sons and I camped near the Buffalo National River in northern Arkansas, enjoying some spectacular hikes and the sound of the river at night. It’s been a long time since I spent much time in such a wild location, and while that came with some drawbacks—sleeping on the ground gave me a crick in my neck I’m still recovering from—I felt invigorated by the experience. So much of modern life centers around my comfort and convenience, that it’s a kind of bracing pleasure to spend 48 hours somewhat cold, uncomfortable, in a place without cell phone service or much in the way of creature comforts.
At the same time, time in the wild carries with it, for me, a certain desolation, an uneasiness. The wilderness produces not just physical discomfort, but a spiritual discomfort as well. I am human and adapted to human things. In the wild, I can never feel fully at home. Late in our second night on the Buffalo, I lay awake in the dark with my sons breathing heavily beside me. The moon was nearly full and so the night did not lack for illumination; I could hear the river softly running over the rocks. Three trusted friends slept nearby in their own tents in the same campsite. I felt as safe, comfortable, and at ease as I could have in such a place. And yet, staring at the roof of my tent, I felt exposed, alone. I was out on a rock alone, left behind by all that is human.
I like the countryside and I like the wild. I want to spend time in these lonely places. And yet it would seem that no matter what I do, as Robert Frost put it, “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.”
News item no. 1: A week from today, I will be part of a panel discussion on Thoreau’s Walden hosted by Gracy Olmstead, along with my friends Jeff Bilbro and Ashley Hales. If that sounds interesting, please join us on Zoom next Friday at 11:00 AM Central. It should be a fun conversation.
I want to think here a bit about the wild and domestic, about how we human creatures make ourselves at home in the world and simultaneously feel pulled back to the wild. Wendell Berry has written a wonderful essay from which I have cribbed my title, in which he argues for a reversal of the usual sense of these terms: that “we, the industrial consumers of the world, are the wild ones, unrestrained and out of control” whereas “The so-called wilderness, from which we purposely exclude our workaday lives, is in fact a place of domestic order.” I am far from disputing these conclusions, and in fact tried to find another title in order to avoid the association. Alas, the title stuck. All that to say that I commend the Berry essay to you and endorse his conclusions.
However, I want to consider a different sense of the term wild. Where Berry defines it as “out of control,” I think my experience on the Buffalo suggests another sense we ought to consider. Let’s consider the wilderness not as a place that is out of control, but as a place where human beings are, in some fashion, not at home. For all we may become expert in the wild, and for all that the wild does indeed have its own domestic order, as Berry points out, our species has long made around us a habitation. We dwell in houses made by hands, open clearings in the wilderness, and establish our workaday world as something carved out and made human among the wild. We make gardens. Principally, we dwell in places that are partially if not entirely human-conceived.
These human domestic habits have their problems, as Berry and other ecologically minded thinkers have long pointed out. I recognize these problems and insist, with such thinkers, that the wild ought to come more into our domesticity than it currently tends to do. Yet I also feel that we are justified, to some extent, in making and seeking out homely places in which to dwell. We are soft-bodied creatures and culture makers, formed (as Berry elsewhere has it) “of mud and light,” made to dwell one with the other.
Yet, as I alluded to in my opening, we also need to experience places that do not place us at the center. Time in the wild reminds me that the world is not made to my specifications, does not revolve around my comfort. Such experiences can be lonely, disorienting, unpleasant; they are also bracing and clarifying.
News item no. 2: I’m excited to share that I am contracted to publish my first book, entitled Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden, with Belle Point Press in 2024. The book will consist in part of essays drawn from this newsletter, revised and amplified, as well as much new material. I look forward to sharing it with you. In the meantime, this development (along with the other usual chaos of family life) has meant and will mean that you won’t see as much from me here at the newsletter.
Making a garden can be, ought to be, a means of bringing the wild and domestic together in our home places. The most grand and meticulously planned garden, managed to within an inch of its life with chemicals and tillage and exotic plantings, will never fully eliminate that humble outpost of the wild in its midst, the weed. Similarly, even the gardener who seeks to restore the native ecosystem and avoid human intervention altogether will, by so doing, make a change in the place that orients it toward human use.
So humans need—and indeed we find it impossible to escape—both wild and domestic as regular presences in our habitations.
This time of year also reflects our need to bring together the homely and the wilderness. We bring these experience of landscape into our seasons, the better to explore within ourselves those desert places. Christmas is a domestic season: comfortable, homely, and oriented around Christ’s coming to dwell with us. (Certainly the contemporary American expression of the holiday tends more toward being wild in Berry’s sense: out of control.) Walking up that season, however, we endure the wilderness of Advent, a time when we anticipate the last things. Advent is not a comfortable time—it ought to make us feel somewhat exposed, not at home. Even the liturgical seasons, then, testify to this polarity in our natures.
This weekend, I have some garden work to do: I will do some pruning and transplanting, shaping my shrubs and my planting to make the garden a more homely, livable place. But I will do so in the cold and the wet, my fingers and the tip of my nose growing tender. The work will be, as all garden work is, a hint of the wild and domestic. Work done, I will go indoors to turn off our lamps and light the Advent wreath, those flickering flames a glimpse of the unhomely in the heart of domesticity.