wild places
When I asked my partner to listen to this track I told him the song was brand new and I didn’t know where it came from. almost implying it had manifested of its own volition. But upon closer inspection I realise that the ideas behind this song are years in the making, arising at the intersection of a number of threads I’ve been following.
A couple of years ago a friend introduced me to a song that I instantly loved and when I started digging to find out more about the song, I came to love it even more.
The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris is a book written to revitalise the vocabulary of the natural world. When the Oxford Junior Dictionary started omitting words to describe the natural world, it sparked a public outcry from those who recognised the importance of keeping these words alive - of keeping the human connection with the natural world alive.
Evolving from the book, a group of musicians took the poems, or spells as the writers call them, and put them to music. It is one of these spell songs – The Lost Words Blessing – that I learned to sing with friends a couple of years ago.
More recently, I have been reading Wild Places by the same author, Robert MacFarlane, who writes about his investigations on foot – going out into the natural world to find out if there are indeed any wild places still left in Britain or Ireland. I love his attention to the details of the living world through which he steps. His language is considered and invites wonder by simply noticing the presence and aliveness of place. He mentions unnamed landmarks and speaks of places ‘unmarked on our map.’
Living in a small town in the centre of Australia I sometimes forget that our everyday outlook is very different to many others on this planet. My life is very domesticated in many ways, living in an affluent country, but there’s still an edge to the lifestyle here that reminds us that we’re never too far removed from the wild. There’s the big open blue sky for starters. The quiet and space that stretches out into the surrounding terrain. There’s also the bush trips out to remote places and the privileged insights to local Indigenous knowledge whose connection to land and place runs deep and is still very alive. More recently for me, there’s been trail running out through the outlying mountain ranges.
I have also just started reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. Published almost a decade ago, I am very late to find my way to her words. And it makes me question why it has taken me this long to start to really open my eyes to the reality of climate change. As Klein herself writes ‘I remember the precise moment when I stopped averting my eyes to the reality of climate change, or at least when I first allowed my eyes to rest there for a good while.’
Klein, sadly more ahead in her thinking than most of us, realised that in order to step up to meet the planet’s fast changing conditions, it would require a paradigm shift in how we think.
“For any of this to change, a worldview will need to rise to the fore that sees nature, other nations, and our own neighbors not as adversaries, but rather as partners in a grand project of mutual reinvention.”
There’s a hopeful feeling in this song Wild Places and that’s perhaps what has surprised me most, the reason why I told my partner I didn’t know where the song came from. Where does this feeling of hopefulness come from? It comes somewhere from the juxtaposition of reading Klein talking about no longer being able to close her eyes to the reality of the situation, that a radical rethinking of how we approach our place on this planet is necessary, and a realisation that some kind of solution, I believe, must come from embracing that we are a part of the wildness of this world and not separate from it.
Wild times we live in
Wild lives we’re living
We live in wild places
Wild songs we’re singing
Wild dreams we’re dreaming
We live in wild places
Wild places, give me
Wild places
Wild hearts with wild minds
With wild lives in wild times
We’re living in wild places
We breathe in wild
We sing in wild
We live in wild places
Wild times we live in
Wild lives we’re living
We live in wild places
Wild songs we’re singing
Wild dreams we’re dreaming
We live in wild places
Wild places, give me
Wild places
