“Wildness is a form of sophistication, because it carries within it true knowledge of our place in the world. It doesn’t exclude civilization but prowls through it, knowing when to attend to the needs of the committee and when to drink from the moonlit lake. It will wear a suit when it has to, but refuses to clip its talons or whiskers. Its sensing-nature is not afraid of emotion: the old stories are full of grief forests and triumphant returns, banquets and bridges of thorns. Myth tells us that the full gamut of feeling is to be experienced. Wildness is the capacity to go into joy, sorrow, and anger fully and stay there for as long as needed, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Sometimes, as Lorca says, it means “get down on all fours for twenty centuries and eat the grasses of the cemeteries. ” Wildness carries sobriety as well as exuberance, and has allowed loss to mark its face.”

A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth & the Grace in Wildness by Martin Shaw, available from Cista Mystica Press (White Cloud Press, 2011; Cista Mystica Press, 2019).