In "The Moral Equivalent of Wildness,"
Moore writes of taking her Philosophy of Nature class into the wilderness, to experience wilderness and wildness and to talk of them, of what they are and why we - as humans - need them in our lives. Yet she recognizes that it's an error to pre-suppose wildness "is something we find in the mountains and don't find in the valley, something we might transport from nature into culture, from wilderness to town, from far to near."
"Doesn't the moon rise over the sororities," Moore says, "when it rises also over the howling hills?"
"Maybe wildness isn't something we need to bring down from the mountain," she suggests.
"We are wildness - soil, water, oxygen, sunlight," she says. "It's all there."
The question may not be "how can we bring wildness into our lives?" The question may instead be:
"how can we remember to notice the wildness in every sweating pore, each stewed carrot, every solid step, the morning air noisy with rain, the reeling stars? Or maybe the question is: How can we live as if we were in the wilderness, with that same respect and care for what is beautiful and beyond us?"
One of Moore's students, with a wisdom not usually given to undergraduates, at least not when I was an undergraduate, said: "Wildness is a kind of silence, and silence is wild. You can bring silence down from the mountain, or you can find it in youself - either way. The importance of silence is that it allows you to hear." Although this Philosophy of Nature class, camped out in the wilderness as it was, still "had a lot of material to cover" at that point in the discussion, Moore assented: "Maybe this silence was our most important material."
And to some extent, I agree. One needs silence. And I agree silence need not be defined as something outside ourselves, any more than wildness is something outside ourselves. The secret is not so much going to wilderness as it is paying attention. If we pay attention, even the humblest pebble has much to teach us, even the merest grain of sand can take one's breath away. We value wilderness because it so readily transports us beyond ourselves. We recognize wilderness as "awesome" because it so readily draws awe from us. Yet if we choose to live an attentive life, if we choose to notice anything and everything in the ordinary world around us, if we learn to look and to see intensely, the beauty to be found in even the most ordinary of things can transport us far beyond ourselves.
As they sat at the fire, someone in Moore's class asked "everybody to hum a note and hold it. Doesn't matter what note. Just start to hum and don't stop." And so they did.
"Everybody hummed their own note, and it was a crazy, discordant chord we made. But gradually - inevitably - the voices tuned themselves together into a rich, beautiful, lingering chord. In the wild night, in the firelight, the students' eyes were bright with tears."
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Continued in Part Five, below....
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