for R

"...We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud. More. We are animal not only in body, but in spirit. Our minds are the minds of wild animals. Artists, who remember their wildness better than most, are animal artists, lifting their heads to sniff a quick wild scent in the air, and they know it unmistakably, they know the tug of wildness to be followed though your life is buckled by that strange and absolute obedience. (“You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star,” wrote Nietzsche.) Children know it as magic and timeless play. Shamans of all sorts and inveterate misbehavers know it; those who cannot trammel themselves into a sensible job and a life in the sterile suburbs know it.
What is wild cannot cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth. Wildness is the universal songline, sung in green gold, which we recognize the moment we hear it. What is wild is what drives the honeysuckle, what wills the dragonfly, shoves the wind and compels the poem. Wildness is insatiable for life; neither truly knows itself without the other. Wildness is the luminousness of a bluebell wood at twilight, massing clouds boiling up their rain, the weed that cracks the pavement and the river that floods its banks, the creeping jenny run riot. It is the first “fuck” on television, it simmers in the feral intoxication of jazz, it explodes exuberant in carnival, it honks with laughter in the magic-mushroom season, it smashes the clocks above the factory gates and sucks up the now, it blazes in your eyes and it glories in everyone who wilfully goes their own way..." ~ from 'wild: an elemental journey' by jay griffiths