In search of wilderness

Are we always in search of something other than ourselves?

Why is it that society builds itself into a huge necessary machine of convenience and survival but then individuals go off in search of simplicity? The first time I found myself in the desert I felt something like deja vu, a feeling that I had been there before, a homecoming of sorts. I couldn't shake it. As I soaked up the heat, the golden dust and acacia trees, the kopje and the small lush green plants that sprung up in the driest of places, I felt a deep connection reignited, a familiarity. As though all I was seeing was a treasured memory from childhood or some distant life. It was recognition. The strangest moment of this recognition was during a track, in which we were looking for signs of elephant and rhino. I saw a pack of baboons, loping away from the loud motor of our car and the swirling dust it kicked up, and felt as though I had been in that moment before, I had seen the sight before, it was like a memory thrown up in sepia.

Seeing wild elephants was even more overwhelming. Watching the silent grey ghosts blend into their desert environment was more powerful than recognition. I was flooded with a feeling I couldn't explain or describe at first. Later when I thought about it, I realised it was a feeling I had once had in a very old church, which prior to being a church had been a pagan sight of worship. I felt something stir in the depths of my bones, something which made me feel tiny and insubstantial yet at the same time a solid part of history and place. A feeling of awe and interconnection. I have never been a religious person, I would rather believe in science and nature than a man-made god, yet the feeling I had in that church was best described by a religious word: reverence. For me, it had nothing to do with god, but everything to do with a realisation that something beautiful and inexplicable existed outside of my own small experience. In this case, the wonder of a herd of African desert-adapted elephants moving their way through a landscape they knew inside out, a place they could fight for survival in, by living completely within and of the land. It made me realise I live in a bubble, a small boxed world (a box house, a box vehicle, a box office ...). Everything I use is packaged and seemingly isolated - the connection from food to plate is lost. This is civilisation and a wonderful thing - I don't have to endure burning heat or freezing cold, find shelter, hunt food, make fire. This is a gift beyond belief. Yet did we lose something along the way? A connection with nature?

All this I wondered as I felt the calm of the herd silent as mountains, except for the crunching of leaves and the gentle rumbling as they communicated with one another. This world, so far from the one I was born into, this world seemed like home.