A 13th Century map shows the whole world radiating out from Jerusalem. The holy city of the Judeo-Christian faith positioned dead-centre… the axis of the known universe.
In 1514, Copernicus suggested that the centre of the universe was not Jerusalem, or even the Earth, but the Sun. Over a hundred years later in February of 1632, at the height of the Inquisition, Galileo published the fact that he agreed with him, and was promptly sentenced to life imprisonment for heresy.
Sailors on Columbus’s voyage to the New World lived in fear of sailing off the edge of a flat Earth. In the 1960’s, NASA published the first photograph of our planet from space – it doesn’t look flat.
Albert Einstein dropped into the heart of his contemporary science like a smart-bomb with his theory of relativity. In 1971, Carl Heisenberg showed that scientific method itself could not be impartial, always being influenced by the humans observing each experiment.
The Enlightenment brought with it ‘perspective’. Lines of sight, followed to their furthest extremes, came to single points of reference. A revolution in art ensued.
History brings with it changes in the way we see the world, shifts in perspective that completely alter our fundamental beliefs, and the consequential ways we live out our lives. Maps change, even though the landscape stays essentially the same – they are interpretations of the world, not the world itself. They are as much maps of our culture as they are of our landscape and every era believes its maps are complete. Satellites beam images to the Earth that are used to draw up contemporary charts – how can this system be faulty? How can this photographic realism be flawed?
Maps don’t trace out smells, they don’t have a certain quality of light, they don’t change texture with the setting of the sun. Maps don’t describe the migratory path of birds, the drift of an airborne seed, the squeak of snow. They don’t sparkle like hoar frost, sting like hail or caress the skin like a dive into cool water. They are interpretations and they have the potential to hide the better part of a wilderness experience by promoting the idea that reality is only paper-thin. But surely it is our era that has finally got the complete picture?
Mountaineer and environmental activist David Brower, once chair of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, would often find himself confronted with a panel of scientists sent to reassure him that a new hydro-scheme, or road, logging operation or agricultural policy, was scientifically sound and environmentally safe. He liked to ask them which of the current ‘laws of science’ they thought would have been disproved in 50 years time. He lived long enough to see this confrontational technique through, and he was proved right. Nothing is for certain.
The moon draws great tides of air across the curved surface of the Earth, in the same way that it pulls the denser, liquid oceans. Through caverns and microscopic soil pores; the burrows of rodents and snakes; the tunnels of moles, worms and beetles; the rotted out hollows of old root systems – freshly ionised air is sucked and pushed, nourishing the planets humus lungs. The Earth breathes. And its great intercostal muscle is the gravitational pull of the moon.
Women who live together often report the synchronisation of their menstrual cycles. On prolonged excursions into wilderness their cycles can also synchronise with the phases of the moon. The agitated mood changes of patients in old-style mental health facilities lead to the term ‘lunatic’, from the Latin ‘Luna’ – moon. Today outpatient admissions increase dramatically on a full moon, it’s a well-known phenomena that even influences the staff rota arrangements in some Accident and Emergency departments.
We are filled with the ebb and flood of or own wildness.
Things effect us – fundamentally – in ways that we in our arrogant technological times, have decreed as irrelevant, unsubstantial. In doing so we have committed to living in a world that is only a thin slice of the reality we could inhabit, if only we’d opened ourselves to the adventurous possibilities brought with humility. It is said that wisdom comes in proportion to accepting how much one doesn’t know.
To live, really live, we have to explore the intricacies of the Earth’s fabric first-hand, we must experience it, engage with it and create a mindscape – a map that cannot be drawn but one that is intuitive and transcendent as well as geophysically informative and navigationally sound. We all build these maps as we journey, but how many of us are actually aware of this subconscious surveying?
This mutli-dimensional, multi-sensory map must be as deep as it is wide or long. And there must be no edges to it, no limit to its depths. The potential for revelatory new detail must be allowed for and we must accept that even a lifetime of exploration is inconsequential in the lifecycle of a universe.
Within this mindscape, the best part of the territory is wilderness. This wilderness spreads out over it’s own distant horizon and meets the physical wilderness that we usually consider to be “out there”. Being wild, as it is understood in human emotional terms – uncontrolled, without constraint, spontaneous, irregular – is about accepting the unknown, the unknowable. It is about the joy of surrendering to the power of greater things.
There is a metaphysical world beyond our material reality. To the Christian, it is the home of God; to the Muslim, of Allah; to the Hindu, the dwelling place of a complex myriad of deities. But to me this place is connected to our physical reality, it can be wandered into – it lurks there at the peripheries of the wilderness.
This is why the wilderness is sacred. It provides the meeting place for our disparate parts. “Out there” the Earth is more physically real, more solid, the consequences of our actions more obvious and yet, in wilderness we drift closer than ever to the oceanic nothingness of pure ecstatic being. “Just to be in the presence of big mountains”, says Sir Edmund Hillary, “is an act of prayer”.
I fix the climbing-skins to my skis and start the meditation-walk rhythm of steady ascent. The sky is white, the landscape is white, my mind comes to the luminescent white of emptiness and I am gone, I have slipped my skin and wandered off the edge of the map.