Wilderness part deux

 I'm watching Simon Reeves in the Congo jungle he's looking at Bonobos 

I'm happy to see them.

The jungle looks uncomfortable with biting insects

and swamps

Someone, a friend from Hungary

Said she'd gone to live in a rainforest

I volunteered today on a disused railway track near Shepton Mallet

It was a bit of a wilderness

Oak trees growing

Just nice to look at the trees with moss on them

We put up a dog fence to stop them running into the private forest

Which you can look at but not touch

I wonder if we create these private wildernesses

Here, where you need to have money to own or experience 

wilderness

For myself to have the privilege of experiencing it

I must volunteer for free

To build a road essentially for people to pass through the wilderness

Probably because we need to walk in nature

More than anything else

We need to do it

But essentially Wilderness in this country is privately owned

I think that essentially I'm part of a middle class attempt

To declassify the countryside

But really it is a reclamation

of an industrial road

It had a societal or manufactural function

It also had a commuter and tourist function

It brought communities together.

Whether there was any true wilderness there,

I don't know

It was probably all farmland for hundreds of years

what makes a wilderness?

That it has never been in contact with humans

Because certain tribes have contact with deep jungle territories

Therefore it is not wilderness

However, that it is not in contact with the wider world

Perhaps is more the point 

She's gone

 She's gone

The day is done

Who won?

Who lost?

 I've forgot

she's a ghost

It's just

I wish

I'd known

And was free from

repentance

Or guilt

She's gone

There's nothing more to lose

I saw a cloud

Pass by

And a trail in the sky

Say

I could choose

But it's not me

It's not my mind

It's my heart

And there's nothing

but the blues

She's gone

Now I have to 

turn her

loose

Marguerite

 Marguerite your light is so unique

You're like a beacon shining on mountain peak

Marguerite when I'm in darkness

Then it's your light I seek

Oh thank you from the bottom of my heart

Marguerite

I once was walking down a road

I didn't know my beginning

I didn't know where it goed

But I fell into the wayside

Like many a fellow before 

But you always pulled me up

And set me in good store

So thank you

Wilderness 2

 Trying to write about wilderness is like trying to look at your backside in a mirror

You know it is there somewhere, but you just can't seem to see it.

I think wilderness exists in the mind

It is the other

Sometimes the strangers of a town are the wilderness

Sometimes the people you know in a town

Are a wilderness too

But often we escape into nature to get away from society

A forest walk or along a hill top can be freeing

It's not wilderness exactly just away.

Perhaps true wilderness is being separated from civilization

And having only nature

I've felt very free walking in the Blue mountains on my own with just a bottle of water in my rucksack

I met another hiker some hours later with his backpack full of water and he thought I was mad to be walking with so little water.

I suppose if I had a good knee I would be doing that again,

But I've broken it and now the idea of being away and relying on

my body to run or walk enough without extreme arthritic pain

means I don't want to consider it

garden of Eden

 Wilderness in the garden

Taming the garden of Eden

The garden is really the closest thing most of us get to the wilderness

The fact is if left unattended the weeds grow over us and we have to fight to survive

So even outside our front door we have wilderness

We really, when we are older or frail, rely on others to fight off the wilderness.

There is an interesting paradox here, in that peace of mind can come from order

And yet to throw yourself into the wilderness of forest or jungle with near abandon is also

freedom and freeing.

Though of course you need to learn or know how to survive. And it is only human to try to bring order out of chaos. Even these tribes in the Amazon are sweeping up and keeping their homesteads clean and tidy and there is order in the community. To think otherwise is delusional and I'd say too much the basis of green or hippy thought. You cannot function as a society on such an individualistic basis in my opinion. 

You go into the wilderness to escape people and find people living there. They live in more harmony with nature though. I only want to live and be around real nature not just agricultural lands but Scotland and mountains. And forests. 

So dark

 Am This road ain't no E7  good

Am This road leads to E7 doom

Am So dark, G7 so dark, C so dark

Get off it while you still can

We don't need to follow the caravan

It's so dark, so dark, so dark

This road leads nowhere

This road leads to despair

So dark, so dark, so dark

Well I never knew your name

And you never needed mine

And if someone is to blame

Blame it on my heart

It's so dark, so dark, so dark

Well if you want to follow the light

Well you should learn to fight

But just keep your dreams in sight

while it's so dark, so dark, so dark

Bat my cricket

 Will you cricket my bat

Or bat my cricket

If you pull down the battens

Or mount upon the cricks

When the clouds turn to patterns

When the dusk turns to pitch

have you ate a bat, have you bit an itch

Have you blacked your cat

With the paint of a pinch

Or salt and peppered the wicket

Made all the cricketers sneeze

And fall over their white picket fences

Down upon their knees

Is the umpire of empires

Finally a sleep on the breeze

Because the silly mid is off

On his

Holidays in the land of sunny seas