Wildish Things

Since before my arrival in Ireland, I've been meditating on the concept of "the wild," inspired by reading Robert MacFarlane's new book The Wild Places, where he explores remaining wild parts of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In her review of this volume in the NYTBR, Holly Morris (author of Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine) describes his work as a "prose map" that seeks "to make some of the remaining wild places of the archipelego visible again. " For Macfarlane, "the natural world swells with meaning." He also describes the "fizz and riot of the natural world.

Once I got to Ireland , I also learned about Wildish Things, a collection of literature by Irish women. It turns out they can be quite wild in all sorts of interesting ways.

There seems to be both an interior and exterior dimension of wildness (also suggested by Call of the Wild, Into the Wild, and Where the Wild Things Are along with many other works of poetry and prose).

One of the delights of a place like Annamakherrig is that respect for wildness and wildish things abounds--whether in the natural world, the inner spirit, or the artistic realm.