Status Updates From The Necessity of Empty Places

"The solitude is necessary, the wait is necessary, and it is necessary that you yourself be empty, that you might be filled."

"A mountaintop is not simply an elevation, but an island, a world within a world, a place out of place.”
This goes beyond reconnecting with wildness. It's about making peace with our limited understanding of it.

"It is an odd irony that the places we call empty should retain some memory of the diversity of life, while the places we have filled up grow emptier and emptier."

We go to a mountaintop, or retreat to the desert, or repair to some lonely cove along the wide and empty sea. We are drawn toward wildness as water is toward the level. And there we find the something that we cannot name. We find ourselves, we say. But I suppose that what we really find is the void within ourselves, the loneliness, the surviving heart of wildness, that binds us to all the living earth.

I like the brittle and severe qualities of the places that remain empty. I like life that has braved the odds, made the best of little, come to terms with conditions that frustrate life in general.

We ourselves seldom comprehend the moment at hand. So we turn to history, the one element of our lives it is possible to fix on. Or we turn to principle. Or we turn to nature. There we find, amid the silence and mystery, order and structure, the sense that life is not simply random.