In wildness is the preservation of the world… Life consists of wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a ‘sanctum sanctorum’. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. In short, all good things are wild and free.
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home.
Wendell Berry