#jay griffiths

The human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not.

I was, in fact, homesick for wildness, and when I found it I knew how intimately—how resonantly—I belonged there. We are charged with this. All of us. For the human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not.

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshakable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

After a dodgy 2018 and a slow start to this year I’ve managed to hit my reading target with three and a bit months to spare! Bit of a mish mash but I spent the most time with Byron and Anne Carson, so can’t complain! Definitely need more novels in there though.

If you take people out of their land, you take them out of their meaning, out of their language’s roots. When wild lands are lost, so is metaphor, allusion and the poetry that arises in the interplay of mind and nature.

This was the calling, the vehement, irresistible demand of the feral angel—take flight. All that is wild is winged—life, mind and language—and knows the feel of air in the soaring "flight, silhouetted in the primal."

I was walking up a bracken hillside in Wales recently and a horse picked its way nervously towards me and then stopped. I turned away from it not to frighten it, and waited. I could not hear its approach on the soft and fertile earth but suddenly I felt its breath on my neck, where my sweat curled up from my collar and my hair smelled of wheat. It sniffed me for ages and did not leave. It filled me with rapture.