Cultivating the Wild Inside
Getting in touch with our humanity starts with remembering that we’re wild, too
“Mom, can I play Minecraft?”
The afternoon was unscheduled, open, gloriously free. I had no reason to tell my son no. But I didn’t want to say yes. We’d just been up on the little ski mountain that sits above our town, indulging in a skip-school ski day with my father.
If the mountain had been foggy, which can cause disorientation and sometimes severe vertigo, or if the snow had been sticky or icy, or if it had been windy, the snow cutting our faces like needles, or if my son had fallen down hard and badly, then soothing the afternoon with an hour or so of Minecraft would have made sense.
But none of those things were true. It had, in fact, been one of the most perfect days I had ever experienced. It had snowed all morning but not hard. There was no fog, a rare thing on our lake-adjacent ski hill.
The light was like nothing I’d ever seen before. A cloud inversion lay below us, smothering the valley, but up high the sky was clear and the sun bright. A ray of light that glowed without fading, like a ground-level sundog, followed us all over the mountain. Looking through it, we could see every particle of snow as it flashed through the light. A sublime day, a day the…
