What did it mean, to truly love the wilderness? And yet, there was a time when the wilderness became terrible to me. Like the poet Arthur Ficke, I was “in love with high, far-seeing places.” The wild country was beautiful.
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Free time was spent in the wilderness, backpacking and canoeing. I chose to live more than 20 years of my adult life in the West. Thank you for being a part of the Minerva community. We are proud to feature the following amazing contributors in this issue of Minerva Rising. Read your way through bear hunts and canoe trips and strawberry fields, and after you have read this issue, get outside and find your own unclaimed corner of the world.
I urge you to strap on your proverbial hiking boots and let the words of our contributors take you on a virtual tour of their various and sundry definitions and incarnations of wilderness. Wagner’s tribute to a neighbor’s child and close family friend who died with his father in a car accident deftly and dolorously touches on themes of memory and, in the poet’s own words, the “great struggle to reclaim something that the ground took.” Grief is a land that must be explored alone, though it is the loneliest wild place of all. I think that’s what most parents want to achieve: raising children who are free to live and grow and soar without unnatural boundaries, without exceptions.” Julia Wagner’s poignant “Elegy for a Young Boy” explores another realm of wilderness altogether, the wilderness that is life after life. It examines “our own deficiencies in the wilderness experiences” when she writes: “I suppose that’s one of the reasons I followed Polka and Dot so closely-somehow they had overcome the burden of captivity and produced something wild, something truly free. A pair of owls that live in a birds of prey center in Oregon become a metaphor for our own captivity in “Reintroduction” by Mary Heather Nobles. The Wilderness issue of Minerva Rising captures the many lessons learned from nature. The wilderness challenges you to not depend on what you thought you knew about yourself and life but to be open to new ways of seeing. But there is also healing and self-discovery. There is no doubt that the wilderness, both external and internal, can be dangerous.
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