Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth —Mary Oliver

ne of the four axiomatic intuitions that buttresses Edgewood Wild is the understanding that learning to love the Living World That Sustains Us is a necessary first step toward Gaian Reconciliation.

As the Pandoracene continues to deepen, spurred on by climate change and its profoundly reformative exigencies, Edgewood Wild imagines a time when young people begin to take up the age-old practice of personal vision quest, a rite of passage common to many Traditional Cultures around the world.

While personal vision quests can in principle be practiced by anybody, their efficacy requires, at a minimum, acceptance of the fundamental meaningfulness of nonhuman life and the powerful agency of the Living World over the unfolding of human destiny.

In this one sense at least, we are fortunate to be alive at a time when the biological sciences are shedding new light on the nature of life, not least including our own – a time when a way begins to open for reinstatement of an age-old relationship with the only world we’ll ever know.

Taken together, the themes developed in this section are intended as a kind of primer to intimate engagement with the Living World at a time when the predominantly command and control approaches of western culture are coming increasingly into question.

Next up: Speak to the What?