| wə’THin | preposition - occuring inside the range of something.
Within
“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
- Edward Abbey
Within
Discover The Wild Within
Our motto is built on a deep sense of responsibility to ourselves and to the ecosystems we inhabit.
We are all born with a curiosity about the world. As we age, our brain develops patterns. We learn the ‘hows’ and the ‘whats’ of life. We learn how to make money or to find a mate. We learn what happens if we do X or instead do Y. Often, the more we learn, the more our curiosity diminishes. Our questions about the world turn into statements. Question marks become commas. Commas become periods and periods become exclamation points. Before we know it, we are entrenched in the pattern of the familiar and the wilderness of curiosity that was once within us has been exchanged for the tidy hedgerows of certainty. Travel wakes us up. It removes us from those patterns and reintroduces us to the wilderness within us.
Having a close encounter with a lion or an elephant often serves as a gentle, but significant reminder that we don’t always have all the answers. Every morning in Africa is a new chance at breaking the pattern of the familiar and doing something which evokes the childlike spirit of curiosity we were all born with.
At Wildland Collective, it is our hope that we can help our guests navigate the wilderness around them, but also within them. We want to help our guests understand that the wildest landscape we will ever walk in is the landscape within us. There is always more room for discovery.
The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently. The new is always by definition unfamiliar and untested, so God, life, destiny, suffering have to give us a push—usually a big one—or we will not go. Someone has to make clear to us that homes are not meant to be lived in—but only to be moved out from. Most of us are never told that we can set out from the known and the familiar to take on a further journey.
-Richard Rohr