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Into the Wild

Author: Tracie M MacMillan
Year: Adventure

I began taking solitary summer evening walks in some nearby woodlands at a time when I had heavy thoughts weighing on my mind, threatening to break me. Walking alone in an attempt to recover my sanity had felt a little daunting at first, but in contrast, any worries I did have, soon dissipated as I walked, inhaling the clean, fresh air, infused with a light fragrance of pine and I knew this was where I needed to be.

Looking up at the early evening sky overhead I was almost dazzled by the vastly pigmented azure and sapphire blues, colours so intense I felt like I could drown in them. Back on the ground, the fiercely yellow blooms scattered along the pathway I walked, also prompted in me a sense of calm – as they gently swayed in a soft breeze.

This was no garden of Eden, however. Wild and overgrown and even dangerous in parts, but it strangely enticed and intrigued my senses. Sometimes a light rain would fall and everything would become drenched in a damp dankness. Leaves on trees would become heavy with and bowed in the rain. Reign indeed.

Occasionally I would stop along the way to listen to some nearby birdsong, connecting in a curious empathy with the flirtatious symphony of joy. I soon realised that my solace was coming not from my solitude, but from the wilderness around me. I never felt more connected to the sounds and scents of nature, the earth under my feet and the wild around me. It was in those beautiful moments, I understood that this connection was what was helping to make my own heart truly sing.

The walking was healing. It was exhilarating, and it was not long before it became something to eagerly look forward to. To anticipate with a childlike excitement, and I began to record the joys I encountered on my walks in words as a precious reminder, to look back on in the future in a little journal of personal reflections called “Into the Wild”.

As winter approached however, the weather made my walks a little less suitable and I found myself contemplating another void that I felt and that’s when I began to look and listen for you.

You. The person who would sing that same song of joy back to me, that would fill my heart with joy, on those days when I cannot find it myself. You, the person that would understand how wild is my best colour, as the wind blows through my messy, tangled hair.

And it was there that I found you.

I realised as I took your hand in mine, that it was you that could feel my heartbeat and you that already feels my words and hears my soul. You had been there all along. You just don’t say it in the eloquent way I had expected to hear it. But I felt it, I feel it. Our words may be different but it’s during the storms in our lives that you take my hand silently and together we dance in the rain.