I went out early this morning, as I’m wont to do, to visit the Little Wilderness.

Go out from the town, out past the smoke stacks, and turn off the road, walk past the farm house, fjord the stream. Cross the dead ground and climb, climb up through the slime slick timber piles, worm up along the decaying caterpillar tracks, long colonised by lichen and gorse, climb up into the remains of the plantation, splintered limbs and smashed logs strewn amongst the heather, half submerged in mud and pond scum, arboreal echo of the Somme.

Keep climbing, up over the top and into the wilderness, a false floored warren of marshland, rotten wood and tall grasses, wild flowers and native mosses run riot over sterile economics.

Skirt the fairy circle growing amidst the Firs and Rowan, sit down, close your eyes, and breath.

You come now into something joyous, a tiny twisted patch of life, a spark of the real lurking in the banal.

I love these places, the older I get the more I find myself seeking them out. The older I get, the further I recoil from everything I have been told I should value, the more convinced I become that the wilderness is the only thing worth anything.

What is wilderness?
Wilderness is that that exists neither having nor seeking purpose or justification, that which needs no permission to exist, I think it is more a state than a place, a quality most often found in nature but not of it alone.

Nature is not inherently wild, and the countryside definitely is not wild, it isn’t even natural.

Agriculture is not nature.
It seems stupid to say out loud, painfully obvious, but it is a fact worth repeating. The countryside is an environment as ordered and artificial as the city, just one marshalled to different purpose, one I prefer to the city but spiritually just as polluted.

There is very little wilderness left in Ireland, even the national parks are bisected and invaded, bent to serve economics. Some remains in the night and on the coasts, in those places too difficult to reach or tame to be useful, but most of what is left to us is left in the gaps between the world of men, in the flooded fields, the abandoned buildings, the waste ground.

Little crippled riots of life, existing without reason, needing neither purpose nor permission, lopsided yet fully formed. Beauty in squalor.

The fallow commercial plantation I am writing in, now colonised by native saplings and moss, the tiny slices of ancient rainforest invested by farmland, guarded by foxes and ivy and biting flies, the little anarchic copses that rime the stillborn lakes and captive marshes, the birds roosting in abandoned buildings, in nests of pilfered hay and cast off plastic, the frog spawn jiggling in the rusted mine cart, the dragonflies patrolling the effluvial streams shot through with fertiliser and antibiotics.

These are the little wildernesses, living samizdat, messages from the earth we’re killing.
They are wild in that they are unthinking rebellion, gifts for the world choking them to death, little pockets of hope forever dying and living in the dying.

These things, the flowers blooming from polluted streams, the weeds breaking up through sterile concrete, all of these futile gestures are beautiful.

There will come a day when these little riots will be all that’s left of nature, and then a day when they too will be repressed and recede, and then nothing will be worth anything.