I spent a night in Ashdown Forest, sleeping in a hammock, woken up by owls, foxes, woodpeckers, small unidentified creatures rustling. Over this week, we are passing through the Perseids meteor shower, so there were shooting stars above. It felt precarious, free, uncomfortable and joyful.
Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o write “New forms of wildness call to us on all sides, whether in the form of odd weather patterns, inventive forms of political activism, new classifications of the body, fluctuating investments in disorder, or a renewed embrace of the ephemeral. But, at the same time, wildness has a history, a past and, potentially, a future… Like another problematical term — queer — wildness names, while rendering partially opaque, what hegemonic systems would interdict or push to the margins.” (Halberstam & Nyong’o, South Atlantic Quarterly, 2018).
Today’s prompt is to write your wildness – the raw, bloody, free, visceral, unrepentant, violent, wise, tender, quiet, scared, ferocious heart of yourself. You might do this by writing yourself in an unexpected or precarious situation. You might write a fight. You might write a trap or a hunt or a relationship with someone else wild, or something else very tame. What is on the edge of you? What is it you can only hear in the 4am quiet before dawn?
My response: I wrote about need, how not being needed is a kind of release, and the relationship between need and wilderness.
sl grange 