Wild

I laid in my bed, caught in that sweet reflective space somewhere between waking and sleeping. Through my mind danced images of the cottage where I spent my summers as a child. It was rustic and simple, built by my grandfather’s hands many years before I was born. The unfinished walls were covered in chipboard–a thousand shapes I imagined into silhouettes of stags and fierce bears and mountainscapes as I drifted off to sleep in the foam-covered bunks. The sandy sunroom, the heart of the cottage, was the place where I spent the opening and closing hours of the day: quiet, dewy mornings heralded by the cooing of mourning doves; and late, sun-weary evenings thrumming with the buzz of mosquitos.

The hours in between were spent in a suspended eternity, trudging down the gravel road–always barefoot– to the long, splintered staircase through the woods. It, too, was crafted by my grandfather, and here was a point of pride: like a monument, or a place of historic importance, it stood as the only access to our piece of Lake Huron, a gift to all the many cottages and homes claiming that part of the sparkling coast. Winding down the lake-soaked stairs through a cathedral of dense green, we were spit out suddenly into the bright sunshine and gritty welcome of the lake. Here, we spent hours tanning our bodies golden brown under the rolling waves, wading out to sandbars, resting in the white-hot sand dunes. When we were too tired to swim–or perhaps too hungry– we made the return journey, picking our way over the sharpest parts of the gravel road back to the cottage.

At night, we gathered around the rusted metal fire pit and watched the dancing flames against the brilliant black star-filled canopy of night. We sang old songs, camp songs from another generation and another era. We huddled and heard stories, or listened in the hallowed silence to the crackling fire. Those nights were magical and somehow outside of time.

There was a wood stove in the center of the cottage, but it was rarely used. When winter came and the cold Canadian fingers reached Lake Huron, my grandfather dutifully turned off the water, pulled the curtains, and closed the cottage down against the snowy months.

As happens in time–children and grandchildren grow and move away– the cottage became too much: too much work, too much distance, too much. And so it was sold, in all its rustic beauty, to a new owner. The buildings around it, once simple cottages and rough retreats, had changed with time, too. One by one, they had been finished, winterized, polished into fine homes with all their wild beaten back. Such would be the fate, too, of my grandfather’s cottage.

It was this thought that I turned over in my half-dream state, and the utter sadness of it. The memory, the beauty, the thing that made me love the cottage so very much was the outright natural wildness of it. The sand that permeated everything. The rain falling hard on the uninsulated roof above me. The woodchipped walls with their infinite pictures. The cold, cold mornings, and the sweltering nights. It was a building that stood as it was, as it was made, with all the unfinished nature of its being celebrated. It was wild. And in all of these places, I saw my grandfather’s fingerprint, his handiwork and intention for the cottage on full display.

Some things ought to be wild.

My thoughts wandered to those places in my garden where I always seemed to be at war: the leggy weeds that grow proficiently amid my flowers; the climbing vines cascading stubbornly over the fence; the twisting tree that grew up almost overnight, it seemed, from a runner I neglected to pull. I spend myself beating them back, exhausted by the effort of keeping the wild at bay in my little corner of creation.

And why? Sometimes, when I withdraw from my battle to survey the battlefield, I’m forced to acknowledge that these things are beautiful. In their own wandering, stubborn way, they are beautiful.

Like the countryside around my city, raucous with trees and vines and wildflowers, a garden more varied and suited to its own place on this planet than anything I could plant and cultivate. As though God himself pressed his fingerprint into each space, marked its purpose, filled it with all the things he imagined it should have.

And that’s just it: it was in the wildness of the cottage that I could see my grandfather’s fingerprint and intention. And it’s in the wild places of my garden and my surroundings that I see God’s.

When, I wondered, did I first believe that only the cultivated, cleaned up, neatly lined and sterilized places of my life were right for God? When the places God makes for himself are wild: tumbling, cascading, raucous, exposed, chirping, climbing, plummeting spaces. They have an order and an orderliness of their own (each element knows its boundary, each held in check by the laws of nature). But it is WILDNESS that God creates.

And so, what of the wildness in me? Those places where my imagination runs free? Where my character tumbles over itself, uncultivated and uncensored? My passions and lust for adventure? My audacity to believe for more, and the racing pulse that confirms the belief? What about my wild spaces?

Could it be that they are the fingerprints of God? Or at least, that God can be met in the wildness of my heart to trace the intentions, the real vision, he had for me?

Perhaps, sometimes, we are too cultivated. We think we must be sober and serious before we come to him, tempering our emotions. We assume we should reason and intellectualize and logic our way through life and faith. We plan sensible paths for ourselves, full of safe decisions and grown-up choices. There is room for the cultivated and civilized, to be sure.

But sometimes joy should be uncensored. Sometimes wonder should consume us. Sometimes we should dream dreams bigger than ourselves, reach for stars beyond our own reach. Sometimes we should marvel at the wildness in ourselves, the fingerprint of the builder, and fall asleep imagining shapes of what could be on the chipboard walls of our hearts.

Some places should be wild.

Because it’s the wild, unfinished places that truly show the fingerprint of their creator.