On Sunday I will be 60 and I’m feeling a sense of bewilderment around that. It’s a strange time. I’m full of anxiety, fear, immobility, paralysis: about my life, about our political and existential crises, about the survival of our planet. And at the same time I’m wondering about this ‘bewilderment’, what it might mean to ‘be wildered’.
On the beach today I found a stranded guillemot and was advised by the RSPB to help it back into the sea. As I held its beating body in my hands I felt its mysterious aliveness, felt again my yearning to know and to be known to ‘the wild’.
I wanted to know what was right, what was needed. I wanted to know the unknowable. I don’t know if I did the right thing, I don’t know how injured the guillemot was, whether it will survive. I have to accept this not knowing, to become able to bear it. I have to learn how to live in this painful place of knowing so much and at the same time knowing nothing.
