Stagtine, 3. Introduction: I Am

An Introduction to Stagtine.

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Introduction: I Am

I have a story to tell you. But first an introduction, something I think you will find useful on the journey ahead but also something that I give you permission to skip entirely if that is your flavor.

What you hold in your hands is a record of the land and its four-legged cousins speaking to us. A journal of their gifts, a schoolboy’s scribbled attempt to recount their tutelage. It can be read as an undomesticated memoir or a mystic fable, that is your choice.

Where you place it on your library shelf is also your choice. It can be cordial to the likes of Tolkien, Livy, and Doerr, their stories and linguistic prominences wrapping, like a fine gift, the deeper narratives of change, or perhaps next to the lost druidic fires encircling the leaden story stones of The Mabinogion. If you have a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, perhaps you can place them together? Osmosis is a magical thing and the Brothers have so much to give.

Regardless, this tale is concerned with everything too small for industry, too humdrum for capitalism, and too localized to do any good in your environmental projects. If it does anything, I hope this work illumines who you already are and what you already know, awakening in you a fervor to meet cows like Paddy and Nelly and goats like Mara. Not me. God, what an awful waste that would be of the precious time you have left. 

I only hope this memoir or fable or whatever you decide it to be carries their thoughts, their wisdoms, fine enough. It invites you to open your eyes, to look, to see life as they, at least, know it to be. This is not a paradigm-building book. This is a spell-breaking book. And I have a story to tell you.

The Nature of Wildness

In some general sense, stories are both grounded in and transported by characters. They are neat or untidy symbols that point to various aspects of ourselves or our world. They also wave to us, signaling to come, to look, to see, to inhabit their story, making it, slowly, our story. Closing the book, we awaken to new life, for the story that we thought was the book and its characters and its world now walk amongst us in ours. The veil between worlds is torn when we wake up. That is the power of story.

Of all the characters in this particular story, I submit “Wildness” as our faithful protagonist. She is, I believe, the autonomous acceptance of the basic conditions as they are. She is presentness. Many take possession of her spirit to describe that which lives over there or beyond that hedge or fence. If you follow their path, you will find yourself where you do not want to be. Stuck, forcibly but kindheartedly, in the muck and mire of her womb. Others capture her and force her to lead wilderness walks as if she can only be found if you pay her to guide you from your suburban and consumeristic lives. 

Wildness is who we become when we accept life as it is and not push for life as it could be. Wildness is found in the present and the autonomous acceptance of the magic that is here, in this moment, waiting for us. We will explore this idea at greater length throughout this book.

It is improper to leave this moment without observing the general hilarity that our language contains a word for wildness or wilderness. Like its synonym, the environment, wildness as a word is worthless in the truest sense, as it is worthless to describe the air as blue or a wafting white when we all know that it is not a color at all and every color at once. I use it in this book, alongside the term rewilding, of which I have the same opinions, painfully but purposefully to bring us together and not because I like it. One day, we will call this “life” and that will be good enough. Until then, “wildness” is here with us.

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