The air is filled with car horns and smoke exhaust pouring through the car window from a rusted truck. Inching down the highway, sweat trickling down your back, the asphalt heats city tempers well past their boiling points. Arriving at the office, you sit before a window into a pseudo universe, a computer screen you loathe to touch. Prepare yourself to think in ones and twos. Stop.
Pick up “Wild Moments” by Ted Williams. Open the book before the screen flickers green and on. For a moment allow yourself to be lulled away into a compendium of fabulous glances at the natural world. “Wild Moments” is not a book to be read straight through, but more like a text of meditations, to be opened between those stressful activities humanity has constructed. This book allows you to slip into a moment, a wild sojourn to feel briefly as if you are there experiencing it. Ted Williams brings to life an earth un-stifled by concrete and city noise, and opens our inner child’s eye again to the amazing truth of the natural world that has become for many of us a fantasy.
“Wild Moments” inserts with some gravity the reality and complexity of the natural world, calling on human experience to shed light on unique and fascinating topics. During one reading you may open to fall and find yourself lost in a passage constructed of wild impressions; “When the yet-snowless woods are silent save for the rustle of southbound wings and brown leaves clutched by oak fingers. One tends to notice crows.”
While in yet another reading you find yourself in springtime discovering the wondrous cholesterol reducing affects of Leaks. Yet despite the wonder, you feel the reality and texture of “the blood of the great bear” as it was killed and know what it is like to walk through the crackling leaves. Williams performs a remarkable job in blending the material and the predominantly human world with that of the natural world, allowing those of us who simply want to take a break, to meditate on anything but the false idol on our desk.
Now get back to work.
