It’s funny. I mean, I very rarely subscribe to YouTube channels or anything and, even when I do, it is normally for just a week or so before, like the fictional Federation explorer, Captain Kirk, I fire up my starship, abandon any temporary distraction that may have captivated me and, instead, activate my warp drives and head deeper out into the online universe of Youtube in search of new alien content.
But no longer because Wildbeare’s down to Earth channel now holds me in its orbit, being a sparkling gem of a production that broadcasts a polish and a patina that always seems to delivers way more than the sum of its individual parts.
So, yes, in a first for me, with the intention of subscribing and staying, I am thrilled to appreciate I am now joining a community of over 320,000 like minded souls who already enjoy the many human layers and levels the channel effortlessly explores and radiates. (It is fascinating to appreciate that so many subscribers would fill the UK’s Wembley stadium 3 times over)
*Solar Camping Under Northern Lights*
_”It feels so profound to me_
_The vastness of the human experienced_
_The burden that we carry as emotional sentient beings_
_To feel. To care … sometimes too much.”_ *Wildbeare*
Yes. And just like your own bewilderment while viewing the ethereal beauty you witnessed at Eryri, sometimes the wonder, the mystery and the unfathomable terror of the unknown can be unsettling; _though would we wish things to be any different?_
Not gonna dwell on it, (and life is fab, thanks), but I have inoperable prostate cancer and time is finite so, sure, although I’ve always been a passionate and inspired individual, easily capable of becoming profoundly moved by even the simplest or subtlest expression of nature, these days, my lens upon the world has become a searing, searching magnifying glass where I see and experience everything at a far higher resolution.
*Escape Or Arrival?*
With home being a little coastal market town in West Dorset, I’m currently documenting and physically visiting all of my county’s mysterious ancient iron age hillforts, standing stones and henges along with other sites of archaeological interest including an unscheduled Anglo-Romano villa site where I’ve been plucking Roman coins, brooches and pottery shards from the soil for over 40 years!
Whenever the farmer’s tractor deep ploughs the rich mineralised soil, I find Roman coins by eye, being the first human being to view the image of a Roman emperor staring back at me in nearly 2000 years; from an age when Jesus Christ himself was, allegedly, alive and handling exactly the same, now ancient, coinage.
*Gratitude*
Wildbeare’s own adventures, often out in some spectacular ancient landscape framed or bathed in the light of the stars of our own Milky Way, earths so easily with my own sense of belonging to this little spinning rock we currently call home and I find myself pondering, “Am I exploring the mysterious and oldest corners of my ancient Dorset topography as some form of an emotional escape from my ails? OR am I, rather, aligning myself with a primeval, innate, natural sense of just “being”, and in that process, emotionally arriving at a sacred location or place or space in time that requires neither a token, a name or any kind of a label to explain or define itself at all?
_”To live through fear, trauma, pain and loss_
_but also to love and be loved_
_To achieve things both big and small_
_To feel excitement and wonder_
_To be able to experience and appreciate unspeakable beauty_
_what a convoluted, messy and wonderful thing it is to be alive”_ *Wildbeare*
Ah, but we need such stark contrast, Claire.
We need such context and conflict because, in the same way we may need salt to act as a backdrop on our tongue to appreciate the taste of our food, we need the conflicting contrast of good & bad or dark & light or life & death to deliver us a calibration and meaning to this convoluted, messy and wonderful thing we call life.
Whether it is you experiencing the discomfort of your “floppy joints” or me experiencing one of my own occasional “challenging days,” we need the negative aspects of existence to be present in order to even be able to evaluate the blessings of the gratitude we sometimes find ourselves humbly accepting at certain times in our life.