As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I spent the last part of July and early August traveling and hiking in the American West.  One mountain range in which I hiked was the Sawtooth Mountains in southern Idaho.  The Sawtooths are a small range, tucked away in a part of the U.S. to which most people do not go, but offer many opportunities for wildness.
     What's wildness?  Opinions vary, but observers agree that, at the least, wildness is a sense of the wild, rugged, and unknown, of being in the presence of forces we cannot fully comprehend, of walking through a region of space and time whose essence we as finite humans cannot totally grasp.  Wildness, most say, is essential to being human.  As technology becomes ever more pervasive in our lives, we need moments in which we relinquish control of our surroundings and instead let our surroundings control us, times of utter surrender to the mystery of existence.
      Indeed.  Whether we make our starting point faith, religion, expectation, virtual particles, nothingness, or anything else, we all do well to accept and embrace life's inherent mystery.  Though we can certainly learn much about how life arose and how it works, we will not ever know, really, "why" life is.  We have it, we experience, but we do not really know why we do so.  We're just here.  Wildness reminds us of our inadequacy and contingency.
     Wildness also reminds us of our place.  It's no accident that the natural world has generated massive spiritual speculation through the ages: its power should make all of us gasp at the magnitude of the forces that shape existence.  Whether we attribute this to a creator or to impersonal powers is not so much the point as that we should recognize that we, all of us, have an inherent bent to seek our cause and meaning and that, if we are honest, we will admit that, given the fact and power of wildness and its essential ubiquity in the human experience, we cannot do so without considering cause's metaphysical mystery.