Ah, adventure, unemcumbered adventure.  Amidst the personal pilgrimmages that marked the Sixties in the West, many people sought to find their peace and meaning in venturing into remote and wild places.  On the Loose, a compendium of thoughts, reflections, and meditations on the virtue of wildness and all things apart, written by Terry and Renny Russell, two then college age students, appeared in 1967.  Published by the Sierra Club, On the Loose celebrated the joy of adventure.
     Its opening page contains this famous line from James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:  
   

"He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

     Joyce captures the moment perfectly.  To be alone, open, questing, and alone before the raw forces of existence, to have the moment to step into the wonder that hovers ever before us, the storehouses of marvel that existence holds.  To seek, to simply seek with no thought of what will come, only that it will be something other than now.

     As we move towards Thanksgiving in America--and remember similar days around the world--we think about the gift of life, the unrivaled astonishment of sentient existence and all that it bequeaths us.  We ponder the essence of what it means to be here, alive, moving, breathing, living--and dying.  And we pursue the spirit of inquiry and journey, the many opportunities we have to step into what life most deeply means.

     Some years ago, I read a book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God.  An atheist, Ehrenreich nonetheless found cause to wonder about what the Celtic religions called the "thinness" between this world and any others that may exist, that we perhaps live in the midst of a very slender boundary of immanence and transcendence.  I cannot disagree.  Moreover, as I re-read On the Loose, I find even more reason to do so.  The Russells offer us the greatest mystery of all:  why do we want to be free?