Lately, I've been reading a book about the puma.  Called variously mountain lion, cougar, and any number of other appellations, the puma is the largest feline predator in the Western Hemisphere.  It is perfectly designed to do what it does, beautifully equipped to stalk, pursue, and capture its prey.  So skilled is it at concealing its whereabouts, so adroit is it at finding its meals, that we rarely see it, even if it is wandering, as it is doing with increasing frequency, in our backyards.
     Some years ago, one night while I was backpacking in the Rocky Mountains, my tent pitched in the shadow of the Continental Divide, I heard a puma come through my camp.  So quiet it was that I barely knew it was there.  But I could sense it, prowling around and, when I assume it had detected prey (not me!), hissing over its fresh kill.  It was chilling, but absolutely fascinating:  the raw beauty of the natural world directly before me (happily, I was in my tent).

     We may be frightened by the thought of a big cat slipping through the spaces of our lives, but I believe that without these glimpses and intimations of wildness, we would be less than human.  We are not independent of the rest of the creation, nor are we beyond the currents of wildness that course through the life of the planet.  It is us.  In a good way.
     God made a perfectly wild world:  amazing and breathtaking and, most significantly, marvelously apart from full human control and comprehension.