Perhaps you can identify with a longing for outdoor adventure, a longing to step out of the regular and normal, a deep seated desire to break away from the staid rhythms of quotidian existence.  If so, you are decidedly not alone.

     But you might wish to be.  You might wish to be tromping through an uncharted wilderness area hundreds of miles from anyone or anything else.  You may seek the deepest unknown there is.

     A book published by the Sierra Club in the Seventies chronicled the adventures of two young men as they explored the wild places of the American continent.  Its opening page recounts some words of the late actor Steve McQueen, "I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than any city on earth."

     Put another way, it is this spirit of adventure, this thirst to explore, to topple boundaries, to abandon everything in quest of inner fulfillment that overrides all else.  It captures the heart of the lonely yet determined human pitted against the forces of the distant and remote, the former hinting at meaning, the latter inundating him with it.

     There are many wilds, there are many unknowns.  In focusing on the wilds of the material world, however, it's not difficult to see that in seeking them, we cannot help but find the wilds of another.  Finite creatures wandering in a nearly infinite cosmos, we humans need the wilds of transcendent mystery to really see whom we are.