I created this blog to explore what it means to be living on the edge of the wild.

We all are, in some way, living on the edge of the wild, either literally or figuratively, whether we know it or not.  We all are standing at the edge of some great unknown, exploring what it means to be human in a more-than-human universe.

We encounter the “wild” not only in the natural world, but in ourselves and our daily lives, if only in our own strange dreams, our own unruly minds and rebellious bodies, our own inscrutable families and weird and wonderful pets.

We encounter the “wild” at the edges of science, the arts, and human consciousness.

I began my exploration into the wild quite literally, when our family was living aboard La Gitana and traveling around the world for six years. It became starkly apparent when I was sailing across the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by nothing but the sky above and the sea below, that I was living on the edge of something primitive and uninhibited, vulnerable to potentially terrifying forces that could rip us apart or swallow us whole. And yet those very same forces are what filled our sails and moved us forward, and what cradled us below, harboring in those depths the creatures that astounded us with their beauty and power.

I came to appreciate in the most intimate way how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in the natural world that surrounds and supports us.  We are indeed living on the edge of the wild, the largely untamed and unknown world into which we are born, exploring the borderlands that lay between the human and the more-than-human worlds, and the ways they overlap and mirror each other.

Now that I am again living on the edge of the wild in a home bordering a nature preserve, I find myself re-exploring those borderlands:

• Not only through my encounters with the wildlife and natural habitat that now surrounds me, but also through reflecting upon those years living at sea.
• Through my writing, plunging below conscious thought into that unruly wildness that harbors all manner of terrifying and astounding creatures to capture on paper.
• Through the books I read exploring the edges of science and the human condition, pushing the envelope on all manner of frontiers.

What’s really interesting is how often those explorations into the wild begin with seemingly mundane observations, ordinary sights and sounds, that caught in the right light, reveal something extraordinary.

This blog was created to explore those borderlands with others.  I hope you will share your thoughts with me on these and other topics.

• In what ways do you live on the edge of the wild?
• What borderlands are you exploring?
• What envelopes do you think need pushing?