Wilderness. The name conjures up exotic images of remote mountain peaks framing glacial lakes, or endless sand dunes undulating under sirocco skies. Beauty and solitude amid red-clawed nature. Life, but wild-er.
But wilderness can also be an interior landscape, one not fulfilling travelogue fantasies. Wilderness can be a fallow, hollow time defined by the ragged footprints of tedium, lethargy, confusion, and immobility. In this scenario, the senses feel dull and homeless and bored stiff.....stiff like a cadaver, stiff like an unyielding old oak in a rising wind.
This unglamorous version of wilderness is where I currently find myself. In between vocational clarity, betwixt health and wholeness, sapped of life by death . . . I am a sailer on the open sea, caught in the doldrums. The doldrums was originally a nautical term:
"The doldrums refers to those parts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean affected by the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a low-pressure area around the equator where the prevailing winds are calm. The low pressure is caused by the centrifugal force from the rotation movement of the Earth which is most important at the equator, which makes the air rise and travel north and south high in the atmosphere, until it subsides again in the horse latitudes. Some of that air returns to the doldrums through the trade winds. This process can lead to light or variable winds and more severe weather, in the form of squalls, thunderstorms and hurricanes. The doldrums are also noted for calm periods when the winds disappear altogether, trapping sail-powered boats for periods of days or weeks."
These are the days of scanning the horizon for any breath of Spirit. There is only one way out of here. An oar is of no use.
