THE HOPE IN WILDNESS By Andrew Hidas “In God’s wildness is the hope of the world,” wrote John Muir while tramping through Alaska on a long mission to meet that hope on its own terms. Not to snub the majesty of perfect sunsets, Muir might hasten to add, but is there a nobler expression of divine engagement, of a super-charged world ripe and overflowing with portent and awe, than a severely blackened sky followed by lightning cascading across its canvas? Or even in suburbia, biking in a hot…
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*Why do I always feel, when I am meandering about in the mountains, so wildly free and self-possessed, and at the same time so puny and insignificant? Does the vastness and majesty of the setting release some heretofore unknown chemical that allows me to settle contentedly into my niche as a speck of cosmic dust, desiring nothing more than to exist in this moment of plain clarity and calm? These are questions the naturalist John Muir may well have asked himself at age 30 when he nixed an offer of a partnership in an Indiana machine shop that made wagon…