Small Is Beautiful

by Robert K. Olson

While much of this issue is devoted to the "big picture", wilderness around the world, our personal sense of wilderness or wilderness is actually very small, personal and private, but very important. Tennyson said it best, perhaps, when he wrote "Flower in a crannied wall,/ . . . if I could understand/What you are, root and all, and all in all,/I should know what God and man is."

Sig Olson quotes William Blake to the same effect. "To see the world in a grain of sand,/And heaven in a wild flower;/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,/And eternity in an hour."

This appreciation is at the heart of Listening Point and the Listening Point philosophy, stated explicitly in the first chapter of the book. It is at the heart of Sigurd Olson's love of the wilderness. Scan some of the chapters from this and other books to see how many times he refers to this scent, that sight, this sound, the howling of the wolf, the call of the loon, the smell of balm of Gilead, of balsam, and the smell and feel of the earth itself. How he loved the little things, a mouse sliding down his tent in the moonlight, the sound of the rain, the drip of snow melting off his roof in the spring sun. One evening after a sauna, I found him lying face down on the swimming dock, as if he had collapsed with a heart attack. Then he murmured, "I'm all right, Bob, I am just listening to the chuckling of the waves under the dock."

I live in the country, not a wilderness, but among the woods and fields. There are trails around the place but no intruders other than myself. There are places where great old-growth pines, the magical floor of the forest in spring, the private silence of the marsh, speak to me of the old, almost but not quite forgotten old, old world from whence we came. This, five minutes from my house. Yet, is it not what wilderness is all about? I have no need to scale the heights to find it, nor to sail the oceans, nor to lose myself in the solitude of the desert. For me, it is here. It is near. It is now.

In a recently discovered piece of unpublished writing, Sig wrote that when we speak of wilderness values, we do not necessarily mean vast expanses of primitive country. We also speak of small places close at hand, a brushy undeveloped corner with a few shrubs and trees, a patch of grass or bracken, a cluster of wild flowers beside a roadway or trail, a cloistered dell where water trickles down over the rocks. Nothing large or dramatic here, but within them all is wilderness. (1)

This may not be wilderness with a big W, but it is wilderness. Who has not seen the little plaques for sale in garden shops with the saying, "You are nearer to God in a garden, than anywhere else on earth."

Look out for the publication this spring of a book called Voices for the Land, Minnesotans Writing About the Places They Love to be published by Milkweed Press. Twenty-five Minnesotans write about their own special places in a project sponsored by 1000 Friends of Minnesota, which hopes to start a statewide grassroots discussion about land use and development in Minnesota.

It is true, that small is beautiful and that everyone has a listening point of his own somewhere.

(1)(With permission of the City of Duluth, which in 1975 commissioned Sigurd Olson to write the introduction to Volume 2, ?Urban Wilderness? of the Duluth Legacy project, which was never published.)