We were walking as a family through one of the canyons of Purnululu – I feel like the word ‘profound’ captures but a gram of the place – and it seemed the right place for a dose of the peace of wild things that Wendell Berry so aptly captures in his poem of that title.  This particular canyon was the kind of place that if you tried to absorb and observe the grandeur, you’d simply never leave.  The canyon walls are made of some kind of sandstone embedded with river stones – those rocks that take so long to become smooth and rounded.  Small ferns and trees cling to ledges in the canyon walls, spiders cast their gentle webs across cracks, and the calls of tiny birds reverberate as they flit from tree to tree.  No camera can capture it and my descriptions are inadequate – you know the kinds of places – they can only be experienced.  Whatever your position on how these things came into being, a reasonable, common response is one of humbled amazement.

Presented with this deep beauty, I leaned in, ready to bathe for a while in the peace of wild things.

The challenge was that we were walking as a family, with four kids under the age of thirteen.  The eldest’s current obsession is cars, and he regaled me with how cool it would be to race something (cars, bikes, anything really, provided it was fast) through the narrow canyon.  The second – a newly minted twitcher – was giving a rather detailed run-through of a new bird seen the previous day.  We’d spotted it together, but she felt it best to retell the story to everyone who had been there with her, and in doing so, scare off any birds we might see in the canyon.  The third child wondered out loud and sought my expert opinion on what kind of machinery would be most suitable for digging future, similarly sized canyons – and how much dynamite did I think we would need?  The last child ached every ten steps or so for a lolly break and advocated quite loudly and regularly to that effect, but – to his credit – said he was willing to settle for a dried apricot should I be open to negotiation.

I love my kids – they really are wonderful people – but I may have loved them a little less at this point.  They were getting in the way of my peace of wild things, and I channeled a nameless someone who – at what could only have been similar, regular points in my own childhood – once declared: ‘Oh, won’t you just blow-up and bust!’

I settled for something like an angry: ‘Oh, won’t you all just grow up and quietly enjoy this place!’

In the minutes that followed, I was reminded of Jesus’ words that, ‘Unless you become like one of these children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.’  I pondered that instruction with a generous dose of frustration and a pinch of anger as we continued to wander up the gorge.

But – not surprisingly – he’s right.  My kids (perhaps excepting the youngest at this point in the walk) were enjoying the canyon.  They just weren’t enjoying in the way that I wanted to enjoy it – turns out there’s more than one way to walk a canyon.  You can aim for some profound experience of peace, or you can dream about races, birds, machinery and lolly snakes.  Canyons can be places of serious contemplation.  But they’re also ripe for ridiculous and wild wanderings of the imagination.

So I attempted to enter into their ‘childish’ playfulness, and saw the canyon in a different – dare I say – equally important way.  Life doesn’t need to be – shouldn’t be – all serious contemplation.  We need times of recalling detailed beauty – remembering the plumage and colouring of the birds from yesterday.  It’s good and healthy to long for and enjoy treats or yummy food.  There should be space for adrenaline rushes – hurtling towards rock-faces or blowing them up.  Turns out that the kids weren’t the one with a problem: I was the one who needed to grow up to be more like them; imaginative, playful, wild.  I needed a piece of wild things, kid-style (with apologies to Mr. Berry).

Well, we got to the end of the canyon, and an unforced silence settled over us while we snacked on those much-longed-for apricots and drank in some of the beauty and grandeur that the canyon generously offered us. And – with a childlike wonder that I also need to learn – our youngest son interrupted the silence at some point with a quiet and unprompted, but fitting: “Thank-you Jesus.” 

We rode imaginary motorbikes back down the canyon stairs, jumped tumbling boulders that exploded under us and needed heavy machinery. We pretended that we had discovered a brand-new species of bird (keep an eye out for the lottian bergsmacus, it’s a quiet but sweet little bird), and made it home to a sumptuous meal of ten hundred thousand kilos of lolly snakes that don’t give you belly-aches. 

And I didn’t lose out on the peace of the wild things, for in amongst it all, I felt that too.