Wild Places

There are some wild places around here.

Sometimes I think there’s a lot less separating what’s real and what’s fantasy than we might believe.

Just as mind-body dualism is an oversimplification of what it means to be, “real-fantasy” doesn’t give credit to the complexity of our existence.

We have infinite, entire worlds created by creative minds, turned into words, stories, books, paintings, movies, video games. Are these worlds really just “made up?”

Sometimes created worlds are real enough. Even if the actual characters of a story don’t exist physically in our universe, they exist within us, within every person who brushes up against these worlds and stories.

Real or not, their stories inspire us, delight us, change us.

There are some wild places inside us.

Why is fantasy so appealing? Is it for the escapism, the imagination? Or because something about it connects with something in us?

I love the real, external world, there are some fantastical places within it, incredibly real stories from incredibly real humans overcoming and growing and sparkling their way through life.

Real life can be pretty wild sometimes.

But I love the wild creativity of imagined worlds as well. These fantastic worlds can be just as real to us, the only difference being these worlds exist internally, they come from within. Someone wrote the words down, yes, but as any writer knows, these created characters, these imagined worlds take on a life of their own.

We are more wild than we think.