The Lost Yonder

The yonder is the perennial space the nomadic mind travels towards, the untrammeled horizon beyond. In the exalted realm of our imaginations, the yonder is the inscrutable frontier that can never be fully tracked down or captured. It wants to always recede and remain a distant spectacle. It wants to be itself, at peace with its peripheral position. Once the yonder ceases to be itself, it becomes that which is easily won. It is lassoed by the intellect. It is then denuded of its power and presence. It wilts. It fades.

Because we have constructed tall, stately buildings and congested cities and have become lost in the catacombs of civilization, we have lost touch with the yonder in all its elusive, multidimensional facets and forms. We have sequestered ourselves in rectilinear structures, and we bathe in a fluorescent world of flickering lights. The celestial yonder and the yonder that shepherds the vanishing horizon have lost their important and paramount positions in our media-saturated lives. We’re now enchanted with the technological ephemera of culture. We’re held in thrall by cheap thrills, scandals, stolid politics, and all that bric-a-brac. The yonder, alas, has taken the back seat to bills and television programs.

The loss of yonder brings about the loss of depth, and the loss of depth brings about existential crises and a whole slew of psychological neuroses. It must be said that the depth of things doesn’t only pertain to the vertical dimension of existence. The depth of things is perceived and felt in our very own horizontal and sensorial field of immediate awareness. As David Abram poignantly explicates in his latest book, “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology”:

“Depth is the visceral stretch between the near and the far of things—the continuum, or glide, between the known and unknown.”

As soon as this “visceral stretch” is sundered from our immediate awareness, a light goes out within us, and so does the light that illuminates the grand scope of microcosmic and macroscopic happenings. Life turns into a chore, a bore, something that resembles stale plastic. Life loses it capacity to mystify and enchant us. Then the world becomes a claustrophobic space devoid of synchronic wonderments. Life also becomes devoid of wonder itself, because wonder is, after all, a type of kinetic and etheric energy the imagination hunts for in the yonder itself.

A return to the yonder foments a much-needed return to the roaming self, the inner nomad, the wizardly itinerant. Sanity is found in this return. Harmony.