Longing for Elsewhere, Finding Here
I am somewhere high above London, in the glass and greenery of the Sky Garden, looking down upon a city that refuses to rest. From this height, the streets lose their names and histories and become narrow channels through which vehicles pulse and twist. Cars and trucks move with an urgency that feels almost feverish, like ants stirred into frantic purpose. There is something both impressive and unsettling in the sight—order wrapped in chaos, movement without stillness.
It feels ironic, standing here, suspended above it all, speaking of wild places.
I have fallen into conversation with a young Flemish man I have only just met. There is an ease to it, as though we are continuing something that began long before this moment. We speak of distance, of walking, of the kind of quiet that can only be found where the land stretches unbroken. He tells me of his longing for The West Highland Way, a walk he must return to, a nature walk that is now spoken in the same breath as the Camino, and I speak of my similar encounter with this landscape. We talk about it with a kind of shared nostalgia, though neither of us is there. It is not just the place we miss, but the version of ourselves that walked within it—unhurried, attentive, stripped back to something more honest.
And yet, as we speak, I begin to feel the gentle contradiction pressing in.
Because even here, in the dense machinery of the city, something just as natural exists—if one is willing to look.
Not in the trees or the curated green spaces, but in people, human nature.
The city, from above, seems impersonal. But on the ground, it is anything but. It is crowded not just with bodies, but with stories, lives unfolding quietly behind faces we pass without knowing.
I think of the Chinese men and women in Chinatown, standing with quiet resolve, campaigning against the sale of human organs in his dignified presence. It struck me then how conviction can live softly, how courage does not always need to raise its voice.
I think of the young woman in the Lebanese restaurant, who spoke to us about her PHD and we admired her accomplishment hoping she will find true happiness in this world. Her words carried a tenderness, and also a weight—memories folded into simple sentences. For a moment, the distance between London and Lebanon seemed to collapse, and we were sitting somewhere else entirely, held together by her telling.
There is the night manager at the hotel, who moves through his work with a quiet watchfulness, holding together the fragile rhythm of other people’s rest. And the clarinet player in Paddington Station, who spoke to me of breath and time, of how the sound of instrument changes as the body ages—how something once effortless becomes something to be negotiated, relearned, challenged.
Each encounter small. Each one complete.
And all of it, undeniably, human.
We often speak of wanting to escape to nature, as though meaning lives only in distant hills or along worn paths through open country. And there is truth in that longing. There is a clarity in wild places that is difficult to find elsewhere.
But here, too, there is something just as profound.
Not the quiet of wind through grass, but the quiet revelations that come from seeing one another, however briefly. The recognition that every person carries an interior world as vast and intricate as any landscape. That connection—fleeting, imperfect, but real—is its own kind of wilderness. Untamed. Unpredictable. Alive.
Standing above the city, watching it surge and flicker below, I realise that perhaps the place we long for is not always somewhere else.
Sometimes, it is already here—hidden in plain sight, waiting in the spaces between strangers, in conversations that begin without reason and end without conclusion.
Nature, it seems, has never really left us. It has simply changed its shape.
And I say a prayer for these strangers, hoping we will meet during the renewal. Revelation 21:3,4.
