Reclaiming Wildness
This spring was going to be one of my busiest as a facilitator and trainer. Numerous trainings and client engagements filled my calendar between March and May. This felt good. At the start of 2020, I set an intention to hone my skills. Back to back engagements would sharpen my practice.
With the rapid spread of the coronavirus in February and the disruption of business as usual in March, my calendar gradually, and then quickly emptied. Initially, the void was filled with adjusting to homeschooling and fundraising for movement building organizations quickly adapting to a digital organizing strategy. As my family settled into new rhythms of learning and work, and the urgent needs of organizational partners subsided, I filled any free time with a plethora of powerful online community gatherings, podcasts, and webinars.
Some of this engagement nurtured meaningful connection in a time of physical distancing. Most experiences revealed important insights about what we are facing, how we got here, and what can guide our movement into a shared future markedly different from Pre-Covid 19 times.
Simultaneously, my engaging squeezed out moments of silence and stillness. Moments in which to attune to my grief over the loss of life and livelihood and my anger over the disproportionate impact on Black communities, migrant workers, low income students, refugees, domestic violence survivors, low-wage workers, and houseless people around the world. Moments that may have otherwise been spent listening to my deepest longings for myself, my community, and the Earth and feeling gratitude for the mandate to slow down and tend to what is most essential.
It has been widely reported that as global capitalism’s extractive and consumptive practices came to a grinding halt, the Earth showed signs of restored health. City skies once thick with fumes are blue and clear for the first time in decades. Orcas and dolphins are venturing into seas long encroached by industrial fishing. And silka deer in Nara, Japan and goats in Llandudno, Wales now roam well kept residential streets and feast on manicured shrubs.
As i witness wildlife - living beings who do not question their essence, are guided by their desires, and adapt to changing conditions - reclaiming space, I am attuning to the wildness that is reclaiming the parts of myself that resist change, fear flux, and cling to certainty. In the space opened by a collective slowing down, wildness is rekindling my desires. My desire to live each moment with full presence. My desire to resource my body and spirit with sleep, nutritious food, dance, sensual pleasure, and acts of creation, My desire to trust my intuition, instincts, and evolutionary wisdom when choosing action. My desire to commit fully to whatever actions arise from my embodied consciousness. In this time of enforced confinement, wildness beckons me to vast terrains of my inner life. Terrains of ancestral wisdom, traumatic memories, survival responses, and resilience practices mapped onto my organs, muscles, and tissues.
As wildness reclaims me, I surrender to grief as it convulses through my body. I allow anger’s rushing rapids to roar through me. I sing songs of lament and liberation. I feed on what the Earth offers without inflicting suffering - tri-colored sunrises, the feel of soft moss, audacious blossoms, gurgling brooks, farm grown greens. I listen to and share stories of anguish and resilience. I dance in virtual rooms, with my child, and alone. I descend into subterranean layers of my consciousness and search the darkness to meet my fears and ask them what they need to teach me. I belly breathe and belly laugh.
As wildness reclaims me, my be-ing expands, my connection to all that is wild around me deepens, and i know there is no going back.