Meeting the Wild Within

Connecting in from an Urban life

No matter where you live, there is some nature to connect with somewhere within reach. If you look for it, you will find it, and it is in fostering that connection that it begins to grow. What commonalities do you share with that plant? That spider? That blade of grass? In what ways are your experiences of life shared? If you don’t know, try zooming in. You can do this in many ways, but one is through an intentional meditation where you focus on something in nature. Keep your attention soft and receptive. Invite in curiosity as to the relationship that exists between you both. Deeply listen. The rational mind is not your friend in this process. Suspend disbelief. Journal what comes. Repeat this process for a time. 

What you attend to really does begin to augment in your life. This is indeed incredible and mysterious, and it is also evidence-based quantum mechanics. 

What are you paying attention to?

Are you seeing the half-empty glass or the half-full one?

You truly are creating your own reality with how you engage with the world around you. You are that powerful. Unconscious habits and stories are the only enemy. Invite curiosity in. Keep a beginner’s mind. What do you really know about this great mystery that is your one precious life?

Within and Without

When we connect with nature without, what we are essentially doing is re-membering the wilds within. It is to this re-membering that the Amazonian Arts speaks, for it is the antidote to the disconnection that has brought so much suffering to ourselves and all our relations.

"Bone by bone, hair by hair, Wild Woman comes back. Through night dreams, through events half understood and half remembered...”¹

Living in Sacred Relationship with Nature

A few days ago, I heard a different sound in the orchestra of life from our kitchen, and following that, I picked up a baby yellow-cheeked honey eater that needed to be moved back to its parents. I listened to some dingo pups being disciplined by their parents, watched an antechinus run up the inside of our bedroom cob cottage wall with her baby on her back, and shortly thereafter saw a Stephens' Banded Snake follow her up and into the roof. Another snakeskin hangs from the roof outside where a different owner shed it on route the same destination, and I discuss with my neighbour an unusual, banded python we both saw on the side of the road a few days before. This week may be dominated by snake stories, but such stories of close encounters with nature are not out of the ordinary. I live off-grid and interface daily with the natural world in ways I am aware are not the average experience in the modern-day world.

Yet how did I get here? For I began with an urban life too. I deeply believe it was because I changed what I was attending to. Many of us have been told a story that separates us from the natural world. Perhaps it stems from those fateful biblical words that spoke of dominion over the natural world… or perhaps it simply stems from a long and lasting slumber from which so many of us are now awakening.

What if you knew you had a choice in this very moment? A choice to take a different path? A choice to focus your attention on a different story? And what if I told you that in so doing you will begin to weave yourself into a new story. One in which you awaken to your deep and sacred relationship with the natural world of which you are a part of. One in which you will attune to the symbolic and spiritual language of nature that will inform and enrich your daily life in unimaginable ways. Science tells us that everything is interconnected. What if you understood that to mean that there are no coincidences? That everything is deeply, sacredly interwoven and infused with intelligence and meaning?

A rose blooms on our veranda and sprawls towards our front door, I feel her reaching in, connecting with me, inviting me back into my own wilds within …

¹Estes, C.P. (1992) Women Who Run with the Wolves. Rider; London, UK.