Leave it Wild

We often think that we are separate from Nature, that it is something outside of us.

I was struck by this paragraph from Gary Synder's The Practice of the Wild and I wanted to share it with you.

“The body does not require the intersection of some conscious intellect to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating, it is a life of its own. Sensation and perception do not exactly come from outside, and the unremitting thought and image flow or not exactly inside...

The depths of the mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I don’t mean personal bobcats and personal psyches, but the bobcat that rooms from dream to dream.”
- Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

The body is wild. So is the mind. We keep forgetting we are a part of Nature. We keep forgetting (or made to forget) that this earth is not an extension of our body.

Why are we so afraid of the wild, of our Nature? What are we trying to hide when we pretend to be civilized? Or that this is civilization?

So separated from the cycles of death, rebirth, ebb, flow, rest, revival, revelation, we have become so disembodied.

My hope is that we can feel into the wildness of our body – this primal energy – reclaim the connection between Nature and flesh, spirit and matter and, as Mary Oliver writes, “let the soft animal of the body love what it loves.”