The Wild Things
Saturday, August 31st, 2013
I wasn’t even sure how I’d gotten there. I just suddenly seemed to find myself in the very dark forest, sitting over and softly playing my drum, in the cold late-autumn rain, and crying…
I must have wandered out of my apartment and down the path, across the road and long parking lot, and into the woods. I must have finally let my body lead me to exactly what it so badly needed. The wild.
Up until that moment, if you had asked me what was wrong I couldn’t really have told you. It was my first year of college and you would think that living on the most forested campus in the state would have sufficed, but apparently living in the close quarters of student housing after being spoiled by years of living on a magical island was crushing my spirit. That was the night I decided to move off campus as soon as possible, and I did.
We are all wild creatures. We, for the most part, have just been tamed. We thrive on the wild, it is the currency of our life force, our passion, our soul. And I don’t just mean the wilds of nature, though that is one way to return to and nourish the wild within us. I mean the wilds of the body…you may feel it when you dance with total abandon, experience sexual ecstasy, swim in the ocean, or do anything creative that involves your becoming completely absorbed and completely free in the moment.
At some point, as a child, we knew this abandon. We really got upset when we got upset. We really got excited when we got excited. We ran, we jumped, we threw our hands around and shouted, and sang, and always cried hard when we really hurt. And then, one day at a time, we were made self-conscious (in a negative way.) We were told (or threatened) not to cry. We were told it was embarrassing to get too excited. We learned to hold it in and play it cool. We stopped running wild over the open fields and stayed within fences. We may have even learned to look down on others who ran free. Sure, maybe some of the people who run free make mistakes or aren’t truly free, but that can be true of anyone. The big question is about whether or not you are too afraid to take the chances that matter…
Not that I don’t understand why chances seem like a luxury one can’t afford. When life gets hard just getting out of bed in the morning or making sentences feel like massive accomplishments. Someone like me even suggesting that there are more ways to be free may feel like just another pressure, another way you aren’t doing something right, another unreachable goal or even a cruel joke. If that’s the way you feel, even just on certain days or at certain moments, I have a story for you…
There once was a princess named Innana. A princess who was, inside of herself, already a queen and even already a Goddess. She was born in pure remembering, an embodiment of the Queen of Heaven. And she was also a human girl. She already contained the all, but would go on to become even more.
One day, before she was crowned queen, she was walking by her favorite river where she loved to walk nearly every day. It was always golden there. The light made everything glow, and she was always happy there…at peace with all in the universe. On that one special day as she walked the shore, she saw a strange shape ahead of her on the sand. Soon she could see that it looked like a plant, or a branch, and as she came closer it revealed itself as a small tree that had been uprooted somewhere, carried along by the river, and brought to her. She knew the tree was for her…that it was a sign of a coming time of power and beauty in her journey. It glowed in the golden light like everything else, but more so. It’s leaves were at once green, then purple, then silver, as they turned in the breeze. And right away she loved her Huluppu Tree.
She planted it by her beloved river in her most special place and it became her very favorite spot. It was where she was when everyone wondered, “Where is our beloved Innana?” And because she loved her tree so very much, every day that she tended it, it grew a year’s growth…it stretched and reveled in the love it was given. Innana filled it with her soul so much that a serpent moved into the base of the tree, and a magical bird made a home in its branches. It was even said that the spirit of Lilith lived in the trunk. For all these things were the passion and life force of Innana herself. When she was under this tree she felt only her own magnificence and magic. She marveled at her body and here she fell in love her “wondrous vulva”. For here she could explore herself completely. She had never known such embodied joy.
But the world had already begun to forget the magic that Innana knew. They wanted her to rule as queen and felt that she spent too much time under her Huluppu Tree. And there was no reasoning, ever, with Innana…for Innana knew what others did not. So her family and the others who wished her to fulfill a certain role in the way they deemed “right”, decided that perhaps they could entice Innana back into the temples and the court. They would make for her a throne, and a bed fit for a queen so she would rule and live indoors as considered proper. They decided that they would make them from her Huluppu Tree. Then she could no longer go there, and perhaps would think of the throne and bed the way she thought now of her tree.
And so they sent her brother Gilgamesh with his great axe, to take down Innana’s beloved tree. Innana, who was not by the river, felt a terrible pain in her stomach when the axe first hit. The bird cried out and flew away, the serpent slithered quickly off, and Lilith screamed from the tree’s trunk, her red hair wild, and rose naked into the sky.
Innana knew what had happened. She also knew, in that moment, that it was all meant to be for a greater reason, but her wrath also had its greater reason. She forsook her throne and bed, and all she had known before. She knew an act of such ignorance could only be healed with a greater act of power. She knew she was at risk of losing her wildness, her serpent power, her girlhood, her womanhood, her feminine soul, her animal-self, her wings. Things we all have regardless of our gender. She knew the death of her Huluppu Tree meant just one thing: it was time for her even greater rebirth.
It was this loss that made Innana go where no human had gone and returned from before. It was this act that made Innana become not just the Queen of Heaven, but Queen of the Underworld as well.
She waited until the night fell. She went to the stump of her Huluppu Tree and said the no-words that the tree knew, and it opened the secret stairway to the underworld. Once there Innana would give up all of her adornment, her crown and her clothing, one item at a time at each of seven gates. For one can only enter naked into the underworld. And while her journey in the underworld is another story altogether, know that she faced her own soul death, and her great rebirth. And because the world went fallow while she was gone, for a while everyone once again remembered the importance of the wild, and why they needed a queen who would sit under a Huluppu Tree most of the day, and know herself.
When Innana returned to the surface of the earth, she did so again through the stump of her Huluppu Tree and her rebirth was its as well. It grew back, and the serpent and the bird and the spirit of Lilith returned. And Innana was happy, and more whole than before…
If you are still in the underworld then my talk of magical trees seems pale and painful. But it is only because you have not yet completed the cycle. There is rebirth yet to come, and what is wild in you will return. And no matter where you are in the cycle, which you may have gone through many times in your life, know your wild medicine and grasp and savor the wild moments when they come. When a song you love plays and you lose yourself in dance, as you once did as a ecstatic maenad with moonlight in your heart and honey on your lips. When you are writing or painting or creating anything and you become so absorbed that something moves through you, and you feel at one with pure life. When you find you’ve wandered to the edge of a dark forest with your drum, in the rain, to cry.
I know we’ve been taught to button it up. Not to speak up, not to get too emotional, not to upset anyone. We’ve been taught not to live too large, laugh too loud, or experiment freely. We’ve been told to calculate the risk right out of everything, though that’s impossible. We’ve been led away from the Huluppu Tree, but know that even that has a reason, and when you return you will find your serpent writhing with life force, you will find your free bird, and you will find the unruly, untamed spirit of Lilith still living in your heart.
For when we who carry the secrets of the Huluppu Tree become untethered again, uncaged and unbound, the world will be filled with the golden light that makes everything glow, the blood-red pulsing river of passion to quench the dry deserts of passionlessness, and the embrace of the wisdom and pure, beautiful power of the underworld. This is the balm for the world of people who have lost energy, lost direction, and lost soul. Just trust that if you are in the dark of the underworld now, you are on your journey and its gifts are vast. And if you are simply marking the days, ask yourself what really lights up the fire of your heart, what does the animal of your body lean toward, what makes the lamb within you leap and the lion within you really roar? I know that choosing a more wild and free life involves so many steps, choices and moments. I am only encouraging one…after the other. Just let it begin with one. Like Innana’s one choice to plant her Huluppu Tree. Just notice the offerings that come up on the shore of your river, and see what speaks to you. It may just be that you pass some wild blackberries, and when you lean in to pluck and place one in your mouth you really taste it. You let its flavor explode like a sun-warmed purple ocean of bliss. And if the first one is bitter you try another, or wait. Ripeness always comes.
Love, Jennifer
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When the Owls Call…
Friday, April 12th, 2013
It was late. I had just gone upstairs to my special room and let my body down onto my yoga mat. It always takes courage to meet the floor that way…to meet with everything you are feeling so fully. Everything throbbing in your heart, hiding behind the corners in your body. It all comes out, and you meet with it. And on days when you are sore, when either your body or your heart aches, and sometimes both, it is especially courageous. It was one of those days for me.
The soft pink lights along the wall in my room took the edges off of everything, and I met with the raw feelings that waited for me, knowing that if I let them in they would soften too, and reveal their secret and wild beauty. That’s why I go. That’s why I’m willing to meet with my pain. I know it has gifts, even if it takes a sweet and terrible wait, a torturous eternity, to unfurl and finally drop them in my trembling hands. But aside from that knowing which helps me rub up against the burning ache inside again and again when it comes, there are other things that speak to me…that have always been the whispers in the Oracle’s ear. Those voices can lead us back to the one that pulses, ever true, from our hearts, and guides us always to come from that place of home inside.
That night, giving up on my yoga mat, I had just sat down when I heard it, right away…an owl calling out to me. It must have been in the trees nearby because it sounded as if it were right outside my window looking in at me…looking right into my heart. I didn’t move. I didn’t even breathe. And then it came…another owl replying. Breathlessly I listened, and there it was…a third owl, far in the distance, almost inaudible, joining in. This is why I put tissues in my ears at really loud dance parties, I said to myself. So I can hear the third owl…
And that’s one of my great secrets. It’s one of the ways I remember and always have. But it isn’t just my way, it’s the way we all remembered. It’s a lost art I want to remind you of. I want you to hear the third owl too.
Luckily I am not talking about your actual sense of hearing, so if you are worried because your hearing is not what it once was, or was never that sharp to begin with, don’t worry. I am talking about something much deeper that can always be reaccessed, renewed and relearned. Because it isn’t just the owls that restored my soul that night that beats strongly in my heart as I write you these words. It was seeing the brand-new eyelash moon last night before it set, suddenly as if the magical realms I have known were suddenly made manifest outside the car window on my way home from the gym. It was pure power, pure truth, pure memory that new beginnings are forever…are now. It was the first time, leaning in to close my bathroom window in the darkness, that I heard the frogs this spring, and in a single moment my soul was revived…a deep underground water was brought to life and flowed in me where I hadn’t known I needed to be quenched, and I felt, beyond what any description could offer, the absolute essence of hope. The promise that we are never alone, even though I hadn’t felt alone before. That’s what the frogs were singing about. It’s what they’ve been singing to me about every night since.
And it was, without any doubt, in the moment my heart skipped a beat because I heard the first buzzing behind me, sitting in the sun yesterday, and turned to find the first honey bee resting on the rosemary blossoms. I felt its bliss, finding nectar, leaving pollen, such perfection in its quest. Such redemption, such fulfillment, such ancient joy. The same quest we have. And I was transported, before I even turned to see it, to that cave on the side of Mt. Parnassus in Greece where I first remember living as a Bee Nymph, and the sweet-honey bliss of every moment. The same sun shone on me and I was not separate from any of it.
What I want to know is, can you feel it? When the moon starts to wax? When she lets go? When the tide is coming in? Perhaps the tide of an ocean nearby, or another kind of tide somewhere in your heart? Do you know when something lights a spark in you and do you let it start a fire? Is it okay for you to burn? Do you hear the owls because you have made a special space and been willing to meet yourself where silence and your real feelings meet? And when you do, can you hear what the owls are telling you? That everything is perfect and you are just exactly where you need to be on your path? That you haven’t missed anything, or mistaken anything, or taken the wrong turn? That spring will come for every winter that freezes your heart and numbs your body? And do you know, when you hear the owls speak, that you will not be alone? That others like you are waiting to step into your path just as soon as the moment is right? And do you know that, as the owls speak to each other across the distance, you are the fourth owl? You are not separate from them, but one of them answering too from your own ancient depths…
We were trained long ago to look away from the skies, from the earth and the trees, to look away from the truth resounding from inside, pulsing through our perfect bodies and calling from our timeless hearts. We were trained by powerful means to look down, not at the earth, but at some book of someone else’s truths. We were told not to trust ourselves, our all-knowing bodies…to look out, away. I know when we look back there we may find pain, we may find a mess of crossed wires and neglected gardens. But I promise that beneath that first layer, if we can stay with it, a wild forest of perfect beauty and true understanding still waits…has grown even more powerful and true. And the owls know this, and the frogs and the honey bees…this is why we communed with them once…why the goddess rode with the owl on her shoulder, why the bee priestesses buzzed and rolled slick honeyed fingers across their bodies. This is why the Oracles listened the the wind, and the babbling spring, and why the Sibyls listened to the sounds of their own voices coming back to them deep in the caves. This is why the Priestesses of Dodona listened to the breezes through the leaves and stayed barefoot year-round. Because if you keep feeling, keep noticing, keep listening, you can hear exactly what the universe is saying all the time. Your heart is not a mysterious code you have to break. It sings and you know the song. You sing too.
Oh yes, sometimes you have to wait. Sometimes you haven’t heard and owl, or a frog, or a wild storm…you haven’t felt a downpour or a windy sunlit day, or sat beneath falling leaves or a swelling moon in a long time. But keep going anyway. Keep going to the place where you meet what you feel. Keep going to the place where you listen to what is said inside of you when there is no censor, no promise and no price. Where there is only what is real for you in that moment. Where there is only the ecstatic throb or the cracking glass of broken things, and whenever you can, go to the body, go to the ocean, go to the sky. Go to the places you have been told not to. Don’t try to be good, or spiritual, or somehow right inside…you already are those things. You can’t help it. Try to look in the places you think are forbidden, are wrong, and give them a warm place by the fire that never dies. Try the path that looks unacceptable. That seems like it might upset someone but set you free. And move your body from that place. Write from that place. Be alone with the trees from that place. Tempt the ocean from that place. You have secret fire, secret diamonds that sparkle in a way you are afraid would burn the eyes of others, burn the world down. But the fire we have been told to hide, deep beneath covers and snuffed out by blankets of shame and complicity and compromise…the world needs that fire. We need that fire.
So feed it. Give it the oxygen and fuel of your awareness. Meet your naked body in the place where the owls cry. In the place where the new moon is born. Show up in the places where you hurt, and forgive yourself everything you could ever imagine needing to, and forget you ever thought you needed forgiveness. Drop all your signs and all your promises to be small, drop all the postures you try to hold without breathing and step into the clear pool of nothing where everything begins when you don’t have to be something you didn’t create. Oh yes, the place you end up in is the meeting point between heaven and hell. The place everyone is so afraid of that they’d rather live in shades of grey than visit. But it is the place of all possibility, of all creation, of all power, and I promise you that if you can get there, you will remember just what to do there. It’s like riding a bike. Once you get on it, once you get there, it all comes back to you.
Only you know what it means to meet your feelings right now. Only you know what you have to walk away from, whether it is just an afternoon appointment you need to cancel so you can walk out in the sun and hear what your heart has been trying to say, or something much larger. Make the space…whether it’s to sit alone in your special spot or just to lean in when you close the window, look out at the night sky on your drive home, or sit on that bench for a moment before you go inside. Listen carefully. Touch the fire and find out what places it burns and what you really, really want. Not what you’d settle for. Listen for the third owl…the one that you can only hear if you are so very open, so very still. And be the fourth owl. Respond in your heart and let it settle all the way down in, let it quench the place you didn’t know was thirsty. And wait, soulfully, when you haven’t heard the call in a while. One quiet night, a dark one, perhaps even when you are hurting the most, it will come again…
Love, Jennifer
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