We Are Wild and Divine

We can’t keep out the wild for it is embedded within us and we within it. No matter how hard we try to cover the landscape in concrete and asphalt, the wild bursts through. No matter how civilized and proper we think we are, our reptilian brain rises in the heat of the moment. Our past is ever with us, our nature is nature. The wish to rise above it only brings pain and longing.

We move through our manmade landscape as though lost. We navigate it well enough from practice, but it’s as though we are just skimming the surface and not truly living in the world we made. Our heart and whole body carry a latent memory of another way of being. But when we attempt to go back to nature, we find we are just as lost there. We are beings not at home anywhere anymore and perhaps that is why we seem bent on destroying ourselves and the planet. The only relief from this painful longing is consuming what we long for. Somehow we believe by consuming it, we’ll get back what we lost. But really all we get is a stomach ache and deeper grief.

Maybe we can find home in the eternal. But maybe all we need to do is look within and touch that sore and tender place that misses home. Perhaps we can then grieve what we have lost and in the grief finally open the door we shut long ago. It’s the door to the eternal and present moment. We can’t find our way back by tearing down the world we made or building a new one. We can only find our way by realizing the wild exists next to all that is holy within. They are one and the same. We need not have ever separated them. We are both heaven and earth walking. Dust rising and light becoming. We are life. We are wild, and we are divine. And we are free when we bring them together.

At dusk the other day, a large red-tailed hawk flew by my window. I could imagine it sailing over the valley floor here thousands of years ago as it looked for prey. I could see it gliding on thermals up from canyons. In that moment the past and present came together. In that moment the wild and divine were caught on the wing of that magnificent bird of prey. It was home and reminded me I was as well.

And then it was gone, but I captured it. I captured my feelings in words. Poetry is the bridge between the past and present for me. It’s the way through. It’s the way home.

Wings spanning ages

you grace our street

in this current era.

A shadow gliding

out of the past

becomes ever now.

Red-tailed hawk,

glorious shifter

of time and being

barely glimpsed

caught only out of

the corner of my

eye and mind.

©2019 Joanne Young Elliott