wildness

i woke this morning to snow. with childlike wonder, i scurried around the house, opening all the curtains and gasping each time the wintery landscape was revealed.

winter wonderland.

i love it.

and i’m so grateful. it’s as if mother earth knew precisely what my soul needed today–a day of quiet and stillness.

there’s been a lot moving in the waters of my life.

so with a cup of coffee, i sink into my morning sitting place and pick up one of the books in my pile. the one that came was “The Book of Creation” by J.P. Newell. i open it to the second chapter, “The Wildness of God”.

yep.

warming my hands around my cup, i take a first sip of morning coffee. i look out the window at the snow covered Gaia tree and breathe. this is gonna be good.

and it is. so. good.

i have to stop every so often to breathe it in…the stillness and quiet of the snow inviting me to slow down. revel.

i come to this passage on the Celtic tradition:

“One of the most striking features of this tradition was its love of wandering or peregrination. In its more extreme form, the peregrini, as they were called, would set sail in a boat without a rudder to be blown wherever the elements might take them. The ideal of the peregrini in the old Celtic Church was defined as ‘seeking the place of one’s resurrection’. It consisted of a willingness to let go of or die to one’s home, or the place that was comfortably familiar, in order to find new life. The impression given is that the gospel of Christ leads us not into what we already now but into what we do not yet know…George MacLeod said, ‘Follow truth whereever you find it, even it if takes you outside your preconceived ideas of God or life. Even if it takes you outside your own country into most insignificant alien places like Bethlehem.'”

the idea of “seeking the place of one’s resurrection” resonated. i remembered and selah.

i know the path of the peregrini. i, too, have set sail in a boat without a rudder. i, too, have been willing to let go and surrender.

and now…it seems the boat has led me to this place. there is the land, yes. and that place is also within.

the text continues: “In the Celtic tradition the search to find ‘the place of one’s resurrection’ often led to the wildest and most elemental places.'”

yes, this place–both without and within–is wild.

and wildness calls for spaciousness. it cannot be contained or jammed up. this causes the energy to turn destructive and leads to death. wildness needs wide open spaces.

selah.

isn’t funny how often we need to be reminded? even of things we hold most true?

yesterday, on a leadership team call, we reflected on the power of the pause. we had engaged two facilitators to hold our team in our formation and had right away set to the business of scheduling and calendaring. we went to the form without knowing the intention. they had the wisdom to slow us down. “what are we intending in this time together?” in our slowing down, we found our wildness. we found energy, Spirit, life.

acting from this place of wildness feels so different energetically than not. it feels like creating as opposed to doing. it feels alive rather than busy.

i’m wondering about how to honor my arrival in this place of wildness, in this season of my life. how might i make space for it?

and so grateful to mother earth for this snowy day…of stillness and wildness.