I'm on a quest to connect with the untamed world, release the wild words, and discover the wild self. Continued from last week…
I strode for twenty minutes along the unmade road that leads straight into the damp crevice of the gorge, under the shadow of the mountain.
My clicking, grinding thoughts, that inner film, continued to roll. And it was a horror film. There were men in balaclavas, drunken gangs of youths, wild boar, and hungry bears. They whooped and snarled and shrieked their war cries as they came at me from the dark places. I covered my ears with my hands and screamed.
At that moment, quite suddenly, the fears released like smoke into the air, and the film flickered to a stop. I was left alone in the night. Now I saw different things. I saw one small star signal from behind a cloud. I heard the night bird resume its comforting call. I heard the rustle of a small creature in the undergrowth, seeking a warm place for the night.
And now. It was another of Byron’s poems ‘She Walks In Beauty’, that came to mind, his description of a night of ‘cloudless climes and starry skies’.
And I remembered Mary Oliver’s work. She describes the coming of the light after ‘Sleeping In The Forest’,
‘By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.’
I realised that my days are always full and light, sometimes too bright. My eyes get tired from seeing too much. Now I was bathing in the pleasure of the restful dark, the silence and the stillness. And had it not been so cold, I might have sat down to enjoy the presence of the absence, in which all felt possible.
When I returned to the house later that night, I felt the strength of a true warrior, and slept with the contentment of someone who feels truly safe. There is nothing so fortifying as refusing to run away in the face of fear.