Dear Hearts,
I’ve been traveling the past two weeks and when I travel, away from my creative routine and the energetic field of my writing space at home it’s very challenging for me to think clearly, let alone write. So, I missed writing to you last week. And I’m sorry. But I’m also learning to be less hard on myself when I’m unable to accomplish everything. We can never accomplish everything, no matter who we are. Yet, it seems this is such a hard reality to accept. At least for me. But I am digressing. That isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about today. Well maybe in part, in some adjacent way. What I have been thinking about a lot the last few weeks is how in the day-to-day experience of wilderness-dwelling we soon discover that we are so much more sensitive or emotionally vulnerable than we’d like or are used to. And yet I think it is in this state that we can find ourselves being invited to do something new, to take stock of what we are carrying or investing in or allowing in our lives. I guess what I mean is that in the wilderness we are stripped of our regular defenses and I think we necessarily become more consumed with fostering whatever is in our best interest to sustain us in the most nourishing way possible. And to do this, I think there will always be things we simply have to let go of. But we can only release the right things when we come face to face with ourselves and acknowledge what we’ve been carrying or doing or allowing in our lives that we need to let go of, to give up, and maybe even to grieve over. And so, wilderness space becomes the place where we find the unique opportunity to shed ourselves of practices or patterns of being, or belief systems that hold us back more than they propel us forward. Even if these practices or patterns seemed helpful at some point in our lives.
And I’ve been thinking about this is regards to a wilderness space not being somewhere to live permanently but rather a place between. Between the place in which we knew how to live prior and the place in which we will eventually live once our time in the wilderness ends. Because even though I think we can learn so much from dwelling in the wilderness while we’re there and I believe we all carry the wild within us, as we should, I don’t think we’re supposed to make a home in wilderness spaces. I think rather they are places of transformation, where part of the challenge is to reckon with who we’ve been in the past and how we’ve lived and to consider what about those old ways of being and living might no longer be serving us. What about those old ways of being and living have actually helped bring us to a wilderness to begin with because they are now outdated. And when something is past its use date it I think it can begin to harm us where once it was helpful.
The last time I wrote to you about hunger and how the wilderness is a place that brings us into deeper touch with our true hungers. And I feel like part of understanding those hungers is connected to this week’s reflection, because it’s related to figuring out what isn’t feeding us in ways that nourish our lives to grow in the direction of our better selves, are better selves being who we know we desire to be and how we know we desire to live. But the question is, how do we do that? At least that’s what I’ve been mulling over. How do we discern and determine what is no longer serving us in ways that nourish us? How do we know when it’s time to shed some aspect of our lives, or to simply allow what is sloughed off during our wilderness-dwelling to be sloughed off, without fighting to hold onto what is not for us anymore?
I am sure it is different for everyone, and I can only speak from my own experience. But it is rarely a sudden realization that something in my life has to shift or be released. Rather there seems to always be a gradual and growing indication that something is no longer working, an internal unrest that I can’t shake, even before I have the courage to name it aloud. But for the most part for me, the restlessness or unease I feel is often related to where I feel myself restricted or confined in some way, somehow held back or holding back, where I don’t feel the freedom to be myself, whether creatively, emotionally, intellectually, physically, spiritually…whatever the case may be whenever I sense a diminishing of self it forces me to stop and consider where that sense is coming from and to reflect on the area of my life that I feel it the most strongly. Because ultimately, I think what most of us want is to be free. And I suspect freedom means different things to each of us. And it’s worth the effort and the time to figure out what that means to each of us. But as we sojourn through this wilderness season it can be helpful to think about the wilderness as a place in which, even with all its challenges and perhaps at times because of those very challenges, we are being invited to reimagine who we can and should be, and what a new freedom might look like, for ourselves and for those sojourning with us.
So I guess as you finish reading this and take the next week or so to reflect. Some of the questions I would have for you in no particular order, are:
Where do you feel restless or restricted in your own life?
Where do you sense you might be being invited to release something or even someone or some pattern?
What does freedom look like to you and do you feel free?
Could this wilderness season be an invitation to reimagine your own freedom?
With such gratitude to you for being a fellow sojourner.
From my heart to yours,
Enuma