Living the wild heart

Solutions don’t generally come from the middle, they come from the edge. Mythologist Martin Shaw talks of this, of genius living not in the centre but on the margins. If we ignore what the Mexicans call ‘the river beneath the river’, the soul of the world, Martin says, then we’ll end up going around in whirlpools of our own neurosis, individual or cultural.

Just this last week I guided 27 people into their own edge places during the summer retreat of the year-long Nature-Based Leadership Training. For some, the first time they had camped - sleeping in a tent was an edge. For others, the first time they had slept in an earth built shelter alone, nothing between their bodies and the body of the earth. For some, immersed in a place of open wild heartedness, the edge was painfully meeting the places in themselves that have been shut down and unwilling to feel. For others, a moment of dissolving into the enmeshment with the web of life. As one woman, covered in ash, charcoal, mud and clay, out in the forest, said, “I thought I was picking my toenail, and realised it was a twig.”

Credit: Max Roux

The writing of My Year Without Matches was an enormous edge. Every morning as I sat at the laptop terror would sweep over me.  It was the fear of being exposed for who I really was, how I longed so much for connection with the wild that I was willing to let blood blisters form on my palms from making fire; that I gave up sleep to silently walk the fire trails at night; that I struggled so much with the internal voice of the critic that it would sometimes have me curled at the base of a tree paralysed as to what to do next. It was the fear also that came with trying to put words to a language older than words. I rode the precarious edge with each chapter. When my stories were read by others I found that instead of falling off the edge, others stood alongside me. And life opened into a vast field of new possibilities for meaning, purpose and connection. 

Possibilities our culture so needs.

Gabrielle Roth, the founder of 5 Rhythms dance, said ‘Lean into your sharp places’. It’s the sharp places that are at our painful growth edge, the one so alluring and dangerous. 

This Sunday, on ABC’s Compass program, titled 'The Rewilders' my personal story is told. The exposure feels like an edge yet again, yet a very different one from 10 years ago.

This time, it’s about exposing the fact that this passionate rewilder is facing the very real question of how to live this life with three kids, a mortgage, school routines and the like. Life is still sit spots and enlivening curiosity but it's also lunchboxes, playgroups, and family chore rosters. The relationship with my beloved is not now primarily about adventure and allurement but division of labour and teamwork. 

Perhaps this question speaks to your life too. It’s not so much a double life, as one deeply embedded in the sometimes excruciating enquiry of how to live the wild heart who wants to be radically changing the trajectory of culture, sleeping under the stars and singing longing to the moon whilst also being a mother living within the bounds of this economic and cultural system. What are the portals and doorways to live both simultaneously? They’re the ones I’m tracking at the moment. That’s the edge I’m on. And it feels painfully important. And too easy to feel like it’s too hard.

And so, with some trepidation, I invite you to look through the window into my world this Sunday, with the trust that it mirrors and stirs some of your own enquiry.  

Wildly as always,

Claire