Why Love is Everywhere

I sit looking out on a still, parched landscape. It seems to me pensive, quiet, barely holding on until the rains finally arrive. I can feel the land in my body too; dry, also longing for the softening of wet. Friends up north have battened down the hatches against a cyclone, steeling themselves against the winds. It’s the extreme times when we often feel more keenly our innate connection with animate forces and the Wild Other; our empathy not a mental exercise but a felt sense as we naturally tune in to our larger field of belonging. 

Rewilding practices for me are more than ecological literacy and ancestral wild skills, it's part of a broader spirituality, one a Wild Love. 

I had a short but juicy conversation about Wild Love last week next to Darebin Creek with Adam Murray, one of the participants on this summer's Nature Based Leadership Training (NBLT). Behind us are the sounds of other participants chatting and whittling their hand-drill fire kits. Adam's journey to be sitting by a creek together talking about love and country with me started ten years ago when, deeply unhappy, he left corporate life and took a year off to discover who he really was and what his authentic offering to the world could be. He began enquiring into his spirituality, which culminated last year with studies in myth and animacy, where he finally felt himself "connected to the cycle of the planets and the moon and the bigger patterns of which I am part." Adam emerged with renewed enthusiasm for his podcast and small business coaching project Subtle Disruptors, and a new intention to "bring more beauty into the world." 

The NBLT has been a natural continuation of this flowering for Adam and what is emerging is a new sense of what it is to love. "Instead of relying on love from and to another human, I now understand that I am loved by place. I can direct my love to country and receive it. It's so rich and accessible in every moment." Adam's spirituality has transformed from one of self-growth into "deep loving connection with the world around me." 

It's a profound story of shifting from ego-centrism to eco-centrism, and one so needed in these times. 

Wild love is one of the themes that I will be touching on during my Equinox conversation for the Centre for a Compassionate Society on March 30. Come and join us for this in person event. 

Hope you’re finding your own doorways into intertwined beingness. 

Wild love,

Claire