We live in two worlds: the civilized and the wild. The first is a world designed to be occupied. It is a built place, a place of constructs, both physical and symbolic, a place of prefabricated meaning. It is a place of obligation and commitment. It is a place of unspoken expectations and explicit demands. It is a domesticated place. A place of docility and latent fear. A place of rules and regulations and restrictions and arbitrary consequences. A place of violence. It is a place without a present tense.
The second world is one that we never truly leave because there is no place we could possibly go that is outside or beyond. It is a place without walls or borders or boundaries. It is place without purpose or expectation or demand or commitment. It is a place where the only obligation is to breathe. It is a place of openness and spontaneity and fierce interconnection. It is a wild place. It is a place meant to be inhabited, a place of dwelling. It is a place where the present moment is allowed to express itself fully and on its own terms.
Only one of these places is real, of course. Only one of these worlds has ever had any legitimate claim on us. The other is little more than a lethal form of fairy dust.
My offering of hope for the emerging new year: as the light begins to spread itself more generously day by day, may we find in ourselves the strength to refuse our forced occupation of the sterile civilized world, the equanimity to reject our coerced participation in the global death machine, and the courage to embrace and reinhabit our true wildness.