Are you living in the Wild Now?

Hello there,

It’s been a while since I’ve been in your inbox with new writing. I could share the reasons related to integrating feedback from readers and clients into more thoughtful offerings as well as the evolving realities of caring for a beloved who’s getting closer to his life’s ending.

Instead, let me welcome you to this renamed e-Journal, The Wild Now.

As the masthead suggests, it’s about reimagining life moment by moment. It poses the question that I explore every day, no kidding, every day …

By the way, you don’t need to live in the redwoods or a rainforest to have this question resonate with you.

The natural world is all around you—from the spunky black cat who shows up on your doorstep to the wet head of lettuce you haul home from the grocer’s to the furry bits of dust in the bookcase you try not to disturb (or is that just me?).

Also, don’t forget, you are the natural world. Part skin, part spirit. You are a completely necessary way that life is expressing itself right now.

I hope you’ll join me on this journey into ordinary moments that might offer extraordinary possibilities for living, as one of my client’s puts it, with lightheartedness, even when—especially when—your life or the backdrop of the world feels heavy. Let’s jump in, okay?

Look. This bronzy snail with swirled shell climbs the outer wall of my home. Ah, how far from the earth, how high above the flowerbed with it’s crumbling remains of summer’s stalks she’s climbed/he’s climbed (dual gendered), and on only one foot.

Hello, miraculous being, running your marathon of one, where is it you aim to go with your rippling motion, competing only against yourself and time?

Is it a destination, or only Up?

Up is enough, isn’t it? Curiosity and autumn light coming low through the redwoods is enough to keep going and just see what happens.

This morning, a song I haven’t listened to in too, too, long, nearly broke my heart with grief and brought such joy all at once. 

There is a self I thought left me a long time ago. The song was a moody solo clarinet backed by piano and bass, voiceless.  My eyes closed to listen fully, my whole body taking in riff and rhythm, she emerged, this self, as a felt presence. 

It was the way I felt my mother, yesterday, at my left temple while a gifted woman in Israel guided me through a meditative practice over a Zoom call (Thank you, magical Internet).

I felt my mother, as if an invisible body, the gentle heat of her, just millimeters away, though she climbed her own Up more than 21 years ago. 

In this morning’s lamplight, out of bluesy jazz, the presence, the visiting one coming so close, was me, even though I’m still here. 

Have you ever had that experience? Meeting yourself like an old friend you’d almost forgotten?

The song felt like coming home. To what? To whom? 

What if we carry all the versions of ourselves over time, the way this snail carries her coiled home wherever she goes?

Perhaps your shell and mine are not what we wrap around our tender bodies and hoist forward. Instead, the shell-cave with its hidden chambers, so full of us, all varieties and evolutions of us, is within. 

Mary Oliver, the shy, attentive poet, once wrote, “tell me about your despair and I will tell you mine.” Sometimes the conversation you need is with yourself. A past you, a future you, informing the current you.

My mother, who talked to herself alot, doing needlework, washing garden vegetables, and especially while smoking a cigarette looking out the window, held a despair in her that she could never truly tell.

She was also funnier than hell. Her snippy reply, if anyone commented on her self-dialogue, was this: “Well, it’s the only way to get an intelligent answer around here.” 

Why talk, or not, about despair, when a snail can glisten and glide and be a gift giving itself to you?

Let me pose this, “Tell me what opens your heart, and I will tell you what opens mine.”

Slicing red peppers, I try to find the pulse in the action, a tempo, the efficient slicing through pepper skin to cutting board, the rhythmic knocking as knife blade lands again and again.

Surprise, a red that isn’t pepper. I pause. A drop lands and spreads out on the board, the wood blossoming, an oddly beautiful blood flower.

Which hand? Ah, the left, a palm, red-streaked, and like a secret spring bubbling water, I discover a small cut, oozing and pooling.

I am my own red well. Such a funny thought.

Then comes the line, broken into 8, from the enigmatic poem by William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow,

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Thank you pepper and blade for inviting William here. 

My palm is now the red wheelbarrow, glazed with something thicker than rainwater. No white chickens here, though the white-girl skin of my hand has become a map of red lines.

The lines tell how I’ve been travelling a long time now, but they’re not only about where I’ve been. There’s traffic in those lines. My palm is alive and still has places to go. 

I’m happy. I. Am. Happy. Happy for no reason, and for the only reason.

My hand suspended under a faucet as it pours cold water, my wound is cleaned.

I pick up the knife again, hold what’s left of the red pepper, finger and thumb grasping firm but delicate as if holding a red bird. Finding the rhythm again, knock, knock, knock, another line enters my thoughts—my line—I have to stop to write it down before if flows away.

What is fleeting and what is forever are found in one wild moment brought into focus.

Holding the pencil a bit too tightly, when I put it down to read what it’s written on a napkin, no kidding, another blood flower spread out beneath the word, focus. 

Once holding a cat in the deep hours of night, a cat now long nestled in earth, I took him outside beneath a purple ceiling spilled with stars, cradling him tightly so he wouldn’t leap and get lost in the woods. Wary, he clung to me, then I felt his muscles deep in fur, relax. Trust and curiosity taking over.

I wondered what he saw when he looked up, what he heard in the near-silence that I missed, what he smelled in the night-dirt and ferns. I scanned all my senses—a different mode of cat-lady.

Three satellites slowly crept the sky. “Imposter stars,” I whispered to him, as if I could translate human mind into cat mind.  

“What else is here?’’ I asked, the question more breath than sound. My fur-boy’s ears shifted and pivoted like pointed satellite dishes—his way of posing the same question.

Just as my neck was getting sore, my head craned back and stone-heavy, a long, swift wisp of light streaked West to East through Orion’s belly. My sweet cat’s face flitted sideways, clearly watching the trajectory, his tail whipping the cold air.

There is no moral to this little tale, or his little tail, though there is a deep truth. 

Every moment contains a wildness, a wonder, an offering, a possibility, with or without a cat in your arms. 

It’s nice to have another being sharing the moment with you, though not essential. Plus, realize it or not, you are never really alone. Something lives in every space, and you carry a universe of microbial others wherever you go.

Yes, a shooting star is special, though a brave snail or the intricate pattern of lines in the palm of your hand (left or right, pick one) are enough to open a moment, to let yourself be pulled into a story both ancient and brand new, coming through you, for you, simply because you chose to be there, to be here, fully.

All you have to do is step into that moment, with open mind, open heart, and ask, “What else is here?”

I want to dedicate this issue of The Wild Now, to Pablo, who’s birthday was yesterday, and his passing nearly 11 years ago. In his honor, let me also share a link to something I wrote shortly after his passing:

https://www.poetowl.com/post/new-year-s-day-alone-on-big-lagoon.