Go To Your Wilderness

In the wilderness of ourselves... 

We are stripped of all the usual distraction, hiding, and excuse-making. It is here that the compulsive over-achiever in us trembles at being left as an ordinary human being, stripped of all of the ways she longs to prove her worth. 

When we search below patterns of pushing, striving, and strong-arming our way through life, we may find at the crux of our fear: the drive to prove ourselves as extraordinary. The ego can’t seem to cope with being a simple mortal.

In the wilderness of ourselves…

We find that the pace slows to what the Greeks called “kairos time,” a kind of deep time that is slower and richer. Moving at a pace below all of our crowded hours, kairos time stirs with the primal stretch of a redwood’s roots, it grows with grass arms thrown skyward in worship of the sun. Kairos time is a soul connection time, when we see through the performance of our everyday programs and instead hear the voice of our cunning teacher - this very life.

In the wilderness of ourselves…

It is eerily quiet and painfully intimate, butcher hooks leaving the raw and beating organ of our hearts to burn in the open air. With fierce attention, we find that we can not dissolve or transmute our darkest wounds or most maligning fears WITHOUT having them come up, WITHOUT feeling them fully. 

There is a kind of unshakeable confidence that is learned through our sacred initiations: flat-out failure, cycles of hardship, periods of questioning, feeling lost, hanging out in the dark, or even having a complete loss of trust in ourselves. We must have the courage to allow these hard things to inform us, break us, teach us, and change us for good.  

In the wilderness of ourselves...

We are asked to stand up straight in our suffering. Put our fingers on its skin. Count the beats of its pulse. Feel the way the aliveness of this suffering is just as vital as our joy. This wilderness is patient, still, lean and straight-forward in its truths. 

What does your wilderness tell you?

Photo by Roan Lavery