I sat at my journal one morning, as I do every morning, and on this occasion asked my soul what it was calling me to do. A deep question for so early in the morning, but I’d had a few days of being dissatisfied with myself and my life, and my journal will tell you that I can be a bit of a drama queen, when I feel like that. Fortunately, she will also tell you that I recognise my flaws and am in training to talk myself out of such pathos. Sometimes that involves being gentle, befriending my wounded self. Sometimes it involves taking a reality check and giving myself a whopping great kick up the behind. And sometimes it requires me to be still and ask my deeper self what it is she truly wants.
I’ve always struggled with the term ‘higher self’. It suggests that the everyday version of us is somehow less valid, that we’re living lower, less worthy, lives than we might. I don’t believe that. I believe that we are all doing the best we can. So, I reject any notion of my ‘best self’ or my ‘higher self’ in favour of my ‘deeper self’.
My deeper self is no more and no less worthy, or clever, or erudite, or creative, or wise, than my everyday self – she is simply quieter, more secretive maybe, more me definitely. My deeper self is the me that my everyday self has no need to aspire to be, because I already am her.
She is not always on show, by her own choosing. She is, nevertheless, always there, always ready with the gentle soothing, the reality-checking butt-kick, the friendship, the guidance, the listening ear, the words that – because I am wordy – I need to hear.
On this particular day, when I asked, she told me that what she wanted of me was wildness. She showed me pictures of beaches – Porthcressa and Fermain Bay – she showed me island paths, quiet lanes, ancient, abandoned villages, waterfalls, mountains, deer paths, valleys seen from above. She showed me the sea. She said, “Wildness. Wild places. Wild writing. Live wildly.”
She did not tell me how.
I picked up a newly-acquired book, Donna Ashworth’s updated edition of To the Women, and immediately came upon her piece “It’s Time” in which she injuncted me to “stop growing older // and start growing wilder and wiser.”
I have been reading the 169th Granta. I am always behind on my reading. For those not familiar with the magazine, it is an edition dedicated to Chinese literature. The page I kept going back to as I read was one of Lin Min’s calligraphy depictions of the concepts of Chinese literature, the one that says Wild Writers. The caption below the image explains that “The phrase describes non-professional writers – authors unaffiliated with the government’s literary institutions, and who work outside of the publishing and media industries. Their work is self-cultivated and straightforward, written in evenings and weekends, and published on-line.”
Although I cannot claim the time-poverty, nor the bravery, of those authors, that explanation resonates strongly with me. Whenever I post something on line, I talk about it going out into the wild. We cannot control what happens to our work out in cyberspace. It may drift in the backwaters, unread, unseen, lost in the vastness…it may be stolen, misappropriated, corrupted…but there is always the hope that it will find its way to the one who needs it.
The industry tells us to write for an audience, to imagine our ideal reader. If you are writing to make a living, then that surely has to be part of it – but if you are writing because your soul is calling you to write, then the truth is that you have no idea who your ideal reader might be. They are the one sitting in a room somewhere, in the midst of a life, overwhelmed or overjoyed, alone or surrounded. They are who and what they are and I have no idea…but they are the one who stumbles across my words and ‘feels’ something as a result.
Ideally, let’s be honest, they will share that with someone else who might then also want to read my rambles. Ideally, they will tell me that it landed well with them. Mostly, neither of those things will happen and the notion of wildness is that I must let go of any hope that they will.
Wild. Wildness. Wilding.
This is what my soul is asking of me. The serendipity, synchronicity, kairomancy of the message is too clear to ignore.
In true soul fashion, however, she does not tell me how to do it.
I listen in further. Sometimes we have to start with ‘how not’. We start with what we know does not sit easy with us. Sometimes we have to move away from one thing, before we are free enough to move towards something else. Think of it as breaking the gravitational pull of the planet you’re trying to leave in order to venture out into space.
I know the ‘how not’ very clearly. Over the last year or so I have been working with a team to birth an anthology of poetry and nature writing. It has been an experience. I have learned a huge amount. I have no wish to go there ever again. I hope that when the book is released it will be well received. I hope that the final product reflects the vision, and that it too finds its readers. I hope it has a life.
I cannot say that I hope it will have been worth it, because I already know that for me, personally, it will not.
Except to the extent that it confirms for me, that that is not where my deeper self wants to be. She wants to be a wild writer – not necessarily writing about wildness, not hunkering down out in the scary wilderness – but simply letting the power of words fly. I suddenly realise that poems are homing pigeons. They don’t begin in our heads, and that is not where they return. This is why I so quickly forget the things I have written or submitted. Even the things that were applauded I have to look up because they have already flown away. Flown home.
Living wildly
It occurs to me that what we think of as ‘wildness’ these days is also too much curated. The very fact that I ask what it means to live wildly, underlines the point: that I have adopted the insidious idea that there is a definition, worse that there is a boundaried, constrained, idealised way of being wild. What a contradiction!
My deeper self doesn’t tell me ‘how’ because there is no ‘how’. There is only freedom. There is only letting go. There is only choosing the rules that matter and rejecting all the others. There is only instinct, natural connection, trust, weathering the hardships, stumbling into joy, taking the risks. There is only saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘maybe’. There is only the not-knowing route into knowing.
Ok, me, I’m listening. I’m ready to strip things back further. I’m ready to become more wildly myself.
