Wild Spirit… restoration or revolution…

In a world gone crazy, we are saner when nature is our guide. When all else is going to hell in a proverbial hand-basket, people, literally going mad with fear for the future, food security, medicines, ageing and educating children ethically, nature is a constant.

Yes, her seasons change, her patterns are in infinite flux and, when we learn that the ice caps are predicted to melt within 10 years if temperatures continue to climb, as is through recent summers, what will we do? Not to mention the threat of war that constantly hangs over us daily due to the madness of man in his quest to dominate and to control everything.

Learning the signs and signals nature provides is different for each of us, but there are hard and fast ones globally, that tell us of extreme weather events, daily.

Some we have relegated to the realms of myth, others are sniggered at, but the fact is, after studying these patterns for myself over a life time, I know they are no myth. When all falls quiet, not a leaf or grass blade flutters and birds are still, there are earthquake rumblings occurring. Birds and insects disappear before a storm and well before any predictions are broadcast.

When spring returns

there will be scents

of earth renewed

I’ll walk the soil

feet frozen

by the icy, morning dew

I’ll share the sun

as birds salute the day

from treetop high

in morning light

and when day ends

I’ll sleep the sleep of peace

as warmth returns

with every passing night

Days will lengthen

bird chorus my alarm

As sunlight streams

my senses are disarmed

for in the dawn

nightmares fade and die

I’m filled with the joy

of simple things

and with contentment sigh

When spring returns

I’ll raise my face to the sun

I’ll stand again in icy, morning dew

and like the earth’s new day begun

I’ll be renewed

My first foray into studying the behavioural signs of the wild was as a child, watching ants climb trees, walls and posts, secreting their eggs above, what appeared to us to be, an invisible water line. The higher they went the more rain was coming.  Snails and millipedes exhibit the same behaviour.

My first experiment to find out how long a snail lived, was with a dab of stolen, pink nail polish, on an unsuspecting snail’s, shell, to see how large an area it inhabited and assess if it lived more than a year. I looked at its habitat …a small area under a lilac tree, my favourite tree in my Nanna’s garden. I looked at how it hid away in winter, sealing its shell with a paper thin skin and withdrawing into hibernation. Did it worry whether it would wake again?

It lived many years, for after my grandmother died, I wandered her garden for the last time and there it was, and by then the snail was more than eleven years old.

Joey the Tortoise, was about 85 years and my grandmother’s constant, if aloof, companion, who she would feed fresh lettuce leaves to. I realised, she was similar to all these creatures. Slow moving because she took her time over things, relishing the ways of her garden and the cycles of nature. Living through two world wars, losing her husband to the WW1, a pandemic, plus other skirmishes around the world, she was a retiring woman of few words. Instead, she observed. She ate mostly from her garden, other than a little fish from the fishmonger, who delivered once a week, and cheese, milk and butter from the milkman.

A walk down the street with her, was usually to replace a button or have her shoes mended, again. She rarely bought anything new. She wasted nothing, and was a deep-thinking, intuitive woman, clairvoyant and a medium, who suffered often for what she saw, such as the truth in tea leaves, the way a leaf fell or a bird flew… and my own wild spirit is inherited from two such women, for both my grandmothers, lived these uncomplicated lives, translating nature’s rhythms into their own dance of life… and so am I formed.

I wasn’t taught these things in words, only through their awareness, if they taught at all. No, it was all by example and somehow, it inveigled its way into my psyche.

I always loved gardens, wherever I was in the world and in times of personal challenge and change, I would find solace in nature; a garden, a park, a wilderness and still do, to this day.

As a child in the UK, I was mostly classified as different to many children. I loved nothing better to than to be alone to run wild in the countryside, my sisters, both a fair bit older than me, were disinterested in the ways of nature.

Wild living isn’t about getting away from people, necessarily. It’s brought about by a need for the peace of nature to expand on a thought, a theory, or to bury pain in Earth’s dark depths, rather than to carry it around inside to create illness or to despair at the shape the inhabitants of this planet are in. It is however, all about living simply.

Wild Lady, Mother Earth, takes everyone’s pain, wordlessly, without judgement and completely, if we stop picking at old scabs and scars, to check if they still hurt. Maybe they still do. Yet, it’s not the moment where the original pain occurred or exists because it’s now, not then and this moment in consciousness, in the eternal now of moments.

We can choose to continue, hell bent on our linear journey, or we can embrace a broader field of awareness. How we respond now is the ‘make or break’ to heal it. How we own our part in it, rather than blaming another, or circumstances beyond our control, which lends itself to victimhood, when it can be a learning curve for new understanding.

Sometimes, we use our drama to enhance our pain because it is through this, we feel greater… our ego feeds on it to make us think that’s all there is and that it’s the norm of the world. Well of course it’s not. Social media is the classic example of pain sharing and is at epidemic proportions particularly as I began writing this little piece for my next book through the Coved-19 pandemic. Supporting pain, for pain’s sake, is not a solution to healing the root cause… but I digress.

Restoration, a revolution for change in how we see our world, is the ultimate healing paradigm. A conscious, peaceful revolution… to restore Wild Mother to wholeness, is to restore ourselves. That said, Wild Mother will continue on her journey, with or without us… it’s our choice but important, is that we don’t become overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. We each need to focus on our own back yards, so to speak.

Wake up humankind. Stand up and be counted. Nature is the healer. If we learn her magickal, natural and resourceful ways and how to translate her messages, not generically, but for ourselves, everything may be healed, layer by layer, season by organic season.

Walk softly… step up… Awen /|\

Penny

Photography, art and words copyright ©️ Penny Reilly all rights reserved.