Meditation : 15.11 minutes

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

This line from one of Mary Oliver’s most famous poems came to mind while we meditated on a cold, winter beach. Ironically, the poem is entitled The Summer Day,  but I spoke it aloud to honour, after her recent death, the woman, her work, and the wildness that brought our little group together this January morning.

“When, during the guided meditation, you mentioned ‘wild’,  I was actually feeling very peaceful” she says, her expression quizzical. She is finding it hard to equate these two. Wild and peaceful. As though they live on opposite sides of her experience. And so there, huddled together on the beach, we discuss what it means to be wild…

Being a multilingual group, we consider words like the French sauvage and Spanish salvaje, both of which arise from the Latin silvāticus, which literally means "of the woods”, from the word silva, meaning “forest” or “grove”.  And we agree that the forest can be both wild and peaceful. That wild flowers are not threatening. And that wild means also natural.

Over time, as we have strayed further and further from our wild, natural state, the words wild and savage have come to mean uncultured and uncivilised. Something to be feared. But we can reclaim it, especially as civilisation does not seem to be serving us very well.

Knowing that wild is also peaceful. Also natural. Can this help us re-connect with it?