Rewild Your Life Newsletter

While growth can bring with it an immense amount of pleasure, the truth is that true growth is also immensely painful. We only have to look at nature to see the truth of this. For the snake, growth means the painful shedding of old skins that no longer serve their expanding life within. For the caterpillar, growth means tasting the terrible uncertainty of the unknown by “dying” into the dark of the chrysalis.

After recounting to a friend some of the big changes that have gone on in my life over the last six months, including leaving a job, changing cities and moving in with my partner, he responded: Which translates as: This reminded me of a couple of lines from one of my all-time favourite poems, ‘Hokusai Says’ by Roger Keyes: In ‘The Soul’s Code’, James Hillman plays with the “acorn theory”, where he proposes that we are each given, or molded around, a primary image, blueprint, or vocation, and...

One of the amazing things about nature is that it seems to always make the best of whatever it is given. You only have to look at a dandelion growing in the cracks of concrete to admire nature’s ability to respond to all situations, however desperate or challenging. Nature makes no requirements and doesn’t pick and choose, it just survives, thrives, lives its life to the full. We human beings seem to be the only part of Mother Earth that can take a different approach.

At this time of the year the dark, cold of winter, where everything seemed so empty and lifeless, begins to transform, ever so naturally, ever so organically, into the emergent newness of spring. The days begin to lengthen, the buds begin to appear on the barren branches, and the birds seem to find a renewed energy and song.

In ‘The Book of Hours’ the poet Rilke writes: Over the last few months, as I’ve been delving into my own “darkness”, I came across this quote by Nigel Wellings and Elizabeth Wilde McCormick, in their brilliant book ‘Nothing To Lose’: Reading it at a moment when I felt in my “greatest darkness”, I found it hugely encouraging, an important reminder that “this too shall pass”! Keep reading with a 7-day free trial Subscribe to Rewild Your Life Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days...

In her book ‘Waking Up To What You Do’, Zen teacher Diane Eshin Rizezetto writes about a conversation she had with a trapeze swinger, who talked of “the dead spot”, where you literally hang in mid-air between the bars.

The great psychologist Carl Jung wrote: This is a profound truth that has been understood since ancient times, as the Sumerian myth of the descent of Inanna reveals. Inanna is a goddess of heaven, but has a dark sister Ereshkigal, who rules over the underworld. Inanna is called to descend to Ereshkigal’s barren realm, a symbolic picture of our common human need to integrate our “light side” with our “shadow side”, if we are ever to become whole.

Most of us have an inbuilt tendency to favour the light over the dark. The light illuminates and provides us with knowledge and confidence, while the dark hides, leaving us stranded in uncertainty. The light provides warmth and energy, while the dark is often cold and damp. The light shows us the ways forward, while the dark slows us down, sometimes bringing us to a complete stop.

In his book ‘Divine Beauty’, John O’Donohue writes: After an intense month full of movement and change, somewhere deep in me I knew I needed stillness and silence, to let everything settle within me, to give me time to digest and process all that I had just lived. I knew I wouldn’t be able to find clarity and inspiration moving forwards if I didn’t allow myself time to stop. So I booked myself in for three days in a monastery and entered noble silence.

Jesus famously said: As is often the way, life can present us with opportunities to test and practice what we have just been preaching. After writing a blog post about antifragility and going with the flow a few weeks ago, the following weeks have been some of the most intense weeks of my life, at times wonderfully intensely, at other times challengingly intense.