Born Again as Wild Being

I am sitting in the Lufthansa lounge in Frankfurt, Germany. It’s teeming with holiday travelers of every color and language possible. We’ve been traveling home for over 18 hours already, with at least 16 more to come. While waiting to board our flight to Denver, I’m powerfully aware that this trip is not over yet. Far from it.

My soul is on fire like this flame tree.

There is more to put into words, to speak aloud. More ritual travel to integrate at the imaginal level. Impressions and experiences are always very personal. We receive and learn through not only our sensual selves but through the eyes of our heart. And my heart continues to be broken open by all that we experienced over these past three weeks.

Parker J Palmer has said:

…the heart can break in two different ways. There’s the brittle heart that breaks into shards, shattering the one who suffers as it explodes, and sometimes taking others down when it’s thrown like a grenade at the ostensible source of its pain.

Then there’s the supple heart, the one that breaks open, not apart, the one that can grow into greater capacity for the many forms of love. Only the supple heart can hold suffering in a way that opens to new life.

I have witnessed a great deal of suffering and a great deal of love in Angola. In some ways, it has been a search for the home that I lost. Malidoma Some speaks about how home does not mean some “territorial construction … but the place you belong …. Home knows where we are, but it cannot come here, for we have to go out and meet it. That home needs us as much as we need it, and it can call to us only by injecting us with feelings that we experience as nostalgia or even exile. The call to come home to the natural world translates as feeling exiled, feeling alienated, feeling like a maladjusted Westerner, feeling you can’t fit in the way society wants.”

Being in this place of my birth and revisiting ten thousand embodied memories from my nature-based, profoundly spiritual childhood has quickened my soul’s awareness as an Earth being. It feels like being ‘born again’. A curious word indeed to use as one who has spent the last decades deconstructing her Christian evangelical background to become more fully human! It feels like coming out full circle from the labyrinth and standing solidly in a fully alive present-day wholeness of cosmic connection.

Maybe a few more images and metaphors might help describe how this unexpected journey to Angola has offered me that sense of knowing most clearly my/our place as a creature of nature.

Do you know the best way to eat a mango?

We learned this as kids and here I am showing Uli how to do it. First, you pick a perfectly ripe fruit, then you gently squeeze it. It’s a challenge and great fun to palpate every inner morsel until all you can feel is the hard inner pit, floating in liquid slush. Then you bite a small hole in the top and suck the mango dry until all you have left is a fleshy, wrinkled skin.

This is wild haute cuisine. The taste of a tree-ripened mango is like sugar for our earthy souls who know what it is to wait to be ripened, to be plucked off our comfortable tether and pounded, squished by outside uncontrollable forces. Turned into a body of juice and skin emotionally and physically. Sometimes it’s hard to be patient and we are split wide open and make a terrible mess of life and we end up with mango juice all over our face and hands and clothes. Sometimes, rarely-in-fact, it all comes together, and you experience the bliss of perfection. So we keep seeking that soul juice of life at every possible moment.

My wild indigenous being adores sensual pleasure and so many memories washed up from the joys of childhood.

This trip had that aura of perfection and synchronicity at every turn. Like re-membering the hibiscus, lantana, and frangipani as youthful blooms in my aging body.

The sudden savory recollection of tasting a ripe coffee bean prompts a wash of laughter as I recall stealing them off my dad’s prized coffee bushes!

Flying termites swarming after the rain remind me how they might taste of butterscotch if you dare to taste them raw! And a perfect dragonfly captures the freedom we had as children to daily take flight out into the bush and explore – to see what we might find …. maybe become enraptured with the flowing grace of a centipede as I did a few days ago.

My soul (and your soul too!) has all the colors of the peacock …. This one who wouldn’t puff out his feathers on demand – but only shares the eyes of his splendiferous hidden wealth when in safe and trustworthy spaces. Like you and me. When and where do we feel safe enough to show our true colors?

And then, just to stay grounded in reality. Let’s not forget the dark side.

Consider the virus of soul sickness. It’s ubiquitous. Endemic in every human culture and at every age and stage of life. Disembodiment from our loving humanity. I think of it as soul plaque that needs continuous brushing and check-ups to rid us of the shadowy collective contagion that lurks – like this prawn captured one night. It might have been the one that humbled us both for 24 hours!

And look out for all the monkeys that might be hiding in the trees! Can you see the wild monkey in me that waits by the road where all the travelers pass by? One who waits to stir up mischief and trouble. It’s my hope to remind us all to keep moving, no matter our age, to get out of the security of the controlled boxes of our lives and swing from the treetops of possibility.

(I hope I’m shocking you with way too many tastes and sights and sounds to take in - in your safe and sanitary homes. HA!)

To tap down deep into the community of our belonging – to befriend our wild indigenous selves who are mostly trapped behind fences of razor wire.

Join me as we Westerners must learn from She who Waits, from the divine feminine soul of creation, that second Book of God - through all our more-than-human-relations. Let’s call forth and seek out all these precious ones who wait to be our teachers, our friends, our lovers. Those whom each of us probably met first as children and needed to guard ourselves away from that wild ‘danger’.

Maybe you didn’t have my kind of wild African heritage, but you have another kind of upbringing that deeply knows the home of your soul place on earth. And for those of us who have given up the old ways of our Christian faith tradition, let’s trust together that it’s time to become a new kind of embodied soul being.

In the words of Brian McLaren to “ask previously un-askable questions, make previously forbidden confessions, imagine previously impossible possibilities, and form previously un-formable communities so we can continue our spiritual quest.”

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