A Season of Rewilding
An hour spent in reflection, exploring the beautiful idea of Rewilding and of re-initiation into the deep wellspring of the Self, not by doing, but by letting things alone
The following video is an impromptu session held this Sunday on the Mojo Dojo; an online platform dedicated to the discipline and practice of psychological self repair.
I host weekly lessons, run according to a seasonal (lunar) monthly theme. The current theme we step into this week is: Drinking from a Deeper Well.
This month we explore the possibility of putting down all the doing and the becoming and coming back to the stillness of Now, to be welcomed back into the conversation and to be initiated again into the Seasonality of our Lives.
Secretly we are all longing for Belonging. We are in a desperate search for Meaning and Purpose. And we fill every space and every silence with urgent questions and hurried answers, and we end up taking shallow sips, and brushing right past the deep and ancient wellspring from which our true sense of nourishment and belonging actually stems.
In an effort to step deeper into my own work and into my own Myth, I am looking for ways to bring all my scattered work together and invite more people to the space of guiding and generosity I aim to hold in this world.
The video below is an invitation to that circle. The idea we discuss is that of rewilding. Rewilding is defined as "to restore a place to its natural uncultivated state."
This session is devoted to stopping, to leaving things alone, to coming to stillness and opening ourselves again to the Invitation, to the Deeper Conversation. We spend our hour together in reflection.
We explore the idea of Rewilding: a concept of honoring the process and grace of Nature, letting a place alone so Nature can re-establish itself. We come to a stillness, like coming to a sacred well, not to drink from an outside source, but to drink from our inner wellspring, even as we fill it with our allowing, and our being.
We realise there is a seasonality in the place we stand and even in ourselves. We are always trying to belong, to the moment, and to the troubling challenges of our lives.
What Invitations are we ignoring, how do we keep ourselves outside of the sacred conversation in our urgency to be, to fix, to solve, to address, rather than simply being and allowing ourselves to disappear a little, even as we arrive in a new place or a new moment, or even to the new unfolding season inside our loved ones, and inside our selves?
The Poems we cover in the session are, one from myself about Belonging to the moment and initiation into the seasonality of a place called THE BURREN, a micro poem about the foolishness of Certainty, and finally a piece by David Whyte called TOBAR PHADRAIG, a reflection about a sacred well, and ancient place of returning, reflection and replenishment in the beautiful and ancient Irish landscape of the Burren in North Clare.
THE BURREN The soil and rocks of a place define the angle of repose and the angle at which the land greets water and sky, and just so, the angle at which everything greets everything else. To attempt to force a belonging, we are attempting to forge the signature of a place, and bound to feel immediately like a fraud, waiting to be discovered rather than feeling how it is to be here, without the comfort of names, allowing the genius of the place to relay its secret, allowing yourself to be what is written on, which is always a map to something treasured and undiscovered deep inside the weathered ancient landscape deep inside yourself. © Rocco Jarman May 2023
Rumi said “Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.”
A MICRO POEM ABOUT THE FOLLY OF BEING CERTAIN
Be not so quick and certain
to be your full accomplished self.
For how ever
is the greater version of you
to arrive and take up residence,
if all the seats are taken,
and all spaces and silences
filled with who you already are,
and what you already know?
© Rocco Jarman
May 2023
The part in you, you thought the most foolish, always in the end, the wisest voice of all. We ‘hold’ our breath most closely actually, when we let it go.
The final piece is a poem by David Whyte about the invitation to the practice of drinking from a deeper well, of coming to places of reflection and replenishment and renewal, in the world and also deep inside ourselves.
What Invitations are we ignoring, how do we keep ourselves outside of the sacred conversation in our urgency to be, to fix, to solve, to address, rather than simply being and allowing ourselves to disappear a little, even as we arrive in a new place or a new moment, or even to the new unfolding season inside our loved ones, and inside our selves?
TOBAR PHADRAIG by David Whyte Turn sideways into the light as they say the old ones did and disappear into the originality of it all. Be impatient with easy explanations and teach that part of the mind that wants to know everything not to begin questions it cannot answer. Walk the green road above the bay and the low glinting fields toward the evening sun, let that Atlantic gleam be ahead of you and the gray light of the bay below you, until you catch, down on your left, the break in the wall, for just above in the shadows you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm of rock holding the water close to the mountain, a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins, and in the niche above, notes to the dead and supplications for those who still live. But for now, you are alone with the transfiguration and ask no healing for your own but look down as if looking through time, as if through a rent veil from the other side of the question you’ve refused to ask. And you remember now, that clear stream of generosity from which you drank, how as a child your arms could rise and your palms turn out to take the blessing of the world.
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