The tender slip of pigment woven over once-was-trees soothes me.

The tender slip of pigment woven over once-was-trees soothes me. 
Colour scraped from the Earth unravels across a surface at the will of fingers, and heart, and mind, the shape of my yearning for connection to the wild. 
The reverential way I see it. 
The exquisite way I feel it. 
The existential memory deep in every cell of being interwoven, entangled, inextricably linked.
The physical desperation at being untethered, disconnected, a pulled thread.
Untamed but caged. Tamed and uncaged.

I want to lay down and be covered by wild.
Forever running through forests, 
forever rocks carved by water scribes, 
forever moss and lichen slowly unfurling, 
forever winged in the wind, 
in the wind, 
in the softest breeze, 
in the calm. 

The easel, the sketchbook, the scrap of paper with scribbles is devotional. 
A compassionate act of reciprocity. 
A laying bare.
A desperate, fervent exposure - 
chest carved open by pencil and paint, heart exposed, 
beating (wild), beating (wild), beating (wild). 

I have only two hands. 
I have only this one, wild and treasured life. 
My wound is the marvels I will not honour with words and ochres and umbers.
My wound is the wild already lost, into whose eyes I will not gaze, I see you, I honour you, I am you.
My wound is the time I did not spend in love with the wild.

And still, there is only now, and there is only now, and there is only now.
I have two hands. 
I have this one, wild and treasured life.
Colour scraped from Earth unravels across a surface at the will of my fingers and heart and mind and sculpts my devotion.
The tender slip of pigment woven over once-was-trees heals me.

It is late and I am tired and my peppermint tea is now cold, but I drink it anyway. 

I am tired and so much has been on my mind, weighing on my heart. 

Do you feel this too?

I think so many of us do.

I am also feeling a clarity, but it seems so tenuous and made of fog sometimes. My fingers move through it, a sheen left on the back of my hand but nothing I have grasped, nothing I can show for it. And there is a quagmire of confusion about how to balance that precious and fragile orb of clarity with only my mind while walking blindfolded through the swamp of sorrows and the bog of eternal-stench… and the grocery store and post office.

But always, it is to the easel I turn, to pour forth the desperate need to move pigment around and honour the wild. It is here that I am soothed, that I am healed, that I find grounding when my wings are beating hard and fast and getting me nowhere.

A week ago I stood in the pacific ocean under the super-blue-moon beam and let the waves gently lap away my worries. Tonight I am writing this with a soundtrack of wave sounds, and bird calls, and distant thunderstorms in my earbuds to drown out the irritating clackety clack of my new keyboard (no more sticking ‘aaaaaaaa’ though).

In the last 7 days I have seen the back half of a fat, shiny, healthy red-belly black snake slither under blackberry brambles in the culvert beside where I walk (cue Gang Gajang singing “this is Australia”). I wound my body in serpentine grace to honour her. I watched the collared sparrow-hawk (that uses my backyard as an all you can eat buffet) shred dove dinners. I was the hawk, wild and fierce, an authentic predator. I was the dove, alone, afraid, surrendered. I saw a black-shouldered kite hovering over the water catchment and wanted to shelter the ducklings hatched the week prior. I marvelled at the way she suspended air beneath stealthy wings and defied the gravity we are all beholden to. I counted the ducklings today, there are still 9, and they are plump and waddling more emboldened each day between fiercely protective parents. I saw two new to my-in-real-life-eyes birds of prey, a Pacific baza and a Nankeen kestrel, and I thought I might jump out of my skin with excitement. I went to sleep thinking of them. There have been other wild (mostly winged) encounters, but it is the predators that I am most noticing, that I am connecting with, that seem to have a message for me (though I don’t know what it is, yet).

I feel like there is something more, that there is something coming. Something big, and that the wild is trying to tell me. She is whispering, but I can’t quite hear. So I will keep watching and listening and pushing around pigment to honour this heart calling and I will wait to understand more (and in the meantime marvel at what I am surrounded by all the time).

I am wondering what the wild whispered to you this week, too.