Cultivating a Wild Heart

I am recently home from Maine and can already feel a longing in my heart to return to the wild waters and damp forests of the deep north woods. Yet, I love my home and woods here. They feel right in their place in my heart and soul. If home is where the heart is, then surely I have more than one home.

Perhaps you do too. I wonder about all the many places and people and things we call home - maybe even a memory can feel like home. For me, the earth feels like home from the very inner wild part of me that knows no culture or even language, in the way that we do today. I notice different areas of nature resonate with me differently. A meadow sings its own song, while a river another, and the forest another. Like notes of an instrument, together nature plays a symphony of interconnectedness. If we listen closely, we can hear it, even feel it.

Cultivating a wild heart begins with noticing it beats inside you - that ancient rhythm that began many generations before yours began to beat. It plays to the ancestral rhythms that connect you. The mesic, or damp, forest must have been a place I've been before, or the energy of this heartbeat has been before. I feel as if I could fold into the forest in all its mystery and shades of green, muted earthy colors with an occasional bright flower shifting my direction as my feet follow along a moss and dirt covered floor, lichen speckled rocks punctuate the landscape, and somewhere a stream runs through, maybe even a river, maybe even a lake rests at its center. The birdsong, hawks and owls, and other creatures that inhabit this environment - frogs, salamanders, insects... even snakes, I am honored to walk among them. The swish of fallen leaves and the sights, scents and sounds that come with the changing seasons is a timeline I count on every year. Surely I have been here before, and surely this is home.

Perhaps you are connected to the ocean, or meadows, or where certain animals live. Cultivating a wild heart is as simple as noticing that place where you can feel the innermost layers of your heart and being unfold and at peace, this is your home. Nurture yourself there and nurture in return. And yes, you can have many. Imagine all the places you call home, where your wild heart beats its most natural rhythm in rhythm with home, your true nature.