Preserving the Wild Soul

Julia & Dylan, August 2006

We’re sitting on a red and blue quilt on a wide green lawn overhung with cedars, at an Ani diFranco concert. It is my daughter’s last night before she leaves us to go back to school for her junior college year, maybe the last summer she will come to spend with us before she travels to Europe to study opera. Because she is going, because we are already feeling her loss, she sits between my husband and I, rather than having to choose sides. When he goes off to find us dessert, she leans into me and asks, “Any last words of wisdom?” I laugh and tell her she has almost surpassed me in wisdom, and that the best I can tell her is to trust herself, to trust what she wants. She knows what I mean by this.

We have spent most of the summer deciphering what it means to live by one’s instinctive nature. I have experimented with sitting in one place doing nothing for hours until it occurs to me what I really want. I have gotten up, made a sandwich, taken a walk, written an essay, sat in stillness with those words. She has tried a few experiments with casual relationships, and then determined it isn’t for her. Through a health challenge, I have begun to look at my own history of pushing through adversarial circumstances, managing details, caring for others, because I was strong and I could – but not necessarily because I was acting out of my own sense of order or horror or beauty or understanding. My daughter also has allowed herself to stop; to rest her voice for six weeks, to cease requiring a busy social life, to sit in her own boredom until she could locate her essence.

I think if I could pass along one bit of knowing to her it would be this: One cannot preserve the wild soul on piecemeal terms. I have tried. I have tried taking a karate class, and redecorating the living room and cleansing my liver and buying the cutest freakin boots to ever walk down Pike Street. Beautiful alterations that lasted a few moments, and still never delivered the intended, lasting joie de vivre.

What sustains my wild soul is living less out of perceived obligation, finding the place where desire and responsibility have merged into one soulful union. It can emerge in writing what has depth, rather than what I think someone is going to buy. It can come in finding creative people to be in relationship with, and then setting a structure to that interaction that allows each of us to thrive. It can come in noticing anger when it arises, and not making anyone else but myself responsible for that anger; it can come through taking action to alter the circumstances that cause my resentment. It can come through consistently making choices not to alter my consciousness with substances, to live in truth as it arises. It can come through giving myself enough time to follow a spontaneous choice – to turn to my daughter in the middle of making dinner, and laugh and sing and turn off the peas to have a long embrace. Or, in saying to the family – I need quiet to write, and I’m going in here and shutting the door, and unless there’s catastrophe – don’t disturb me.

And I know she’s learned this, because I watch my daughter making choices to halt the red shoes’ incessant dance. On a summer trip to see her childhood friend Julia, after a luscious Indian dinner, and a drive through Vancouver, and consulting the paper for nightlife, she decides she wants to craft a full moon ritual instead of either going to party or descending into abstract conversation. “What makes you most a woman? What does it mean for you to be female?” she asks us. And after we answer, in between nibbling a bowl of cherries and lighting candles and finding bed linens for makeshift beds, I lay my head on a pillow and close my eyes, safe in an apartment full of women who know who are they, and if not, who can sense who they are becoming. An hour later I wake up to giggles and splashes. She and Julia have submerged themselves in a bubble bath, where I will learn later, they have set themselves right on all matters of uncommunicative men, and disaffected roommates and ineffective teachers.

Joseph Campbell called for a ‘creative mythology’ that could become the structuring force of civilization – one whose core is not theological, but instead personal. In this creative story, we allow our experience to suffuse our being, to wait for its depth and import to arise through our understanding of events, to know out of what one has been in, not what one has been told. Through true revelation, an uncoerced discovery of our deep soul, Campbell says we become a living myth. In a world gone mad with killing over God, this secular yet inspiring philosophy might indeed preserve not only humans, but also the earth, which is being destroyed through our unconsciousness.

And so, dearest daughter, I would say spend all your learning becoming your self, and spend it too in the practice of courage and steadfastness it will take to hold your wild soul when others have ideas for you. Become the spiritual guide of knowing your own nature, and devote yourself to the unflinching task of serving it. For, whatever its name, or hue, or form, this soul will create the events of your life, and with it, you will be carried as a river is carried by its shore.

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Thoughts influenced by Clarissa Pinkola Estes "The Red Shoes," and Joseph Campbell’s “Creative Mythology."