Three Teachers: Patience, Paradox, Peace.

Mary Oliver wrote that you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. But what if that animal has been kept in the dark, hanging in a harness, waiting to be remembered?

This month, I’m writing about the paradox of trying to be both a mother and a wild thing, and coming into a clearing in my life, to slowly retrace my steps toward a deeper conversation.

Clearing
— Martha Postlethwaite

Do not try to serve
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.

Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,

until the song
that is yours alone to sing
falls into your open cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.

Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to the world
so worthy of rescue.

There is something deeply romantic about creating “a clearing in the dense forest of your life and waiting there, patiently, until the song that is yours begins to sing,” like this poem points to.

I have always been drawn to clearings and open spaces where no one needs me, and nothing but the non-human world gathers to pour its secrets into me.

As I get older, I find myself making more and more clearings, cutting down trees that obscure this space — trees, in this case, being relationships and distractions, obligations and work that get in the way of me spending time in this opening. My life has narrowed to only my closest relationships, my dearest ones, and most free time spent tending to small green sprouts growing in the garden in my front yard, or visiting wild spaces that both frighten and replenish me.

The song is trying to find me. I have sung versions of it before and offered myself to this world ‘so worthy of rescue’, but there is always another chorus working its way through the lungs of this instrument. I am very sensitive to what begins to feel less like a call and more like an order that won’t leave me alone.

There is no question whether I want to create a clearing in the dense forest of my life. I must. And in many ways, I feel the clearing is being made for me. My gut is being pulled by a string toward some remote place far, far away from everything familiar.

Years ago, I had a dream about a limp, barely breathing fox hanging in a harness in the corner of my room. I have been in conversation with it ever since. It still surfaces in my daily life, asking whether I have managed to let this wild part of myself down yet. I don’t think I have. But I have been trying. Likely not hard enough, some critic in me insists, arms crossed in the corner.

I have started noticing where the restricted instinct lives in my body. I have sat with it in ceremony, in wild places. I booked a trip where I will spend five days in solitude tucked close to a river and miles of cork trees. I bought a small metal fox and nestled it in the tall grass outside my writing cabin, a gesture toward what longs to move freely again through open spaces.

Harder than these gestures is building a life that remembers its wildness daily.

I resist the long wanderings my fox loves. But when I feed it, I become strangely weepy with joy, as though it knows exactly what is required to remain alive and aligned. Mother from there. Love from there. Writing from there.

This is the foundation of the house itself. And yet so often I leave it hanging in the corner of my room, listless and underfed.

I wonder how many of us know exactly what keeps us whole, yet let weeks or months pass before offering it to ourselves. We become distracted — from the Latin distrahere: to pull apart.

The work is slow.

The word patience stands out to me as something needing special attention in times where you are looking for some new or deepening version of your song. We make the clearing, or the clearing makes itself for us, and then, with great painstaking patience, we sit there hour upon hour, as best we can without flinching or getting scared away by all that we encounter in that great, prescient pause we find ourselves moving deeper into and toward.

I recognize how words are so much more than definitions, but closer to living constellations that accompany us through different parts of the path.

I am often visited by words. They find me in the middle of a night dream or slip into a casual conversation, until they seem to take up residence in the joints of my life, sweeping through the rooms of my days to make sure I’m paying attention.

“Patience” and “paradox” have been cycling through lately.

Paradox because I have felt crucified between my responsibilities as a mother and wife, the keeper of this home, and the wildest, most starving parts of myself. Between my need to be with them and my need to be without them; She who wishes to move deeper into the pathless wood where no words are spoken and no time is kept, and she who must be home by three to pick the kids up from school with a smile.

When two opposite things sit in the same room together and neither leaves, this is paradox. The refusal to exile either truth.

Patience because I must refuse to yank open what is becoming, what communicates without timelines or agenda, what the clearing often asks of us after we have finally made space to listen. Patience because I must sit in the twisting, the wringing out of myself, while also straightening up and walking toward the world that needs my care, no matter my personal needs.

Making room for mystery while continuing to mother, love, labour, and remain, this is patience.

I struggle with both these words and the meanings they invite me to learn and incorporate. I am tempted to feel victimized by my circumstances, dipping into resentment toward my children, my partner, and the crushing lists of labor required by the life I have loved building. But patience and paradox keep tapping at the window of my awareness, waiting to be let in, even as I sit here, rigid as a fist, at the center of my life.