I read a line from a poem and felt something rattle inside of me. “The wild pouring of self” moved me in a strange but powerful way.
There’s something frightening about it and yet, it’s the truth of how we expose ourselves and also how we find ourselves newly. Moment after moment. Day after day. Year after year.
Is it the word wild that drew me in?
The memories of days when I felt free to dance at parties, when I skipped school for the first and only time, and hitchhiked with a friend hundreds of miles north to a god- forsaken place in Connecticut to surprise a boy she barely knew at his horse farm, when we were picked up by a creepy looking guy in his open pick up truck who reached back and grabbed porn magazines which he wanted to show us, and from whom we escaped by jumping out and hiding in a bathroom at a gas station along the way.
Is it the wild me I am reconnecting with who took a train from Westchester into NYC at age 13 and met a boy I thought of as my boyfriend but who probably didn’t feel the same but missed the last train back and slept in the vestibule of my cousin’s west side apt building, petrified to ring the bell and wake them up, the first time I lied to my parents?
That wild sounds a bit much to me now.
Who wants to go back to the wild days of our youth?
Or do we?
Maybe it’s the free flowing nature of days? The absence of responsibility? The not living with should? The not worrying endlessly about so many other people?
Maybe we just need to capture the essence of wild.
Or redefine wild for ourselves, in our current stage of life.
A new context for wild; something worth exploring now.
The wild pouring of self can be soothing if we choose.
It can healing. It can be sweet. And it can be grand and open and adventurous.
It need only to be truthful. That is how it becomes wild.
When it is free, unfiltered.
It is the pure expression of fears, creativity, wants, needs, regrets, all of it, that becomes the current wild pouring of self.
When I write and feel myself revealed on a page; when I talk to my children and listen intently about their struggles and successes, when I read a letter and am touched by someone’s kindness, when I sit and read in the den, inspired by my mom, who, in the picture hanging is also reading a book and looking elegant, when I am warmed by the sun and feel its power, when I choose to make wild mushroom soup, just for me when nothing else appeals to me..
These are moments of the wild pouring of self; a river of self-knowledge, ever flowing, continuing, undisturbed by the passage of time, splashing and moving over and around rocks, offering the possibility of floating, of moving, of being you.