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Welcome! This is a place to share how we celebrate & deepen our relationship to Nature. Here you will find stories, images, & ideas about wilderness, human nature, & soulfulness. Drawing from the experiences of everyday living, the topics on this blog include: forays into the natural world, the writing life, community service, meditation, creativity, grief & loss, inspiration, & whatever else emerges from these. I invite you on this exploration of the wild within & outside of us: the inner/outer landscape.



Thursday, April 26, 2012

Framing the Questions





I don’t want to live in the close-ended questions:

When will thus and so occur? Will the discussion revolve around such and such? Are we going to do this thing? If so, when? How many hours a day will I really be able to do that which I desire to do? How many hours, days, weeks will that thing I want last? Will I still be able to do this and that in a year, in two years, when I am sixty? Am I likeable enough, lovable enough, friendly enough, diligent enough, powerful enough, creative enough, smart enough, tough enough, healthy enough, beautiful enough, and blah, blah, blah enough?


And these ad nauseam questions stifle and gag me. They draw my breath into them so I have no air left to live in, to inhale. I am stripped of vitality and passion as well as fortified (imagine a big fortress wall) against “the emergent” when I focus so narrowly – so tritely-but-not-benignly.

Instead, I want to live into, draw breath from and breathe into questions – expanding “Self and Other,” becoming one and fused with All That Is – that are about practices, spontaneity, flow, richness and depth, texture and light.


How can we co-create a life, out of our individual strengths, that adds compassion to this world? In what ways can we begin to conceive of the collective and our role in that?

How can we model the ebb and flow of our lives after seasons and cycles so that:
“gaps” become interstices;
“redundancy” becomes the rich ecotone of layered experience;
“separation” becomes an opportunity for rich solitary inquiry;
“fondness” becomes acceptance of all beings as we are, limiting judgment;
“frustration” becomes an honoring of the beauty in difference;
“callousness” becomes a turning point for the arising of compassion;
“fear” becomes openness;
“anger” becomes softness and vulnerability;
“angst” becomes faith, trust, and then peace?


I want to remember that the osprey will come back, year after year to nest atop the platform at the local park. I want to recall in the darkness of winter that there will be another springtime. During summer’s long days, I want to recall the darkness in the corner of my own soul. It is my desire to reach out with a wide embrace, challenging my own limiting thoughts and behaviors so that I may engage Life open-endedly. I begin by reframing the questions from close-ended, simple-answered ones to those that weave together strands of body, psyche, mind and spirit…so that it is with wholeness that I greet the world each morning.


To paraphrase EB White: Each morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor it. The only way I can savor this one life I have is to balk at the urge to shut down, and to practice opening, again and again, to the largeness and even the un-answerability of open-ended questions. It is a practice, a mantra, a fervent hope carried in the seed of my heart.



All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.