Thank you for the wonderful reflections in yesterday’s comments! I’m heartened to hear your stories of stepping out of boxes, getting conscious of being inside of them, and wondering what it even means, in your situation, to step into the wilds.

I’m feeling aware of how active this all can seem, and what a burden it can come to feel to be responsible for learning! and growing! and waking up! all the time. Parenthood has often taken my breath away with its relentlessness, and there’s a similar feel, I think, to people on a quest for self improvement – the sense of there being no time to rest, no space to put the reigns down and just soak in and recalibrate for all that’s been learned so far.

And there’s irony in this, right?, as sometimes what we’re racing around trying to learn! and grow! and wake up! about is really in fog for the time being, and we aren’t even sure where to place our next step, let alone how to avoid hitting trees.

I’m wondering, then, if there are some of us who need to hear this poem. It’s by David Wagoner, from his Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems. The fifth or tenth time reading it through just might knock you to your knees. In a very good way.

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Last time I talked a lot about the wilds – the stuff inside of us and in un-tended nature that can feel foreign, and increasingly more like home.

Today I’m thinking about boxes, and the ways the things we do to cover our inner wilds (our neurotic thoughts, our depression, our loneliness, our addictions, our rage) are a lot like boxes. Most of the time boxes do a great job of hiding their contents. By all appearances they’re smooth and they successfully scandalize few.

What boxes cannot, do, however, is survive un-tended nature well. Boxes are stable when placed on smooth surfaces. They stack nicely against other boxes. Their integrity is most preserved when every bump, sharpness, moisture, and curve is kept at bay.

And this would be fine if the world were made up of smooth, dry flooring and only other boxes.

But it very much isn’t.

We lose our jobs. We get diagnosed with cancer. Our dear ones get sick or injured or killed. Relationships grow strained. Natural disasters and housing crises strike.

I’m sure you could lengthen this list from your own experiences by quite a few lines.

When thrown onto surfaces like these or tossed into deep, uncharted waters, boxes break and fall apart. They no longer work for their intended purpose.

And I’m wondering, today, whether instead of pretending to be hermit crabs when this happens, jumping as quickly as we can into a different box when the one we’ve been using falls apart, we could intentionally try on life without them.

I’m wondering whether life outside of our protective boxes might not only be more vibrant and rich and interesting, but actually embody more of the security and stability for which we don our boxes in the first place.

Here’s why. Given the wilds of our inner and outer worlds and the wilds of the worlds of those around us, protecting our boxes – our appearance of peace, stability, kindness, positivity, whatever – requires an enormous amount of energy. That task alone can produce more stress and anxiety than the wilds themselves can do sometimes.

But maybe more importantly, being boxless allows you to give and flex and shift and move with the contours of real life in a way that boxes are incapable of doing. It requires your fears and neuroses and whatever other wild things you have inside to actually be heard and addressed, rather than hidden underneath or constantly drugged by some other person, substance, activity, or thing. It allows the people around you to see your true strengths, as well as your deeper needs, and therefore give to and connect with you in more meaningful ways than the smooth outer planes of boxes allow.

Boxlessness, then, can promote strength, flexibility, deep healing, and meaningful connections. For me, quite an appealing list!

Practically speaking, though, what do I mean? I’m certainly not suggesting a return to infancy, where every fear and frustration and temper tantrum is displayed for all to see.

Rather, these are the kinds of things I mean:

• Increasingly sitting with your hard feelings (fear, anger, depression, grief, shame), rather than denying or avoiding or trying to cover them over. Being curious about them. Pondering their roots.
• Answering more honestly than you might otherwise when someone asks you how you’re doing.
• Noting with greater and greater frequency when you’re running away from a difficult inner conversation. (These often start with phrases like: I actually don’t want to be treated this way. I’m not happy. I’m lonely. I’m afraid. I don’t think I want to do this after all.) And occasionally even engaging these courageous conversations.
• Choosing hair styles and clothing that don’t require constant grooming and protection.
• Trying out one or more thing/s from your list of never-can-do’s: wearing your hair in a way that shows your gray or your full forehead or your ears; wearing shorts or a swim suit in public; dancing; taking a yoga class; selling your art; inviting someone you admire to tea; saying no to your partner, kids, or friends; signing up for an important counseling session.
• Swearing sometimes (if you’re one who feels you never can).

Maybe you have more ideas to add to this list. I’d love to hear them! I’m not suggesting hedonism as a means of promoting trust, but rather an identification of what your personal box is made of – the one you use to cover up the wild stuff that lives inside of you or the stuff you fear is less groomed or less tended than others would want to take – and intentional, repeated decisions to try out life beyond those things.

Maybe life beyond them is far more wonderful than life behind them ever can be.

****************

Do any of you have experience with trying life outside your box? What has it been like?

And are there limits to this boxless life I’m suggesting? Places where it makes a lot of sense to keep a box on?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Today my son’s class had a field trip to a marsh – 10 acres of protected land surrounded by strip malls and city streets. There are trails through the marsh, but being 5-year-olds, this group took more to the brush, weaving in and out of grasses, decaying leaves, pond water. As a microcosm of life, I’d say this marsh did a nice representative job: lots of chaos, few spots suitable for sitting down to rest.

As for my comfort level with the chaos, I am a lot like the girl from Tuesday’s sketch. Literally and metaphorically, I love the idea of dirt between my toes. I love the thought of being one with bugs and grasses and trees. I see a life trajectory for myself of ever more connection with nature.

But simultaneously, I fear it. I fear its foreignness and its power. I fear its seeming indifference to my comfort and well being. I fear – and this one’s hardest to name – what could happen to me were I to open myself more wholly to it. My efforts at constructing a self that I’m proud of and comfortable displaying in public feel, in the face of raw, untended nature, like a row of pansies planted in flimsy, plastic cups on the bank of a raging river known to flood. Laughable, in one respect. Pointless in another. Like they’ll wash away as quick as sand.

And truly, despite my long work on inner things, I’m not sure what would be left after such a washing.

I’m speaking here of fearing literal nature, but too the raw realities of life that pulse and flood and flow beneath all of us, all of the time. All of us are constructing ourselves all of the time – putting clothes on and make-up, wearing our degrees and accomplishments, covering over our fears and longings with every manner of food and practice and work and entertainment and exercise and next-best-things to buy. Even relationships do some covering for us. Children, too.

And if we’re lucky – or so we come to think – we maintain some semblance of order most of the time. We maintain our appearances and come to identify so strongly with the coverings that make them up that the raw stuff beneath those appearances begins to look foreign. Fearsome. Dirt we like the idea of feeling between our toes, but somehow never get around to taking our shoes off to try.

So here’s a marsh-thought from today: what if it’s possible to take small steps into raw nature – literally, or into the wilds of our own selves – and not only survive, but be all the better for it: more alive, more clean in the ways that matter, more real, somehow. And what if those small steps, maybe even in the company of a guide who knows more about those wilds than we, could turn into whole afternoons spent there, getting familiar with the wilds themselves, and also our own limitations in them. (There are times for risk and adventure, for example, and times to head back in to a soft couch and something warm to drink.)

I wonder whether the fear of losing our coverings – the things that on one level make us safe (“normal”, “successful”, “dutiful”, “pious”), or at the very least appear to be so, which is often what matters to us most – I wonder whether this fear could be faced and lived past not by giant strides into fearsome, unknown territory (backpacking for a week on steep terrain! quitting the day job now! commitments to years of therapy! ultimatums to people we love!), but by a walk through a small preserve on a March morning. By finding a guide or volunteer somewhere who can say one or two things about the plants and animals that grow there.

By a series of small steps into the wilds of our earth and the wilds of our own souls, we just might discover ourselves less foreigners in such places…less foreigners in every place…and more strongly, abidingly home.

As the calendar tilts toward Spring in this part of the world and toward Fall across the globe, I thought it’d be fitting to turn our thoughts at this site toward nature. Specifically, I want to try to learn some things about trust from this wordless, and sometimes even fearsome, teacher.

I want to lean into and ponder the lessons in the shift of seasons.

I want to listen to what bugs and trees, rain and starry skies have to say.

I want to look, open-eyed, at the fear that nature can produce (the recent quake in Christchurch being one of many examples), and see whether trust can be sown in its midst.

I want to try to find paths out of the fear and despair that climate change and the devastation of ecosystems can foster.

I want to discover connections between nature and trust that urbanites like myself can make, right where we are, without huge trecks away from the city.

The month of March will be devoted to these things here. I want to situate myself on the earth – on earth – and see whether this is a place where trust can be heartily sown.

I’m hopeful that it is.

****************
For anyone interested in seeing what topics will be covered here in months to come, click here for a working list.