Wild Life

 

The contemplative life is not a way of knowing. It is not the path of certitude. In fact, that’s what makes it so alive, so necessarily active. Our glimpses of “arrival” along the way are places we can catch our breath and recall we are moving in the right direction, even if it’s only because it’s exactly where we are. Those times, we remember that the way is not meant to be easy, simple, or comfortable. But these moments only last for a flash in the midst of life because, as the Rev. Dr. Walter Fluker reminds us, “Life will keep going because life itself is alive.”

Cassidy Hall, “Queering the Living Tradition,” ONEING 13, no. 2, A Living Tradition (2025): 39 – 40.

Wild Life

What if Samadhi, the final eighth limb of yoga, the culminating aim of our practices isn’t a cozy, easy, comfortable, place but rather that state of consciousness where we are able to really take in – live in - the wild crazy mysticality of life itself?  Samadhi the eighth limb of yoga is translated as the ‘integration’ of and ‘absorption’ into the innermost self with itself and with outer world. complexities.  I think of it as a radical acceptance of all that is unfolding within and before me and my experience of this unfolding whether that be fear, joy, sorrow, emptiness, confusion.  Samadhi is not a steady state reached when all is calm within and without, but rather a great and eager tenderness with myself as I fall apart and come together again. Samadhi is an active unity with the wildness of life itself, the storms across ocean, mountain goats leaping from crag to crag, the bursting forth of new life towards its first breath.

Yoga has prepared me to contain more of this kind of wildness. Through yoga as my body, heart, mind is stretched to take in the sensations, experiences, and spirit of the wild life.  Not the life I had hoped for but the life I am living. I feel more of everything, not only the calm and joy but the anxiety, the sorrow, the emptiness.  I watch myself in the struggle to grasp after comfort and push away pain and the coming into the realization that the longing itself is God given. The ego that wants to contain things in clearly defined concepts, start and end points, categories of good and bad is incapable of taking in the wildness of life.  Living is too discomforting, humiliating, unknowable for the egoic self. Only the soul possess the nimble and suppleness enough to meet life’s wild infinity. She finds release through softness, poetry and metaphor, the stories of ancestors that I now tell and learn from. 

I first spent time in the wilderness when I was fifteen on a winter Outward Bound class.  With only tents for shelter and the food and clothes we could carry on ourselves and in our packs the veil between inside and outside was thin. Boots froze during the very long dark night, each meal required the time and energy to find wood and boil water, walking in snowshoes with heavy packs was labored, slow, and ungainly. We were dependent on each other when we flagged and on some inner source of strength, new to me, that I sensed in the struggle.  From this frozen landscape, I saw the sky as if first time, more open, blue and mysterious than I had ever known. I was grateful for the sunshine in my eyes and on my face. I delighted in the chickadees who danced on the twigs kicking snowflakes into the air. Icy paths, windy storms, shivering nights in that tent, an experience of Samadhi, the feeling aliveness, each day a loneliness, a struggle, a delight, and a surprise, in the wildness.