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On letting ourselves surrender to the magic of wild things.
When despair in the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free
- Wendell Berry
I didn’t discover Wendell Berry’s poetry until the onset of the pandemic in 2020, when someone read it aloud during to me during quarantine. Since then, this poem has been a constant magical balm for me. When I heard about Berry’s passing earlier this week, I came back to this poem once again, and reflected on the magic that can happen when we let ourselves take one sliver of a moment to rest in wild nature. So much of therapy - healing in general - is work. Bringing awareness to parts. Using our coping strategies. Accessing Self energy so we can navigate the world from a place of agency. Tending to our nervous systems. All this is good, wonderful, and needed. And, there are times when it all feels like too much. Too overwhelming, too much work, too much processing. The world right now is intense. It’s testing all our nervous systems’ ability to stay present, to stay hopeful, to stay ok enough to keep showing up for our communities and ourselves. When I return to Berry’s poem this week, I re-centered how important it is to surrender.
Not to shut down, give up, or dissociate, but to surrender to the wild, magic rhythms of nature. To take a moment to surrender to the grass and feel the thrumming activity of the tree roots beneath us. To surrender to the ocean and observe the waves ebbing and flowing. To surrender to the migrations of birds, the feeling of rain pouring down, and simply feel ourselves belonging to this moving ecosystem. Earlier this year, I got a tattoo of a pelican. A lifelong birdwatcher, the grey pelican in particular holds a special place in my heart. After living for 15 years in the Bay Area, I always felt awe and magic in the way they rode the air along the waves, and wildly dove into the stormy, cold Pacific Ocean. For myself, pelicans represent the magic of surrendering to the presence of wild things.
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