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June 14, 2016

The Only Way Home is to Listen to the Wildness Inside.

Camila Cordeiro/ Unsplash

The elephants are calling to us.

They are calling us home—not “home” to the wilds of Africa, but home to the spin and swirl of the wilderness inside our own beating hearts.

In our hearts, we know what the elephants know. There in the quiet place that lives in our centers that the richness of the world is ours to partake in, just as much for us as for the elephants. The elephants know how to live with their families in complete understanding of exactly how to do what is theirs to do. They know how to go where they are called and they know how to have everything that they need.

They know how to be with the stillness and beauty of creation. They are as much a part of the fabric of the wild as the grass and the wind. There is no separation between them and the world. And they are telling us that now is our time to know the same for ourselves.

We have been lost from our own private wilderness for too long now. Our disconnection from the source of everything where the elephants live shows up in jobs we merely exist in, in constant stories in our heads of scarcity and lack, in the rhythm and pull every day of the memories of the worst thing that ever happened to us that we are afraid will happen again. We have been so limited by our own inertia. We have been too afraid to take risks.

We have neglected the powerful beating of our brilliant hearts. 

We have been afraid to listen for the voices of the elephants inside of us—but they are here. And they are speaking to us. So are the whales, the trees, the waterfalls, the rocks. Every single beautiful creation on this earth has a voice. And their voices are all saying the same thing: Home. Come home. Come home to the part of you that has never been separate from this green world, come home to who you are and always have been meant to be.

It is time now for us to listen. We can no longer separate ourselves from the fabric of life, we can no longer deny our callings and our yearnings that are our essential nature. We can no longer keep distant from the wilderness of our own hearts. The earth is ready for us and we are ready for the earth. Our souls are crying out for something new, and a new consciousness is being born through us into the world. We no longer want pain, or suffering, or boredom, or loneliness or sacrifice or just barely getting by.

We can no longer bear to be less than who we are. We want freedom and joy and beauty and connection and purpose and unlimited abundance. How do we do it? How do we join with the forces of the universe like the elephants that are innately wise and loving and want nothing more than for us to be inside that love? We have to listen to the world the way the elephants do. We have to listen to the quiet beating of our own hearts.

To do that, first we have to come home to ourselves.

We come home to the quiet place that lives in each of our hearts by listening for the call of what we love. We listen and we follow. We take bold steps toward the callings of our wild souls. We move toward what brings us joy and we move steadily away from what causes us suffering. When our souls call we answer. We follow magic and mystery and we watch for miracles. It is simple but it also can be hard. Sometimes it can be very hard. Because the voices of our tame selves, the words from the parts of us that are caged and imprisoned still like to tell us that we are crazy, foolish and completely insane.

The people around us might not understand what we are doing; they might have bad advice that is meant to be helpful. But we have something that they don’t know about: we have the elephants. And if we listen to the elephants, the wise and strong and wild elephants, we can only go where we are meant to go, which is, of course, home.

The next time we hear an elephant whisper in our ears, I hope that we listen. The next time the wind blows through the branches of the old oak tree I hope we stop what we are doing and feel our heartbeat.

The next time a wild longing ferrets its way through our veins, I hope we stop and pay attention.

The only way home is to be wild—and the only way to be wild is to be home.

 

 

Author: Beth Gager

Image: Steve Slater at Flickr 

Editors: Renée Picard; Caitlin Oriel

 

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