Between order and wildness

Throw it away or leave it? It’s a question I keep asking myself these days, as the garden in our land in Cerebros starts to fill with life again. For me, it is essential to return regularly to my centre, to my inner home. As the years pass, I notice more and more how deeply I need to honour these cycles in the way I live: in my coming and going, in acting and pausing, in stepping out into the world and returning from it. My monthly gathering with the art group led by Sara Núñez de Arenas is a deeply inspiring way of fulfilling this ritual. It is so because that space opens me to new perspectives on the expression of our humanity, brings me into contact with artists I did not know, and inspires me to create myself.

These past weeks have revolved around holding, preserving, caring... I did not know of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the Northamerican artist who pioneered feminist art and founded what she called “maintenance art.” After becoming a mother and seeing that the daily care of house and children left her little time for creation, she transformed all those acts of care into art. Her manifesto proposed that these activities of “maintenance” — cleaning, cooking, caring — are fundamental to society and deserve to be recognised as art.

These ideas and reflections have found me among the olive trees, pines, and fig trees of the land I care for, and that has cared for me for some years now: watering, pruning, feeding the soil, burning, uprooting, planting... in this spring that returns everything to wild abundance and life. And although this land was once cultivated by generations of farmers who also kept vineyards, by the time I bought it, it had been abandoned for many years, with all the native vegetation growing in exuberance. In a word: wild.

I walk through these fields and see dry plants, plants that are dying, plants that are being born, and I notice within me a need to reorder what does not need to be ordered, simply because I have chosen to keep it as wild as possible.

How does one maintain wild land? Remove what is dead, or leave it? What is truly waste, and what is simply nature finding its own way?

Can what is discarded become material for creative expression?

Lately I have also been playing with that question in another way, transforming what seems like waste into something else... something that feels alive, even beautiful in its own manner.

I believe something similar happens within us. At times we relate to ourselves like a gardener who wants everything neat and controlled, like a perfectly trimmed lawn, with no room for the unexpected or the wild.

But not everything that grows in disorder needs to be uprooted. Some things only need to be understood, or given a little more space within our being. And perhaps part of the work is learning to know the difference.

It is something we also explore, in different ways, in Rewilding your Soul, Reclaiming your Voice: we do not rush to fix what feels uncomfortable, but learn to remain with it long enough to understand what it truly is, and what it needs.

Paying attention to everything. To what wishes to be born, to what wishes to die. To what is revealing itself yet seems to hide, knowing that we carry an intuitive and wild nature that longs to be rescued.

The Rewilding process is a slow and respectful one, unhurried, in which we cultivate loving and attentive observation inspired by fairy tales, creative expression, and sharing within a safe circle of women.

What in you is truly ready to be released... and what might be asking to grow, even if it does not look the way you expected?

From Women who run with the wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés:

“In a single human being there are many other beings, all with their own values,

motives, and devices. Some psychological technologies suggest we arrest these beings,

count them, name them, force them into harness till they shuffle along like vanquished

slaves. But to do this would halt the dance of wildish lights in a woman’s  eyes;;  it  would

halt her heat lightning and arrest all throwing of sparks. Rather than corrupt her natural

beauty, our work is to build for all these beings a wildish countryside wherein the artists

among them can make, the lovers love, the healers heal.”

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