A wild moment in a wild place on a date when the day was equal to the night. Described by some spontaneous words and deeper thoughts that derive from the urge to truly and fully rewild myself. If you like, feel invited to listen to (or read about) the inspiring magic of flickering flames and sparkling stars. And re-discover a little bit of wilderness in your soul.
Day and night.
Today they are of equal length.
To me. It is an important date.
A date which I wish to acknowledge
For its natural rhythm.
A natural pattern
That I like to consciously direct my attention towards.
Cycles. Rhythms. Flow. Wilderness.
I am only learning
To become more aware.
The whole undertaking
Is a crucial part of my healing journey.
With intention and intuition, I go
Step forward, forge a path.
The latter of which I only start to grasp.
Intuition.
The voice of nature
That speaks through the very sensations in my body.
The sun was setting in the West. Proof of concept from the height of a tower in the middle of the forest. The approximate location: Weser-Hill country, Germany. Date: 22nd September 2024.
13 years.
Physical geography, landscape ecology, and soil science.
This is what I studied.
To understand nature.
The very matter is amusing me now.
Because: it is a striking realisation to notice
That studying is not equal to understanding.
And that knowledge is not relevant
As long as it has not turned into a form of lived experience.
Miigaa.
How can it be
Therefore
That today I feel a nomad man knows more than I do?
A man whom I met in 2016.
A man who introduced me to the secrets of a place
A place where the Eurasian steppe meets Boreal taiga forest.
Whereas I knew a lot of scientific terminology. Like: the taxonomy of soils.
Or how to take samples appropriately, suitable for later analysis in the laboratory.
He grew up at this place. He knew every plant and most living beings.
Not by their scientific terms
But by their botanic value for nourishment, nutrition, and medicine.
Not least by their growing pattern and behaviour, also.
Whereas I knew how to use a GPS device
He did not need a map to navigate.
Whereas I brought with me a lot of fancy gear
He taught me the most useful of all knots I have ever known
And how to walk up and down steep hillsides barefoot.
He too knew how to catch an injured hawk with a wooden stick
And how to heal it.
The place where Miigaa lived. Mongolia. Winter 2016. The day temperature was below -30°C when we went out for a ride. The hut is where his mother lived and worked for GIZ.
The fire.
Yesterday night,
It was whispering to me.
Wood.
Ignited to honour the equinox.
Flames.
Telling me Miigaa´s story.
Reminder of an ancient wisdom
That once was much engrained, a part of every human´s life.
Pause.
After a deep breath
I then noticed
For the past two years
I had been focussing on
How to overcome transgenerational trauma.
Only.
I learnt about the intrinsic mechanisms of how my organism operates.
This was crucial for my survival.
I too learnt about what a dysregulated nervous system is.
And how to soothe myself. How to re-regulate.
How to outgrow all this trauma and pain and dysfunction.
Without doctors´ support. Without the scheme of Western medicine.
It is striking.
And I am practising.
Still.
Now.
In that moment.
By the fire,
I sensed
That it would be time
To rewild myself.
From now on
With each step I take
To seek transgenerational wisdom.
The wisdom that once was part of my humanness.
The wisdom that most of us have lost.
The wisdom that still exists somewhere, out there perhaps in tiny bubbles.
The wisdom that is with people like Miigaa.
The wisdom that is so overly fluid.
Jeopardised by an ever-encroaching globalised world.
A world
That tells fairy tale stories
Of success, growth, money, materialism, achievements.
But, in its principles only causes exhaustion and depletion.
The fire.
Gently flickering.
It put my world back into perspective.
It gifted me a down-to-earth experience.
Now and then, some ambers took off.
Rose into the air with the updraft current.
Before their glow was extinguished by an Easterly breeze.
Little rising stars made of flames, so close to Earth
Saying hello to the clearness and darkness of the night sky above.
Dancing hues of blue and orange,
My favourite colour combination.
Heat radiated out onto bare skin.
Smoke caught in the hair of my nostrils.
A feeling of calmness was washing over me.
I put my fleece to the ground
And stretched out next to the fire.
Bend my head sideways to the right,
Gazed into the smouldering flames.
Did not think
Till I did.
Thoughts.
Circling around.
My favourite friends.
Tempting me to ponder
About how fire provided us humans with a survival advantage.
Back in time and something that now seems so retro.
Thoughts about the fact that
Before me
most generations were all able to light a fire without matches.
Something I am unable to do.
But…
I abandoned those thoughts.
Fluxes of mental energy leading to nowhere.
Instead, my eyes met the stars
And let the universe invite me
To get lost in its ever-present mystery of space.
To feel small, yet as comfortably contemptuous as I could have ever been.
My nervous system was regulated, and my heartbeat slowed.
What a wild moment, that was!
Noise.
I zoomed in
And tried to let the artificial sounds pass me by
A deep roar, not the chatter of autumn deer,
But the voice of combine harvesters
That filled the valley.
Risen from the sugar beet fields next door.
500 PS against the tranquillity of the night.
Economic growth versus dancing ambers.
Hustling humans contrasting the presence of now.
As much as I dislike black-and-white comparisons,
It was a they versus me situation.
The me.
The one that was
Here. Present. Still.
The me.
Caught by the sky and the stars, the flames and the fire.
Not the fire I ignited during the 2024 equinox but an equally impressive one from a cold winter´s night in Mongolia. That night Miigaa taught me his mother tongue, and we spent hours watching the flames dance in otherwise silent company.
Surprise.
Despite the disruptions in the external, non-natural world
I managed to be and to feel
Intrinsically, internally delighted.
Gratefulness ignited my heart and soul.
As did the strongest of all desires,
To rewild further.
To live freely and neither to be enslaved nor defined by cultural norms.
Ever again.
To be healthy and in sync with the natural Earth.
Simply
To be as I was always supposed to be.
For the very reminder
I do thank you.
Equinox
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