When in 1963 Maurice Sendak conceived his now iconic illustrated (children’s) story Where the Wild Things Are, he had no idea how oft-quoted, thought-provoking, spiritually probing and controversial his creation would become. The son of Polish Jewish immigrants who called Maurice vilde chayes—Yiddish for “wild beast”—when he misbehaved, Maurice grew to love writing about and illustrating the experience of longing and expectation, fantasizing about escape, and what came to be a central facet of his own creativity: ”wandering” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/books/review/maurice-sendak-wild-things-are-happening.html).
There is something of a spiritual “re-wilding,” a wandering, that is happening for us human-kin in this time of the Great Turning. Welcoming the “monster,” as Bayo Akomolafe often writes, is part of the journey into the unknown, that place where we confront what we fear, what unhinges us, what turns our preconceptions upside down. “We are in the time of monsters, mostly because monsters are embodiments of the magical between” (https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/we-have-met-the-monster-and-it-is-us). The “magical between” captures us at the nexus of fear and longing—fear for what may be our undoing, and longing for what may be our re-creation, our soul’s re-wilding.
What is re-wilding us now, in 2023? Could it be that we are experiencing a global shift in our awareness, that our humanity was never meant to be viewed or seen as “above” or “outside” the wildness that is creation? We are suddenly, shockingly aware, in the midst of this Sixth Great Extinction, that we are causing the dis-ease and degradation of our home planet, and that the human-caused catastrophe of planetary collapse is because we have forgotten our embeddedness in the wilder, wider “We.” We have forgotten how to join in the “wild rumpus” that is creation’s chorus, trying to “solve” or “master” creation’s “problems,” rather than recognize our intrinsic participation in the ruckus. Nothing we do seems adequate to the task when we feel ourselves separate from the wild. Once we cry out, “Let the wild rumpus start!” as Max, the King of the Wild Things, roared, we remember that exhilarating moment when we belong to the whole, that liminal space of “between,” where we are so loved, so treasured. “But the wild things cried, ‘Oh please don’t go—We’ll eat you up—we love you so!’“
Where is spiritual wildness finding its resurgence in you today? How are you re-WILD-ing?
—Laura A. Weber, Ph.D., Prairiewoods associate director and retreats coordinator
snowy tree image by Jenifer Hanson