Tasha Schumann

Being Wilderness

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In the Buddhist tradition, the elements — fire, water, earth, air, space — are a way of knowing the living texture of reality itself, how it moves and changes and dances on its own. The elements are not on any self-improvement mission. Fire is just warm. Earth just heaps. Water coheres, air moves, and space accommodates. Nature is not FOR anything. It just IS. Us too.

But easier said than felt. We tend to reign over the wilderness of the bodymind like land-developers, trimming the unruly underbrush, damming up the emotional rivers, paving over the spooky swamps where the wild things are. Even stillness and meditation, tools of self-discovery, can get co-opted into this project of self-control and self-curation. We don’t even realize we’re doing it. And as a total and continuous experience of being, it is exhausting.

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Freedom: With Each Other, Not from Each Other

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Freedom, as they say, is an inside job. Turns out, we don’t need to free ourselves from everything if we can expand the field so wide that nothing’s left out. The inside job is less spa day, more hanging out with the full cast of your inner sitcom without needing anyone to shut up.
And yet, it’s not only an inside job. My ability to even consider “inner freedom” has always been propped up by outer freedoms that rely on—surprise!—other people. A room of my own. Patient, brilliant teachers. Cats that sit in my lap when I meditate so I don’t dare get up.

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Glimmers in the Dust: Rediscovering the Magic of Everyday Life

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And it’s when life feels most overwhelming that reconnecting to this magic is most important. It’s not about bypassing suffering or “being positive”, it’s about practicing a way of seeing that expands our sense of self. The moments of magic—sun flares around a kitten, the sound of rain on summer leaves, the electricity of the autumn air—are reminders of the deeper rhythms going on beyond stress and struggle.

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The Force of Imagination

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If we look closely, we can feel the force of our imaginations blowing around us, carving who we are to become. We engage with our environment, co-create with it. Our inner and outer worlds tangled in a dance of becoming. We are not made by sheer manifesting will alone, but we’re also not stuck in an unbending world. We are the dancing middle way.

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