Nobody Arrives at Themselves Quickly—Becoming... slowly

Nobody arrives at themselves quickly. Not really.

In 1997 I lost everything. Marriage, home, stability — gone. I was on the floor, quite literally. A pile of ashes.

And then I got up.

Not gracefully. Not with a plan. Just... up. I had to. One foot, then the other, kids in tow, setting out toward something better without quite knowing what that meant yet. That was the beginning of the journey, although I wouldn’t have called it rewilding then. I wouldn’t have called it anything. I was just trying to survive.

The years that followed were quieter than they looked from the outside. I was doing the inner work — energy work, healing, studying, practicing, growing — but always a little once removed. Keeping myself and my kids safe had taught me to observe rather than participate. I watched life from a careful distance. I got very good at reading rooms, reading people, understanding the energetics of situations without fully stepping into them.

Observation has its gifts. But it has its limits too.

At the end of 2016 I sat down to do what I do every year — review the passing year and create an envisioned theme of what’s coming in the new year. One thing jumped out.

Move from observer to participant.

Then … Music.

I giggled when I wrote it. It felt almost like too much fun to be true, which made me question it. I’d had a secret desire my whole life to sing and play with others — not to perform necessarily, just for the sheer joy of it. And I’d been talking myself out of it for decades. When you’re scrambling to feed your kids, learning how to play music seems frivolous. I can’t really play anything. I can’t really sing well (except when I’m alone, then I’m awesome, of course 😊).

Lame excuses. I knew they were lame. I used them anyway, with full self-awareness and a slight eye roll at myself. I wasn’t fooling myself, but I wasn’t ready to take it seriously either.

For Christmas, Kevin gave me a ukulele and twelve weeks of lessons. I was thrilled and slightly terrified. It was the first act of my commitment in 2017 as an active participant. Small, very intimidating, completely impractical. Perfect.

Growth rarely announces itself any other way.

I also noted in the year-end review: I see how others have built their businesses over the years, yet mine has stayed the same size — hobby size — but I have grown.

Organic inner growth.

And then, this: ... allowing for lightness and rewilding of self, listening to the whisperings of the wind, the song of the earth, the dream of the oceans and the passionate harmonics of the sun.

I wrote that word — rewilding — nine years before it became the title of my upcoming book. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t remember writing it. I just lived my way into it.

It’s not only the title of my book. It’s my whole journey — the long, patient, sometimes devastating work of undoing the conditioning, the survival strategies, the performed versions of myself... to find the necessary Self underneath. The one who was always there, waiting.

Oh the mysteries we live!

Then in 2021, somewhere in the strange suspended time of COVID, a song arrived. Things tend to surface when you’re finally still enough to hear them. With only a handful of chords and lyrics materializing easily, the chorus went like this:

I want a life that takes me to the edge

of my comfort zone,

then nudges me beyond,

into the great unknown.

I want a life where scary beautiful

is possible and true —

a life where I can be myself with you.

Scary beautiful. That’s what the edge actually feels like. Not reckless. Not fearless. Just willing.

A few years later, that song became a painting. My Legend painting emerged, Keeper of the In Between. She was all about living in that space of the great unknown, a bit beyond the comfort zone. She knows more deeply how to show up, how to express herself, how to be more her. She’s been to the edges and came back changed, carrying the wisdom of both worlds.

Did the song call my painting or did my painting call the song?

Twenty-nine years ago I got up off the floor and started walking.

I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew the direction — toward more aliveness, more honesty, more of whatever it was that felt like me underneath all the layers life had deposited.

The rewilding you’re doing right now — even if you don’t have a name for it yet — is already building something. The questions you’re asking today are seeds. The edges you’re willing to stand at, even briefly, even nervously... those matter.

You don’t have to see the whole path. You just have to keep taking the next step, one small terrifying joyful step at a time.

The ukulele counts. So does whatever your version of it is.

And that brings me to the age old question: Ultimately, who’s doing the calling — us reaching toward life (Universe, Divine, God, All That Is..), or life reaching toward us?

Both, as I understand it. We are in this together, doing the dance on planet Earth.

A little 2-step anyone?

What's one edge you've been circling?

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Wishing you a fierce and beautiful spring,

Suzanne