living wildly means keeping death close

I recently went through the process of making a logo which entails finding an image to encapsulate the essence of what Live Wild Therapy is all about.

 I thought a lot about living and aliveness, what it means to feel and be wild. And in all my musings, I kept coming back to death. In the moments I chose to live wildly, to follow what made me feel most alive, it was accompanied with an ending, a death of what was. When I moved to Philadelphia, I said goodbye to Seattle, a city that was once my home. When I hiked the Long Trail for a month, I let go of the certainty of city living for the unknown of the woods. When I started my own therapy private practice, I left got of the sense of safety in someone else being the boss and surrendered to self trust. Every beginning comes from another’s end. (I know, cliché). There is no life without death.

 Living wildly means keeping death close, shaping and sharpening how we choose to live. Living wildly does not happen by accident. It is to notice what is dying in our life, what has lost its vitality, and grieve. This means walking away from what is no longer alive – a relationship, a habit, a way of talking to ourselves, a mode of being. We are choosing how to live every day through our actions, decisions, and relationships.

 This means getting good at change. Which ooh! Change is hard and often uncomfortable. There is much fear and resistance to the unknown that comes with grief and the dying. But there is also possibility. What if the unknown makes you feel alive? Is abundant? What if you fall in love with the mundane? What if it’s pain and peace and pleasure? What if we simply nurture the something different that emerges.

 We are all alive and we are all going to die.

How do we choose to live when we know we’re dying?

In the wise words of Octavia Butler,

All that you touch, you change.

All that you change, changes you.

The only lasting truth is change.

God is change.

Holding death in one hand and life in the other grounds me in change.  

To trust in change and nurture the something different that emerges.

What is ready to be wildly alive in you?