Recently I have felt uncomfortable in my own skin, this impulse, like a snake, to break out of what currently contains me. Do you know the feeling?

I’ve heard that when a snake is ready to shed her old skin, she will bang her head against a rock over and over until the skin finally splits.

Then she can begin to slide her way out of the old container, birthing herself into a larger, more tender form.

What looks like self-destruction is actually new life finding its way.

In our culture, uncomfortable with change, we might call it going off the deep end, or depression, or a midlife crisis.

We are a culture in love with the stories that end ‘happily ever after.” An arrival at a plateau that stretches out into a forever of sameness.

But the only constant thing in life is change.

And the sameness we are offered chokes the life that longs to unfurl.

And it is only a crisis if we choose to resist.

Last week, this persistent itch took me on a spontaneous getaway to the edge of Morro Bay estuary, a safe haven for sea life and migratory birds.

I woke up with the irrepressible desire to get away, and that evening I ended up on the coast where sky kisses sea, and sea strokes the land in lengthy caresses.

Estuaries are ecotones where things mix—fresh water dances with sea water. Baby sharks are birthed in the same waters as baby seals, predators and prey. A confluence of life and death. Estuaries change daily from covered to exposed with the rolling tides.

Here where borders are blurred, where things are both/and, new life is coaxed forth.

And though such estuaries were once common along the coast of California, 95% of these wetlands have been lost to human development. We have traded the womb waters of earth for paved roads, strip malls and gridded suburbia.

I am struck that the loss of the wilderness of land mirrors the loss of the wildness of our own souls. How we have lost what Francis Weller calls the “primary satisfactions” of dance, story, song, and ritual. How we have lost our instinctual, embodied wisdom. Our communal sharing of dreams and food. How we have lost our capacity to keen and growl, get lost, get spooked, get real.

We have hundreds of options when it comes to ice cream or toilet paper… but when it comes to the expression of the human spirit, of the soul, of our wild mystery---we are starved.

Like hungry ghosts, we try to fill the void with consuming more—but what we consume does not satisfy and we feel bereft.

Our natural midlife hunger for a larger expression of the life we sense is possible is reduced to cliches--buying a fancy car, having an affair, losing one’s groundedess.

But how can any of us be grounded when we’ve cut down forests of ancient trees and backfilled the wetlands? Things we persist in doing to this day.

Elephants beg for space to roam. Birds search for wetlands to rest. The ancient groves reach out their roots and feel into asphalt and concrete where there once was kin.

And our own souls long for the vastness of wild expression.

What we have cut down and bulldozed in the land, we have likewise done to our own psyches.

Disconnected from the web of relationships. Untethered from the rhythms of earth on which we and all species depend, we try to cram the vastness that we are into the gridlines of our industrial growth society. We kill the wolf howl, resist the snake’s shedding, and avoid the grizzly’s fierce hibernation. We dam the rivers and stop the flow of life.

Here in midlife, I feel my own soul resisting. The old stories no longer roomy enough for the life that wants to break forth.

Tracing the edges of the estuary, I am rocked back to my senses by the rhythms of the earth. I know in my bones that this ancient dance of earth and water, wind and sun is what I belong to, what we all belong to.

I feel the grief rise in me at all we have lost and actively destroyed in our attempts to control, and I let it roll out in a great swell like the ocean tide.

I feel another wave roll in in its wake, a swell of wonder and awe at the wild beauty that persists. A wave of longing to join the dance of life that surrounds me here on this wild edge.

May we return to our wild participation in the great song of creation, embracing the spiral dance of death and life that asks us to lean into the change.

May we take our place in the family of things remembering that we already belong.

And, as Rumi says, may the beauty we love, be what we do.

So let your hunger for more carry you home, dear one. Let grief and gratitude mix in the estuary of your own heart, that something new may be coaxed forth.

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Connecting to the body’s wisdom and the longings of our souls are important aspect of the work I do as a 1:1 Soul Companion. Click to learn more.

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