Blessings to you my wild soul
Blessings to the wildness of my soul and the soul of my wildness


There, that’s a start.
But where do I go from here?

How do I sincerely pray to something that feels a bit lost to me? Lost first to the winds of time. Lost now to the huge crunch of time caring for new twin grandbabies, a toddler and a struggling post-partum daughter.

If I even knew where my wild was, how can I even pause long enough to find it?

An interior wildness was a constant companion in my thoughts and around my heart since…. well, forever. It was previously, always, easily located -- as if residing on the surface of my skin, like a slow-release watering into my sense of being. It has inspired spontaneous actions– some that were pretty good. It has sparked creativity that resulted in some interesting things. It has stoked the fires of some pretty awesome seeds of joy and excitement.

There has always been a wild soul in me -- even if at times an untidy, windswept wandering rebel-soul seeking any cause to wilder myself.

Yet at the dawn of this now 8th decade of my life, you ask me to write this prayer to my wild soul? At a time that I feel my least wild and most domesticated. Decades of get up and go, are filled with lots more sit down and rest and while I’m at it, hold a baby or two. My long-established empty nest filled with adult dinner parties is again decorated with toddler and infant hardware. The hours I spend at my daughter’s three-kids-under-three household are beautiful and loving, but oh they are so very exhausting.

This question of penning such a prayer to my wild soul in this endless need to care for little ones, has been mulled for weeks now. Days upon days to take heart, take pause, take it all in.

And in the midst of this pause, time and space I found it. I found her.

I reacquainted with my wild self through the wisdom-soul of the grandmother within me.

I am the matriarch of my family and she is my new rebel with a cause. It is more than just the endless holding of newborn twins. I am holding my entire family together at a complicated and exhausting time. I am a great wild soul that sets the emotional tone of a chaotic household that never planned to have three children. I caretake the necessary. I generate wellbeing. I am creating a legacy for the future generations.

For this writing exercise, I was struggling to coin a phrase or find the elegant language to name all of this with the heft it deserved. Then someone shared a Facebook post with me that elevated the notions of the power and importance of Soft Rebellions.

Rebellions that don’t fight against things, but build towards something bigger.

Copy of Blog Post Cover (2)Drawing on the very elegant language of the original post, I came to know the new nature of my wild unhardened, malleable, whispering, quiet, slow and deep, deep, deep. The original post shaped the narrative of a soft rebellion that “moves through stories, through the slow embroidery of alternative worlds into the fabric of the present moment.”

Soft Rebellion is the name of my Grandmother wildness, and I offer my prayer to her warrior heart. To her strong, bold, insistent rebel heart and soul holding a vision and a consciousness that extends 7 generations forward - all while ping-ponging between one little pooping, peeing, crying precious twin nugget to another.

And that’s even before the toddler comes through the door from pre-school saying to this steady, audacious, resolute, unwavering, even-keeled, wild soul – “what are we going to do this afternoon Nina?”