Wilderness Skills
A Selection from Culture Kudzu - a Poetry Series by Theo Edmonds
An homage to the deep inspiration of John O’Donohue & David Whyte. Used to open the keynote at International Leadership Organization Summit, Boulder, CO 8.14.24
You don’t wait for revelation when you pass the frontier Desire is truth here-- where the fiery stardust inside you has pulled you an uncomfortable step beyond. Beyond the old stories you wove around yourself for protection for fascination. A veneer of curiosity manufactured for others. Those you believed not trustworthy with their own estimations. Fiery stardust has pulled you an uncomfortable step beyond the old stories. You don’t wait for revelation here. When you pass the frontier, wilderness skills are needed. Wilderness skills like those you learned when you first fell in love. That raw meat moment where you first heard the calling of your original name. Away from the figuration of settled houses and industrial protocols. Crossing a frontier is a fierce decision made in the extreme honesty. Wilderness skills are not learned as professions, They are acquired through intention and vocation. Wildnerness skills are acquired through a radical, convergent release of all the heaviness you carried here with you. Vocation and navigation go hand in glove… pavement to gravel gravel to earth earth to desire (that holding of a star) Pulled a step beyond the frontier Your old stories no longer seem big enough Pulled a step beyond the frontier you feel the aligning of crucible bones. A Homecoming. The stories you used to shape your presence, back in those old settled houses won’t survive here. Frontiers find their shape among interior landscapes made real in honest mirrors. And in this reflection, you may find an uncomfortable revelation Is it possible you don’t really have language at all? At least language capable of navigating the well-worn and mapped-out reflection staring at you. A reflection that somehow makes no sense beyond the frontier. Like an old lover, the outline is there, but with each passing day, it becomes harder to remember what animated it’s meaning The loss of language hits hard. Does language even exist at all? What is the love language of wilderness? As you begin flicking off old shallow reflections, an intuition grows inside you that deepness is dependable. Moving past the frontier requires reaching further in. Inside to horizons we arrived at seasons ago but were too busy performing the shallow stories in settled houses to notice. I learned I was going to die in my early skin, when I first learned to love. Learning to be loved in return would take longer. Learning to be loved in return is a wilderness skill. In that early skin warmth was a death quilt. Pieced together with science, business, and art. Laid across a nation, the quilt stitched together the memories of those who pioneered into wilderness Those who learned in early skin that love is a wilderness skill. Sometimes, David said, the blessings blow right through us human curtains Hanging to decorate old settled houses. Receiving a blessing requires being equal to it. Receiving a blessing is making a choice to walk lightly Even through even the deepest woods. Survivors of plagues know this. Survivors of plagues feel guilty for knowledge sometimes. Deepness, though, is dependable. In the deep woods, You must give things away to become large enough, to become light enough To gather your instinctual courage into the fierce decisions Required of those whose vocation is vision. In wilderness far off places are not silent they just cannot be heard with eyes. To find the ground that you are meant to stand on, You don’t wait for revelation You make the fierce decision to let go of those small names you once carried around, room to room, in old, settled houses Those small names will only weigh you down here. A fiery stardust has pulled you an uncomfortable step beyond Beyond your old stories Told in settled houses Written in industrial protocols When you pass the frontier, the wonder of unopened life is waiting for you. But You don’t wait for revelation to find you here. Your wilderness skills will be needed.
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Theo Edmonds, Culture Futurist® & Founder, Creativity America | Bridging Creative Industries and Brain Science with Future of Work & Wondervation®
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