What shapes us
Bodies
What makes up who you are?
Your physical body. Your thoughts. Your psyche. Perhaps your spirit.
What about your relationships? Your family? Your community? The place you come from, the land you live on, your ancestors, God, spirit or the cosmos?
For some people these are things we have relationships with. For others, they are part of who we are.
At the Wild School, we experiment with different ways of understanding what “I” is.
Knots
We can live inside a knot for years without seeing its shape. It can become so tight that other ways of living are difficult even to imagine.
A knot might hold fear and money together. Love and obligation. Work and identity. Something old and something happening now. It may run through our body, our relationships and the conditions we live in.
The Wild School offers room to experiment with these knots. To feel their tension. To see what moves when we touch them. Whether they want to loosen, tighten, or remain just as they are.
Direction
There are many ways of moving in the same direction. Walking. A horse. A car. A boat when the road runs out.
After a while, though, how we travel can become tied in knots.
We learn how to ride the horse. It takes years, but we get good at it. People know us as someone who rides, and maybe respect us because of it. Our livelihood seems to depend on it. We look down, and we see knots. Getting off is difficult.
Meanwhile, where were we going?
We may have entered a job to be of service, but after years realise that it leaves less and less room to care. Or we may have entered a community to find belonging, only to find that it now demands compliance.
At the Wild School, we make room to hear the whisper of an emerging direction of travel, alongside the familiar sound of the vehicle.
Freedom
There are things we cannot change. Before awakening and after awakening, there is still wood to chop and water to carry. And if you join us here, you might have to chop and carry. Or cook. Or draw. Or clean.
So freedom here, with woods to tend, food to prepare and grass to cut, cannot mean having no limits or responsibilities. In fact, it can mean walking towards the ones we choose and inviting them into our lives.
Part of the practice of freedom here is choosing and committing to limits and responsibilities. The service that comes with living at the Wild School makes this concrete. We choose some of the work that will bind us to the place and to one another.
There is a paradox in choosing some of our prisons. In choosing them, the limit might remain, but the prison disappears.
Relation
In relation, we commit to failing together. We love, laugh, dance, trust. We misunderstand, disappoint, hurt and fail each other. We forgive, repair, cry. Sometimes we move on, sometimes we can't.
Being in relation, here, does not mean staying together. We can share a community, a home or a bed and be out of relation. And we can be in deep relation when we say no, when we argue, or when we leave.
At the Wild School, the invitation is to be curious about what is happening between us. And later, if possible, to try to separate what is mine, what is yours, and both from what we are creating together.
The invitation is to dare to relate as we encounter each other, including when that encounter is goodbye.
The wheel
Our programmes have a structure, with sessions, practices and movements that travel across five stones: Make room · Listen · Choose · Practise · Return.
These five stones form the turning wheel of the School.
There is no right way around it. There is no way at all.
We hope you can come and discover what they mean to you.