A Wilderness of Strength

I look out upon our world and see a sea of anesthetized souls. You who once rode the wild beasts of your own passions through a life of adventure and purpose, have been convinced, somehow, to contain yourselves. Convinced, somehow, that you must be civilized, the the alternative is unrefined, is vulgar, primitive, grotesque. But I see you. I see in you a wild hidden soul, crouching deep inside the fecund forest of your interior, the one you have been taught to silence, the one you have been told must wear a muzzle of manners, must be fed to the lions, must be kept on the tight leash of your rational mind. 

That wildness inside you, is you.

That wildness is essential to your true nature, to the possibility of becoming whole, to tell you otherwise is just a method of control. And so you seek to control that part of you, you internalize the stories of unnecessary shame, and the next thing you know, some vital part of yourself has been lost. But you must ride that wildness! You must ride in such a way that you are not controlling that creature nor is that creature controlling you, rather you are working together to move forward through the world. The time has arrived to channel your wildness into the expression of your full creativity, allowing you to renew and regenerate yourself. You are receiving through her a gleaming seed, composed of all the instincts and knowledge needed in our lives. There is no need to suppress this growth, this blossoming. 

Within the Illuminated Altar, Strength has three jaguars emanating from her center, they are ultimately wild, and yet they are also under her fluent control. Using energetic reins to do this with balance and clarity, we can release and harness the energy bound up in our strongest, deepest feelings and tendencies. Strength’s crown of wildflowers is the inevitable external blossoming that unfurls from our innate intelligence when we come into a cohesive relationship with all the untamed, unnamed, unfettered parts of ourselves.