Animal Nature: An Invitation for Reclaiming, Untaming & Being

One woman’s primal and poetic reclaiming of her feminine self in all of its glorious connection to Mother Earth and her own animal nature

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Last week, I reached for Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese — you know the line, “Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” Something in me just needed to read it again.

For the last six weeks, since the disappearance of my beloved cat Mila upon moving in with my partner, I’ve been contemplating what I am calling ‘animal nature’. And it’s not just that my mind is trying to grok this concept as it did in the beginning, rather the contemplation is more an experiential exploration. An embodied remembering of my own animal nature. One long overdue.

I just moved to an alive and wild piece of land to live with a man.

A piece of land that is presumably just fine without humans, but since we’re here, I get the sense that She would prefer we engage with Her. (Yes, the choice to use and capitalize feminine pronouns here is purposeful. I like to remember that the Earth is associated with the feminine archetype. How we — each of us — engage with Her, therefore, is telling on many levels.)