She stood wrapped inside the wild wind and her wild thoughts. No, they were not her thoughts, but she felt them as if they were. So wild there was no language for them, only feeling. So wild they lifted her soul out of her body, which she dragged behind her in her wild search for meaning.

I woke this morning from a dream that seemed to be telling me my story but also everyone’s. Inside the walls of an ever-expansive house, I searched the crowded rooms, looking for an exit. I pulled at layered clothing too old to be anywhere close to new. I felt worn and tired, too weary to feel beloved until a ravishing touch awakened my pulse.

Before the dream was over, I listed what defined me. “Oh yeah, I whispered as an afterthought, I am also a writer.”

The list made me feel tired even though my body slumbered. It dulled me inside the confinement of the rooms I could not escape from. Endless chambers filled with the collection of things made to define lives hopelessly searching for the return to the wild soul.

As I put meaning to the dreamscape, I realized that perhaps this simple longing to return to the essence of the free soul is what is plaguing humanity right now. Radical factions breaking off from the “norm,” decrying conspiracy and even hatred in the search to be free. Masks defiantly not worn in the name of freedom…

My thoughts wandered to Nelson Mandela’s life. Twenty-seven years spent imprisoned in body, but not in soul. I can’t profess to understand how he endured those long years while keeping that light strong inside, but I do know the wild longing for freedom when there are no bars holding the physical body in restraints.

The mind is a master of erecting barriers that cannot be seen.

I thought of that day when I followed the wild thoughts that were not mine to a hill in England and looked with wild eyes that were not just my own through a history I felt acutely in my dancing cells. I had, it seemed, come to bear witness to the past stretched long into the present. To know, through the depths beyond reason, our collective history. As I wandered the ruins of a land that was once enchanted by the magic of the free soul, I felt the long moment of entrapment. The wings that would fly, clipped. Grounded into a darkness not my own, yet very much mine.

We are swirling, once again, into the darkness of the shadowlands. We blame the outside, crying out in the name of injustice and freedoms lost, inciting division and even anger and hatred as we rage against our would-be constraints. And in the process, we entrap ourselves and each other, further and further into the abyss that diminishes the light of the soul that knows that it, in truth, can never be confined.

Yet who can blame us? We are birthed to know confinement. The soul that knows only light, suddenly constrained by a dense body inside a dark, ever-confining womb, waits to be birthed into form. A form that it exists within, for a limited time, not just to understand life, but also death. The soul inside the body learns easily what it feels like to be restricted, while forgetting what it feels like to be boundless.

I am reminded of the suffocation of my dream. The feeling of rooms without exits, but also self-imposed labels that felt heavy and limiting. The voice that felt lost inside itself. I am reminded of the inner child who always searches for the chance to dance back into the light, naked and free. Not caring who is watching…Singing with abandon.

I am reminded of how much I have allowed myself to forget that she exists without bounds. That she need not be constrained without my will. I am reminded about how much I default, as I watch those around me doing the same, to the outside instead of the inside. Forgetting, in the process, that we are never not free. That the wild light is alive inside and is always best nurtured with love.