Marilyn K. Hagar - Finding the Wild Inside: Exploring Our Inner Landscape Through the Arts, Dreams and Intuition

Copyright 2019, Marilyn Kay Hagar

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-63152-608-4

ISBN: 978-1-63152-609-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019906664

Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

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She Writes Press

1569 Solano Ave #546

Berkeley, CA 94707

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

To my sons, Erik, Gabriel, and Eli
And to my four precious grandsons, Andrew, Alex, Chase, and Cole
Into their hands, I entrust our future.

Nature, psyche, and life appear to me like divinity unfoldedwhat more could I ask for?

C ARL J UNG

O ur lives move at a dizzying pace. We rush through our days, exhausting ourselves in our mad scrambling. We fall into bed each night for a few precious hours of sleep and then get up the next morning and do it all over again. But as we scurry, filling our calendars and making our lists, another life is living itself inside each one of us. That life is invisible and moves at a different pace. It runs through us like a deep underground river, its source the crystal-clear waters at the center of our being. It lives inside us from the day we are born until the day we die and is the source of our deepest knowing. I call that river and the inner landscape it traverses our wild home.

Most of us are not taught to navigate this terrain, nor do we know how to understand the language it speaks as it tries to guide us toward fulfillment. Instead, we stumble into adulthood, trying to build our lives by following the familiar structures we see around us. Ideally, we succeed in creating a satisfying and meaningful existence. But in a culture that hawks the material plane as the only route to finding joy and fulfillment, we are doomed to struggle, and many of us end up in a crisis of meaning.

This book chronicles my own struggle over seven decades to find meaning and purpose in a world that begged me to look outward, rather than inward. In my midthirties, when my beloved grandmother died, I began to wonder if there was more to life than met my eye. In grieving her passage, I turned my gaze inward to see what I might find. While I wasnt aware of it at the time, that was a completely rebellious actone that transported me into a wild, unknown world where I had to find new eyes and new ears and learn a completely different way of being present in my life in order to make sense of it. A language beneath my words began to reveal itself. It came to me through my music, my dreams, my art, my imagination, and the uncanny synchronicities that I began to recognize as they rained down around me. This new form of communication was rich in feeling, tone, image, and metaphor and was communicated more often through my body than through my mind.

It took many years to make sense of my childhood intuition about my wild home. I was just living my life. I grew up, got married, became a mother, and found my path as an expressive arts therapist. This book chronicles the deeper story that was being told. Because I was not guided by the institutions that most often shepherd us, I traveled through uncharted waters and wandered in a wilderness without trails. There, I learned to follow the ever-unfolding mystery of my wild soul as it guided me through lifes great adventure.

My story unfolds as a series of reflections on my inner life, from the time I was a tiny child until this books publication. Exploring my inner landscape opened me to the gift of creative imagination, a gift available to each one of us. My wild inside took me cascading down rushing rivers, through dark green valleys, and high up onto mountaintops. I communed with the fish and learned from the bears. I came to see that I am a child of Nature, made of the earth, a small speck of the Great Mother herself. I gave birth to my children, and I witnessed my aging parents as they stepped close to deaths door. Standing in the circle of life, I learned that accepting lifes endings is as important as welcoming its beginnings.

The giant redwood trees that surround me in my forest home in Northern California have taught me that if my roots are not firmly planted in the soil of Mother Earth, I cannot reach for the sky. As I learned to traverse this wild land inside me, the boundary between my inner world and my outer world began to dissolve, expanding my notion of my place in the universe and challenging me to reconsider what it means to be human.

Ive sprinkled my dreams and my art amid the stories told here because they are all of one piece inside me now. The stories cannot be told without them. The images that arise from our unconscious minds are gifts from our wild self. If we pay attention, they remain alive inside us and continue to provide insight and meaning throughout our entire lives. I hope that including this part of my journey will inspire you to look anew at what dreams and the arts have to offer. Perhaps you have already opened to these ways of exploring; if not, just know that they await you with wonderful blessings and ask only that you turn in their direction.

I believe with everything in me that looking inward is never an end in itself. Im deeply committed to using what I find inside as a guide and trust that when I am in communion with my wild home, I will find right action in my world. I want to live with that kind of authenticity. We are each on our own journey in this life. My story will not be yours, and your story is for you to explore. I hope, though, that reading about my dogged attempt to live as my truest self, struggling first to recognize and then to accept all the ways in which the larger energies around me support me, will assist you in doing the same. Our beautiful world deserves our own deepest expression of who we were meant to be.

Reflection

At the end of each chapter, Ill offer ideas for reflecting on your own story. Have ready an unlined journal, some larger art paper, colored construction paper, markers, oil pastels, chalk pastels, colored pencils, or paints. If you are thinking, I dont do art! give it a try. Open to the first page of your journal and scribble all over it. Youre off to a great start. Dont worry about whether what you create here is perfect or beautifulwhats important is what your art says, not what it looks like.