Instinct and imitation

Being mammals with imagination

This is a meditation that I wrote for another thing, which I will tell you more about later, but meanwhile I want to share it with you here…

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In the poem that she called Wild Geese, Mary Oliver tells us directly: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body // love what it loves.”

Lest we forget, we are animal every bit as much as our mammalian kin. Our tenderness and our ferocity are both animal qualities. We express and convey ourselves through the soft squish of our animal bodies and in our fierce compulsion to love the life that we are given.

Mammals with imagination. That is what we are.

We distinguish ourselves—or do our best to—by what we imagine, by making meaning. With our stories, our myths, our rituals, ceremonies, and symbols we take the raw matter of life and shape it into something lovable. 

We are mammals who imagine. Our imagination is informed by our animal instincts. Hunger compels us to eat. Fear compels us to flee. Frustration causes us to freeze. Injustice stokes in us our fight.

When we dance in our fullness we wed our instincts with imagination and find the audacity to feel our way into relationship with wild nature. As wild beings we conjure courage and playfulness to experiment with our own wild ways of being. 

Simply put, we make up ways of moving in this world.

So: Do that now. 

Move your body in some small way. 

Swivel your wrists.

Make a fist.

Scrunch your face.

Lift your chin.

Stick out your tongue. 

Or some other small movement. Or all of them at the same time. 

Move your body for a span of several breaths in ways that are informed by only your own instinct and imagination.

Go ahead, take ten seconds, do that now.

“Whoever you are,” Mary Oliver writes, “No matter how lonely // the world offers itself to your imagination.”

You make up ways of moving in the world, and your movements bring you into meeting with the movements of others. We are curious creatures. So of course we heed the urge to explore the movements beyond ourselves.

We love to learn from the wild ways of others. 

When we dance with others in our combined fullness we wed our imagination with our capacity to imitate. 

Salvador Dali said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”

In a sense, every swivel of our wrists, every vowel from our throat, every tilt of the chin is built on some imitation of those we witness around us and those who came before us.

So why not look to other wild ones, from time to time, and pretend we are them? 

Why not meow and howl?

Why not nap in puddles of sunshine?

Why not run in packs?

Why not, right now, up from where you are, go and do any of those things. 

Meow, growl, or howl. Nap or run. 

Or purr softly.

Or sit simply still like a stone for a while.

Or sway subtly like a tree.

Or honk like the wild geese “harsh and exciting // over and over announcing your place // in the family of things”.

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Excerpts from Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver