Information needs integration…
Lately I’ve been wondering if we sometimes mistake recognition of something for understanding. Someone says something and we think, oh yeah I already know that… But do we? or do we just recognize the words? I wonder how much information I’ve collected over the years that is still sitting in my mental toolbox, waiting for me to actually use that info. Maybe information isn’t always asking to be accumulated like wealth. Maybe information needs integration because integration creates relationship, and if we don’t use it, we lose it… or maybe we just don’t know it as well as well think we do because we don’t truly have a relationship with it.
The more I think about it, the more I notice that the things I know best aren’t the things I’ve memorized. They’re the things I’ve developed a relationship with, and with My Wyld Heart Knows, it’s not that I know every fact or have all the answers. But that there’s another kind of knowing inside of us. The kind that remembers we are all connected… to the earth, to the seasons, to the people who came before us, to the people we’re walking beside today, and to the generations we’ll never meet. We’re part of something much older (and bigger) than ourselves.
Sometimes I wonder if we’ve become so good at learning from systems we’ve created that we’ve forgotten we can also learn from the living systems we’re already part of. A tree doesn’t produce fruit all year (or even have leaves all year) it grows roots we can’t see, it flowers, produces fruit, lets go, and then rests. It isn’t trying to optimize every season… it’s participating in them. We can’t tell a tree to grow faster, make bigger apples, tell it to grow deeper roots. How does a tree even know how to grow? It just KNOWS…it trusts the rhythms of the earth, trusts the seasons, and does its thing. How well it grows, how fast, and what it creates all become part of the relationship with the environment or ecosystem it is part of. I think that’s pretty similar to humans too…which is pretty WYLD.
And maybe that’s what the WYLD Way is for me.. a relationship with life itself. A reminder that I can trust my own rhythms while staying curious enough to learn from the rhythms all around me. Not because someone told me to, but because my WYLD body already knows the rhythms of the earth, and my WYLD heart knows where I’ve come from and what I’ve experienced.
Then I started thinking about creation. Maybe when we participate in a relationship long enough, we naturally leave something behind. A story, photos, books, journals, recipes, traditions, games… an artifact. Not something created to prove our worth, but something that quietly carries a relationship forward. Something another person might stumble across years from now…and maybe that’s how we stay connected across time. The people before us left artifacts that invited us into relationship with their lives, their questions, their way of seeing the world. I think when we create from our wyld hearts it’s about the relationship that sparked something inside of us, not because we have answers to certain questions, but because we noticed something worth sharing.
That’s why information needs integration because integration deepens relationships… relationship asks for participation… participation leaves artifacts… and those artifacts become another invitation to notice. The cycle continues because life continues… and life is WYLD.
