When I say I lived wild as a child…

by Lian Brook-Tyler

When I say I lived wild as a child…

I was seven years old, we were living in Ibiza, very much hand to mouth and by the grace of the land and the people… Our only shelter was canvas, tree, or flimsy structures made from whatever we could comb from the molten sands.

These are pages from my diary back then… a list of ways we might make some money. Looking back on my list, along with my father’s additions, I’m struck by several things…

I don’t know what I was thinking we’d do with the fir cones or whether they just seemed so beautiful to me that of course people would buy them.

It makes me smile that we had so little, literally only what we could carry on our backs, and yet we still had books, and enough of them to sell.

I am wondering if you think any of this list “worked”?

And if so, what does “worked” mean to you?

And most of all, I am struck by the contrast of the modern world of more-bigger-better-never enough, and the innocent simplicity of this list and the trust that life would provide just enough.

For us back then, it meant enough to have sun on our faces, love in our hearts, creation in our hands, and wood to make a campfire upon which to cook the next meal when it came (which was what the money was for).

There were no guarantees, no certainties, no security except in knowing… Somehow there was always enough.

It was a precious lesson imprinted deep on my soul but I still needed to choose to live into the freedom it graced me with, and sometimes I did the opposite, grasping with the dimpled hands of my Taurus moon onto the permanent (which of course, rarely is).

Each of us all have our own imprints, the words in the first few chapters of our myth. Some of mine were:

Books

Shells

Fir cones

Portraits

Teaching

Given I now spend my days weaving portraits of people’s souls, inhaling books, teaching through my tears about the nonsensical non-negotiable reasons to fall back into the arms of the trees and womb of the beach, and ultimately to find a path to seeing that it’s all a portrait of the divine, those imprints may have foretold a destiny.

What were yours?

♥️

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