Wild

Yesterday SB and I saw the movie WILD. We had both read and loved the book, and the movie was just as moving. I felt like I was actually holding back tears for most of the film because there is such deep sorrow and beauty in so many of the moments.

The story is of a woman with extreme circumstances - from intense trauma to overwhelming love - but I think that she is so relatable because we all struggle with who we've been, who we are, and who we want to be in the world. For me the movie captured so much of what it is to be human. I would add that throughout the movie I was thinking of how rarely women are portrayed with such complexity in popular culture. It was refreshingly realistic to watch a movie about a woman like Cheryl Strayed.

As she hikes the Pacific Crest Trail she asks herself: 
“What if I forgave myself? What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done? What if I'd actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn't have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”


The movie also reminded me of this poem.


5AM in the Pinewoods
by Mary Oliver

I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.

This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them— I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.