Word of the Week - 132

Art by Miroco Machiko.

Word of the Week:  UNTAMED

Not domesticated or otherwise controlled.

After a great many years and actually hearing the equivalent of "What will the neighbors think?" as I grew up, I am coming to a gradual and reluctant peace with being under-domesticated.  There are turns of mind that simply do not adhere to rules of what some might call normal behavior.  Not that I believe in normal as an existing thing.  I think there is ideal, then there is pretty much everything else.

For some an untamed state may manifest with variant hair, clothing, piercings, modes of transportation, lifestyle and numerous outward signs with which I am unfamiliar.  In others it may reflect more a way of thinking, of seeing, that does not quite line up with the indicated borders.

Though the dictionaries do not seem to offer it as a choice, the word "unsquelched" probably comes closer to the state which has occupied my thoughts.  As squelched indicates forcefully silenced or suppressed, then its opposite would be determinedly outspoken or assertive.  In short, being one's self, true, authentic.

A voice or voices within are, I believe, always urging us toward our own truths, toward the inhabiting of our authentic shapes, so to speak, not seeking camouflage as creatures less brilliant than we are, usually for the sake of others' comfort.  Each of us shines with a unique light which, if dimmed, can exist no other way.  The world will have to get by somehow without it, an unquantifiable loss.

Believing in the rightness, rather than the wrongness, of us being us is a source of swelling optimism.  The tiniest loosening of that too-tight belt of self-squelching can free our minds, hearts and spirits.  We expand, not in miserly, mincing half-steps but in a gush, a whoosh, a genie-out-of-the-bottle burst of what was too little becoming, suddenly and happily, enough.  We are meant to be one with all that is wild and wonderful, big and beautiful and oh-so-bold, never to be silent and small again.