There is a wild Cheetah named Chilli, who taught me that missing link we are meant to have with the earth, with our world, so that we can live with her not on her.
When you sit with Chilli on the top of her hill to look out over the whole Karoo Valley below, you feel her resilient majesty expanding as far as the horizon in every direction of the Great Karoo in South Africa.
But, she not just looking, she’s sensing, she's reading. Is there opportunity? Is there danger? Is there food? Is there anybody out there?
Not only has she given birth to four cubs, she’s adopted her daughter's three cubs and become the first cheetah to successfully raise that many cubs to adulthood.
She's just doing it. She's not a victim of her situation ever. Because she had a choice not to take on those three. She could run, she could snarl at them, smack them, walk away.
You've got a very successful adult cheetah, if she doesn't want to take you on she'll leave you to die. But, she welcomed in the other clubs. She didn't have to do that, she could have killed them.
She expanded to handle it.
It is this straight up sovereignty found in her wild essence that’s led her to success, she is always listening and receiving and then acting on that. When you can feel her, you feel connected to everything through her - her field is that powerful.
We can be this powerful, this is what we are meant to be. In that energy was my own sovereignty. Me.
I have experienced this sitting in the savannah with that cheetah in South Africa for more than 60 days. WILD Reverence.
In the ocean with false Killer Whales, where you can feel them echo-locating off you before you hear them. On island beaches with Hawaiian monk seals. Anywhere, everywhere.
Over an incredible six straight days the wild meadows of Alaska with one of the biggest Grizzlies I've ever seen, and four cubs.
Sitting in the sage grass with a camera and a backpack, wearing hip boots, steeped in a whole ecosystem, in the shadow of a mountain with a glacier that means in the summer there is water to drink or to get in when it's hot.
Glacier water gets nutrients to this particular type of grass that's very nutritious for the bears. When the tide goes out, they go over the hill to go clamming.
With a Wild Reverence where no human conditioning plays any role.
The thought that we would harm them for anything less than a sacred purpose becomes horrifying and absurd.
With a Wild Reverence you know them as precious in and of themselves, not for any use to us.
Yet, every day, we participate in systems that treat bears and much else as resources to exploit, or make them collateral damage in other exploitation.
But as the newly emerging richly abundant women, devoted to co-creating the new earth, we can change this. But it takes connecting to our wild reverence, remembering who we are…just like Chilli did…to get it done.
Are you ready to say yes?