“The life world is dangerous and wild,” says Rafe Kelley, “it has malaria and smallpox. It used to have saber toothed tigers, and we still have crocodiles. So, there’s good reasons why we as human beings have made ourselves safe. But we lose something in that trade off. When we trade away our wildness, we lose communication with the rest of the life world. So, it's fundamental to the health and growth of the human being to continually renew that connection.”
For Kelley, rediscovering our wildness means to come into relationship with the real. When we step off the path in the forest, very quickly we realize that we are in the midst of a world that hasn’t been shaped by the human. Fallen trees block our path. A rushing stream is too wide and deep to cross. The birds call to each other in languages that we cannot understand. Your actions have consequences that are real. Jumping into the stream could be deadly. Unwittingly laying down on a bed of poison ivy will, at best, lead to some discomfort for days. The wild knocks us down to size—and in coming into our rightful scale, it brings us into connection with that which is larger than ourselves. Regaining our wildness brings humility.
Rafe Kelley is a pioneer in natural movement and founder of Evolve Move Play. Beginning with a passion for sports and martial arts, he became a gymnastics teacher. This led him to parkour, which involves traversing space as quickly as possible by running, jumping, flipping, and vaulting around, through, and over obstacles. Kelley began to engage with parkour in nature, which opened up a new relationship with the life world. As he says, “When we return to the trees, we get to play a game that is really fundamental to our nature. Human beings evolved to play in an arena that had grass, trees, and running water. When you’re there you're in the place that you were always supposed to be.”
For Kelley, playing with natural movement is not simply a physical activity but brings us in touch with a living intelligence that, as modern people, we usually cannot perceive. Through developing our imaginal and sensing capacities in ongoing encounter with the natural world, new insights and understanding open in our awareness. Kelley explains that:
“We have a meaning crisis in many ways because we can't read the meaning that's there. A modern Westerner walking through the forest is like someone who's illiterate, walking through the Library of Alexandria. The information is there, the most extraordinary things that you might want to know. The stories that could completely change your life are right there at the tip of your finger, and you just don't know how to read them.”
In this evolve LIVE event, Rafe Kelley will invite us to explore how to cultivate our wildness as a way of bringing alive our relation to Nature. What is human nature within Nature? How can we bring alive an embodied relatedness with the life world? How can our imaginal capacities open a deeper communication with the living world? In dialogue with Rafe Kelley, participants will inquire into questions like these and other questions that arise at the moment.
