I’d rather be dead than tamed

The lioness left her cage, finally. It had taken many years for her to find the will, the need to live again. To live, maybe for the first time. To live wild and free – to allow her instincts to burst through, uninhibited, unrestrained, unafraid. She felt so much relief. Her sadness was gone, she felt like it would never come back.

It seemed impossible now, once she had left the cage, to imagine how she had stayed inside for so long. But yet she had, for years. She has squashed herself, quietened her spirit – for the safety of a reliable meal, the comfort of predictable company, for routine. She had almost died for comfort, because of it. But she hadn’t died. She was alive now and that’s all that mattered. She was to live now, looking forward – moving forward, alone, wild, and free.

There’s so much and yet so little to tell in this story. One day she was trapped and frozen by fear. She could not imagine ever leaving the cage. And then another day (many many days later) she was outside the cage, unable to imagine how she could have stayed in it. Her life now, outside the cage, was radically different. So different that it is impossible to story the transition. One cannot be wild and look back and narrate the emotions of the captured animal. In the wild state, all that fear is gone and memory of the captive mind almost totally erased.

She could hear her heart roar in her chest and feel it’s rhythmic twitching. She felt so alive, so right. She could feel her nose and her heart and her gut, align more everyday. Her desires and primal instinctive systems synching, reacquainting themselves. She wanted what she wanted, it came from her body, from the pit of her stomach, she didn’t think about it. She didn’t judge or question – she wanted, found, fed, lived, survived, thrived. She thought less and less, worried less and less, waited less and less.

She used to wait all the time for her captor to come with meat for her. Waiting for him preoccupied her mind. Instead of hunger for the meat she waited on, she felt anxiety and fear about whether the man with the meat would come to her cage. She’d lost her way – focusing on the feeder instead of the feed. Lost track of where the sustenance actually lay.

But not anymore. Now meat was meat. Man was man. Everything was what it was instead of what it seemed to be, or what she’d dreamed it into being. Being wild cut down her needless dreaming. Dreams could get her killed. So fantasy no longer existed for her – just desire, her needs, her instincts and the elements. Her mind was clear and focused, her senses attuned. She could smell the wind. Before, in her cage, she’d feared the wind, now she could read it.