Mark 1:25

But Jesus rebuked the spirit, “Be silent! Come out from him.”

Silence
cries a wilderness breaker
there is no wilderness binary
to a created order

Come out
of this bi-lusion
see again a great deep
all names floating upon it

Enter
with renewed appreciation
every interface intersectioned
moments of ego aeons of time

Dance
every march to a center
each waltz beyond circumference
demon possessed angel nourished

Again
gyre to new perspective
navigating wild rivers
through a dusty empty

Note the difference you feel with another possible translation: “Jesus commanded, ‘Be still! Come out!’” Preference?

“Stop!” or “Shut-up!” are helpful synonyms for the muzzling language used here. Archie Bunker came close with his “Stifle yourself!” This same command will later be used in the stilling of a storm on a lake as well as a storm within a person.

Wildernesses are characterized by space we respond to by feeling alone, helpless. A contemporary word for this is “closeted”.

Many different personal identity characteristics have been used in a variety of cultures to let us know when we have overstepped status boundaries of the community. Limited understandings of gender, race, physical shapes, intelligence, nationality, economic worth, and sexual orientation have all had their time of being identified as a demon within the community even as here a demon is within an individual. Any location of the demonic is too small and reduces its perceiver to a carrier of demons.

We might wonder at some point about the salvation of that which is deemed demonic or if exclusion, exorcism, expulsion, and execution are the only options. Imagine silencing a culture’s discrimination so those who have been dismissed might emerge in a right mind rather than forced into the perversion of a closeting culture.

Wildernesses are inexplicable places where we can come to ourselves as well as closeted spaces in which to be lost.