The Wild

“It’s not you. It’s your cage.”

I think about this article a lot… On the wildness of children

It’s sad to think that all of mankind’s efforts to grow, to thrive to expand have led to nothing more than elaborate cages designed to keep us from doing exactly that. I have always thought of life as we know it as some sort of tunnel. Our lives are dictated to us by the ones we love, even by the world, before they start. Our names, our faith, our roles… our being. To escape any of these things is to escape the tunnel. But where to? There’s nowhere to go when the wildness has not been given a chance to find its way.

All we come into this world with, whatever is innate or pre-wired in us is all we truly have that belongs to us. From the moment we are born our parents, with all the love and good intentions then begin to mold us.Knowingly or unknowingly our stories begin to be written by others. And because we know no better, we are doing the same for our children. We will hand them the very same template that was handed to us, go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, start a family…rinse and repeat.

This article delves into our disconnect from the world, from nature. Everything we know about the world we call home has been ironically taught from within the confines of man made structures as the world we seek to learn beckons us from the outside. Why can’t we go to it itself and learn from there? It wonders.

But the truth is we don’t know how to teach our children about nature because we ourselves were raised in the cinderblock world.  We are, in the parlance of wildlife rehabilitators, unreleasable. I used to do wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, and the one thing we all knew was that a young animal kept too long in a cage would not be able to survive in the wild.  Often, when you open the door to the cage, it will be afraid to go out; if it does go out, it won’t know what to do.  The world has become unfamiliar, an alien place. This is what we have done to our children.

This is what was done to us.

The author then posits that this disconnect is having a profound effect on us as a species. Separated from what for many years was our natural environment we are slowly becoming restless and anxious among other things. Our home, the wild is calling to us.

“In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”…..What does this mean? Turner has tracked down a reference in Thoreau’s “Fact-book” to the word “wild” as “the past participle of to will,  self-willed.”  The wild, then, is the self-willed, that which lives out of its own intrinsic nature rather than bowing to some extrinsic force.

So where do we go from here? Where does this leave us? Can we ever escape?

Labyrinth

Where do I begin. I wake up with my thoughts in one place and end the day with my thoughts in not quite the same place. They travel, meander, searching for where to perch. Could explain my absence from this space for so long. Where do I begin.

I’m a mom now so often when i wake up my thoughts are about getting him ready for the day and yet..it is still unfamiliar landscape for my mind. Remember those 30 years of your life where your morning thoughts weren’t so consistent or more so did not need to be so consistent? I think to myself. Yes i do. And then i wander out of the house to work and as the day goes by i begin to think about a whole lot of things, some are neither here nor there, many revolve around “what am i doing here, what are we doing here” and so on and so forth.

labyrinth

/ˈlab(ə)rɪnθ/

noun

1. a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.

Words; these have always been a passion of mine, so today as my mind wandered it perched on this word: Labyrinth. This is it, this is what describes what’s going on in the landscape of my mind. Normally I would have let this thought just float away.

But then i remembered that writing was an anchor for me once. A place to perch. And it can be again.

The gray

So I am delving back in. Coming back slowly to my innermost, where my thoughts live. A place that I have been reluctant to come to for a long time now. For fear of what? I’m not so sure. Maybe for fear of spending too much time with my thoughts.

But thanks to Esther Perel and her plethora of thought provoking works I am starting the journey back inwards in a new way. I have been listening to her book Mating in Captivity and oh what a wonder of work it is. It has opened my mind in ways it needed to be opened. I shared my favorite insights from it on this thread here. And now that i am an avid follower of hers I make sure to listen in on her podcasts. And so, my first blog in a while is inspired by her latest podcast The Erotic is an antidote to death.

The podcast is a discussion on some of the key ideas that she likes to explore. Such as how we seem to have formed such extreme opinions of our ideas on love and relationships that we forget the gray, that we no longer know how to navigate nuance.

And what happens is that the people that talk about freedom don’t talk about accountability enough, and the people who talk about accountability don’t talk about freedom. So the whole thing gets polarized, rather than integrated. Politically, it is like that, and in the psychological field it is like that. It’s like that all the time.

We assess each other in absolutes, either someone is good or bad, either a relationship is perfect or not, either someone is your soul mate or ‘the one’ or they aren’t, either you know everything there is to know about someone or the relationship won’t work. We want to completely own our partners hence bringing in the aspect of accountability and yet it is in freedom that play, curiosity and other aspects of us thrive. The two ideas need to coexist and not live at opposite ends of the spectrum. Hence her conclusion that we talk about accountability only but not freedom or vice versa.

We forget that every human being is a complex web of experiences, thoughts, upbringing and individuality. Things we can never quite put our fingers on, and all these things start to manifest in our relationships.

…because I think that one of the losses of this moment is the loss, somewhat, of our intuition. There is a different kind of knowledge and information that is much more data-driven, that is systematized, that tries to be rational, and that is taking away our ability to sense things, to be in an iterative process of relationships, and to suss out and to live with ambivalence.

“An iterative process of relationships“…we desire so much to have definite and absolute answers of and from each other and our relationships that we do no leave room for iteration, for those subtle, nuanced changes for the waxing and waning of who we are, of what our relationships are. We are afraid of living with ambivalence. And I suppose rightfully so. Uncertainty is scary. But how we fool ourselves into thinking we can have all the answers especially when it comes to our partners, ourselves and, our relationships.