what is wild?

how is time reconciled?

Originally posted 14 May 2017 on my earthwidetribe blog, updated and additional epilogue added today 13 March 2023

a week in the wild

no thing mild

a world reconciled

Someone asked Einstein to explain the relativity of time and he said, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.”

Tribute to the effectiveness of our week in the wild was that, at the end of it, a consistent feedback point from the participants was the desire to extend it. Many of us felt we had only just begun to step into a rhythm with the terrain - the actual terrain of the landscape as well as the terrain of the impromptu community. Not to mention each individual’s unfolding place in both. Now, suddenly, it was time to gather ourselves back up and reinsert into “society”.

Now, feeling rootless in the “normal” world, our week in the wild has sideswiped my perceptions of what “wild” even is. Untamed? Ah, but didn’t The Little Prince/Le Petit Prince work magic on my wild resistance to being tamed?

Who wouldn’t want to consider themselves Wild? Yet is anyone really wild anymore? The flabby drunken boys on my flight into England, were they really wild? Instinctively I knew they wouldn’t survive in the wild. The Harley riders anywhere in the world, are they wild? The gang members? The “crazy” ones? Who, and what, defines wild? One of the very first questions I asked at the start of PocaHAUNTus was,

“How can we call ourselves civilized when women and children still live in fear?”

This labelling of what is wild or savage today is an interesting one, but 4 to 5 hundred years ago it was a crucial one. It determined a genocide. By framing indigenous people as savage, a synonym for wild, we humans were able to savagely decimate 95% (as estimates go) of the native peoples of Turtle Island. I say ‘we’ because I was, and am, made of both. The killer and the killed. The hunter and the hunted. How do I reconcile that? By spending a week in the wild? Certainly not. Though it’s a start.

For how else do we cultivate a relationship than by dedicating time and space to learning the language(s) of the Other?

Worlds will collide. This is what happened then, and is happening still. It could be otherwise - it could be a conversation or a dance - but it was, and still is, a collision.

While waiting in line to board the plane to London from Lisbon, I desperately searched my databanks of how best to manage this particular collision. Faced with an iteration of the patriarchal pattern where 3 lads threw verbal abuse at women, each slander cut me to the quick. I felt each verbal lash of “cunt” physically, like the reverberation of a specific rape. I’m sure this sounds extreme, like I’m the epitome of sensitivity to take it so deeply.

But after yesterday, spent on the ground in England - at the Borough Market and then along the Thames by the Tate - that internalized reaction boarding the plane was mild. How else to explain this than to say I am like a sensitized wild animal who feels everything, who is programmed for survival to sense everything. I’m clearly in the wrong environment, this urban one that provides a continual, relentless, and numbing onslaught to my senses.

I felt some of the same shock and awe last year when I came to England to visit a dear friend. I also came to visit Gravesend, with its eerily fitting location name, where Pocahontas had died - or was killed. She had been waiting for the tides to change, a meta-metaphor if ever there was one, so she could return to her homeland. I fully admit it’s absurd to diss an entire nation based on 2 instances of entrance into it, and on an imagined mirroring of an ancestral pattern playing out yet again.

The Disney Pocahontas sequel, as racist and unskillfull as it was, had at least succeeded in showing me how foreign and uncivilized the “civilized” world of England was in 1616. The word “wild” originates from wold, meaning woods or forest. If you’ve come from the woods, the wilds, where your connection to nature never wasn’t, and you enter an anthill of humans who don’t bathe in the river every day, it’s not only smelly, it’s highly suspect.

How far are we now from the levels of artifice and jostling for position that Lady Rebecca, as Pocahontas was renamed, would have witnessed at the king’s court?

This is what I saw everywhere at the Borough Market yesterday, and it called up panic in me. Maybe that inexplicable panic in me was simply a perception of the underlying panic in those around me. Underneath the cool facade of so many fashionably-shod consumers gobbling up the goodies and doubling up the rubbish, there was a low-level panic to devour more. No wonder the Lakota word - waši’ču - is associated with white man generally and apparently translates to mean, ‘takes the fat’.

Acting has given my plastic face an outlet to express all the levels of horror and grace humanity can harbour, or I can put on a poker face to hide my emotions. But yesterday in the market I couldn’t keep my face from showing the terror I felt. Several times my friends reminded me, with their kindness, that others could see my face and the deep panic it was expressing.

Yet I felt invisible, like Pocahontas who had been portrayed so offensively and inaccurately in the Disney sequel that I had to shut it off. What I did relate to was the creature-like animation of her movements as she artfully skimmed up and down trees, moving in and out of view and appearing more wild than “civilized.”

And truly, if civilized means anxious, alcoholic, angry, egomaniacally desperate to “get ahead,” then lord may I never be tamed. For so many of my people have been.

Somewhere in the enormously cathartic and challenging process of writing the play, I realized I was siding with the “good” side. I was conveniently forgetting there was just as much, and perhaps more, of the “bad” side in my blood. That became part of the ending - me owning ALL of it. And maybe it was that willingness to show up to all of it that made it so very much like a rebirth, where I felt spewed out into the world anew, virtually a tabula rasa. Virtually, but not quite, since I still had all my old tricks - words, costumes, sets, identities - to play with.

I am all of it, and none of it.

So I felt my heart thumping and my anger rising in response to those English boys boarding the plane, who were including me in their taunting because I had dared to turn around and face them. My intention was to be neutral and simply witness them, as it was glaringly apparent that they wanted attention, but even that incited them further.

I was at a loss. How can I effectively transform this situation? I thought of Non-Violent/Conscious Communication and of loving action. Others around me were throwing glances around, yet no one was DOing anything. Coming up with nothing better and feeling like a tattling child, I whispered to the flight attendant that the boys about to board behind me were a problem. Could I not do something myself? Being antagonistic would only strengthen their antagonism, I felt.

Somewhere in my recent activism training I’d read that violent action stems from a lack of imagination. In that case I felt like a dim dolt.

I considered striding up to the loudest one in the middle and hugging him, but then thought he’d only convert this to his dark misogynistic purposes. I was failing dismally as an activist.

Once on board they kept up their loud, offensive yammering even when a slight young brown British girl matched their white-boy cursing. She told them in no uncertain terms that if they didn’t pipe their drunken pathetic selves down, she’d have them taken out when we reached London. I admired her pep, was awed at her seeming lack of concern for her own safety, and wondered if she did indeed have a family of fighters to back her up. I imagined a team of big brothers who met her at every airport she alighted upon.

But this only added fire to their fire, although it did have the effect of galvanizing others to step up against them. An older pink-faced man in glasses asked them to be quiet, which they rudely denied. Finally, as in school, the main culprit was taken up front, tucked behind a curtain and told that if he didn’t behave, he’d be off the plane. When he returned my hackles rose higher - his new manners were an obvious ruse and made me far more nervous than his overt rudeness had.

Caged wildness is not tamed wildness, as we like to think.

Just like suppressed emotion is not safe emotion.

We’re blatantly not facing the beast here.

This particular loutish version of a beast promptly fell into a drunken snore as the plane leveled out, which gave his sidekicks excuse to climb over the backs of their seats, endowing them an outlet to express their own wildness. Their untame-ability. Which I also understand.

Who, at heart, wants to be so damn civilized? Who doesn’t want to feel a sense of wild autonomy? But how do we do that as individuals without trampling all over everyone else’s freedom, human and otherwise?

Truly I did not mean to talk so much about them, but about the remarkable week in the wild I had. Yet there’s something here in these boys, and perhaps in all rebellious people, that won’t let go of me. Something about how we have un-wilded our world. For most people the only real predators left are those of our own kind. I don’t think many people think of this as odd, but to me this is frightening. Not the fright of feeling threatened by a rowdy drunkard, a gang member, or a horny frat boy, but the fright that comes from the dilution, and even extinction, of how we experience reverence, which is awe mixed with a little fear.

How often do you feel there is something larger than yourself? There’s a general elegiac feeling that comes through spiritual practices, but I’m talking more about the fear-instilled feelings of reverence that come from immersion in the wild, where the wild things still roar. Where, without the skills to build fire, purify water, create warm shelter and find food, all our righteous roaring will get us nowhere fast.

After yet another romantic heartbreak, I came to realize that a week in the wilds of Barcelona, touring museums and hunting down the gorgeousness of Gaudi on my own would not be as fulfilling as a week in the wild. In the woods with strangers I would be applying whatever small measure of navigational and survival skills I already had and then expanding upon them, in ways that I didn’t even know I needed to know.

Unlike the beautiful strangers of the city, with whom I would not likely dive any deeper than skin-deep - since modern beauty rarely survives the depths and instead thrives on the superficial - I realized that it would be a far greater challenge for my broken-open heart to live in intimate space and co-create in the wilds with 14 other humans.

Wild Camp. A bit of both in that title. A bit of the untamed married to the tame. The settled to the settler. And isn’t this most of us, at the heart of our ancestry? The colonized and the colonizer? The one Of the environment and the one trampling all Over the environment?

I’ve begun to realize why I can’t finish my book yet - I’m still learning what it means to “come home to your own sweetness, your own home,” the current title. For these few days I’ve been in London I’ve been staying with my Spanish friend, her American husband, and their two girls born and raised in England. The theme while I’ve been with them is:

“You don’t have a home?”

They can’t grasp what I’m trying to indicate—that my home is me. I tell them I’m like a snail. There’s a faint flicker of recognition, but their singsong chant of “no home, no home” pulls stronger. There’s a child-like panic in all of us. I am touching on a deep fear, that also fascinates. If I don’t have a home, then home is not a given. They, too, could be homeless. It could happen. I watch carefully for signs of panic, impatience, and grief arising within me, while I continue to field their repetitive and persistent disbelief.

The day spent navigating the hoards of parasitic, mindless consumers at the market has left me washed out, full of dread and devoid of hope, like I’ve just faced off an entire city of ravenous zombies. I survived, but only barely. And there’s still tomorrow.

The zombies are still out there. Yet how much are they “in here”? I wonder. How much zombie am I? How can I be so judgmental without somehow judging myself?

This marriage between male and female that happens at the hips, it’s for all of us to do, including me. And it’s also why I haven’t been able to finish my book. These tough teachings of life are leading me to some sort of literary resolution though. I can feel it arising, albeit slowly. Soon, soon I will feel in my own bones an on-going dance between the ancestral lines that draw up from my feet, through my legs and then come to meet, however chaotically, in my pelvis. The pelvis is a main physical juncture or nexus, just like the shoulder mantle where the arms and neck/head extend from. It’s these areas where most people site trouble and dis-ease in their bodies.

I’m convinced that until we start clearing out the lineages that feed us - by healing what we may not even consider is ours to heal - we will forever wobble and hobble in the world.

And our wildness will not be reconciled. We have work to do. Celebrations sure, yet until we make the underlying shifts, the seeming celebrations will exacerbate the dissonance between the surface cheer and the subterranean traumas we can no longer afford to ignore.

The symptoms of sickness are everywhere. My face in the market was horror and disbelief. How do I convey this to you without sounding like I’m the crazy one? There was a feeding frenzy happening, not just on dead animals delivered in an excess of environment-taxing packaging, but with cameras as well. Everywhere, everyone attempting to capture something. Anything. No one looking deeply satisfied. Only a disturbing combination of bored and hungry, even while overweight and heavily entertained.

My friend at EcoDharma had warned me to be careful out here in the wider world, in London. She reminded me to take care of myself after 6 weeks in the rarefied environment of relative meditative stillness, and especially with my particular strain of open-heartedness. I had brazenly replied that I’d spent far more time in this Being than the years she’d known me and that I could handle it. AND she was right. Both happened. I can, and am, handling it. But roughly.

My friends here have looked after me, like one of their own young girls. In the middle of the mayhem of the market the father said, ‘I love you Melissa’. A few moments later he realized that I was crying, but he didn’t realize that it was his care that turned those tears on. In a maelstrom of mindlessness, his kindness and protectiveness are the kind of fatherly love I have all-ways craved in full, yet only had in small snippets.

And this is key to the marriage in my hips as well. I took on the role of father and protector with my mother. I was the good husband even though she had a few of her own in her earlier times. Recently, when I studied the mythology of some asteroids, I saw and understood an astrological signature for this. With Juno prominent in the public arena of my life, I show a staunch face when it comes to promoting women and protecting them. There is nothing wrong in this.

What requires balancing is the softer, more tender sides. And it was those sides that had felt free to emerge while at EcoDharma, the way a wild woodland creature would do when the crashing-about of humans has subsided. With 6 weeks in the ear-ringing silence of the Catalunyan cliffs, broken only by cuckoos and, later in the season, nightingales, and, sometimes, the dark and startling snuffle of a wild boar, I had been tamed by the timeless.

My own wild heart had ventured forth, showing itself in abandoned laughter as well as unbrooked grieving, all witnessed by these strangers I’d stepped into the wilderness with. Who each had their own luggage to sift through, their own dialectical dramas to undo, to re-wild themselves.

What, for you, is wild?

Epilogue:

2 weeks after my deep disturbance at the Borough Market in 2017, I had an un-wished-for affirmation of my perceptions. I had been deeply perplexed by what I could only describe as a panic attack. It was the only time I have experienced, so far, such a bewildering intensity of emotion and physical sensation that seemed to have no source to blame. It was embarrassing and difficult to explain. My mind latched on to whatever threads around and within me that might help me make some sense of it, but nothing really satisfied. Not even the writing above that I did directly after.

Only when I learned 2 weeks later that there had been a terrorist attack on the same path, did it begin to click into place. 8 people had been killed, either hit by the speeding van on the bridge, or stabbed to death by the 3 attackers who crashed the van and then ran into the market. 48 people suffered physical injuries, 21 critically injured. The attackers were shot dead by the police. It was a scene of mayhem and horror.

I have called myself a ‘human filtration system’ in an attempt to describe how I perceive energies in places and with people. Although I have dabbled with comprehending and operating within simultaneous time and aside from some prescient dreams, I had not, until this moment, considered the possibility that I might perceive the “future” as well as the “past”. It wasn’t as though I saw the event play out the way a clairvoyant might. I felt it like a clairsentient.

Disturbingly I felt all of it. The dark misanthropy of the attacker’s side that judged others enough to want to kill them. While I have felt judgement and even misanthropy before, this level was immense and caused me to panic that I could feel such a thing. But then add to that the panic and terror of those being attacked by steroid-jacked, knife-wielding psychos who, within a mere 10 minutes, had dispatched 8 lives and injured 48 more.

I may never know how it worked. Perhaps the killers were there that day, scoping the scene, and I perceived them somehow. I have been called ‘a bit psychic’. Or maybe the sharp trauma of the event radiated out from its place in spacetime, that we call the future, and in my hyper-sensitive state I felt the reverb of it. Or maybe I experienced time dilation or some other quirk of quantum physics I don’t yet comprehend and certainly can’t explain. Or maybe it was all entirely coincidental. I’m not sure how I’d ever really know.

What I do know is that I would never go to that market again. Ever. My perceptions, although distressingly dramatic, worked to protect me. Isn’t this how we generally understand a 6th sense?

I spent a moment with my hand in a fire that didn’t even exist yet, but it was so hot that it burned me nonetheless.