Untamed

Sometimes I can hear the metal of the sliding glass door grind against the track as my small frame heaves it open to welcome the sweet scent of drifting white plum blossoms; the planks of deck wood rough against my soft soles giving way to the cool spring of fresh grass as I steal out into the garden. I can smell the leaves of the alder tree ground underfoot, the bark pungent in the sun. The chill of my bones softens as the warmth of light seeps in, the hallow echo of architecture fading into the soothing rustle of leaves gently brushing and something small and busy moving somewhere hidden.

My mother created a wild space in the world, a tangled English garden in constant transformation, rich with echoes of ancient history and pagan ritual, and dense with hidden places where we shed in secret the bindings both real and imagined that constrained us. In this breathing cocoon, when Atari was just beginning to creep from the arcade to the living room, I enjoyed a childhood fit for earlier times. We wove elaborate games across borderless yards through warm late summer evenings. We caught tadpoles in the river and kept them in fishbowls, fed by aphids that hung in such thick clouds we could catch them simply by standing motionless as leaves under the sticky canopy. I would lose myself in the mysteries blown in by wind storms, erecting miniature houses and roads and inhabiting them with my entire being. Surrounded by so much life, I was never bored, never lonely or frightened.

My mother only needed to tell me once that when I peeled the bark from the crepe myrtle, the tree felt as I would if someone tore my skin. When my heart broke over accidentally squishing a spider, my mother saved one’s life to repay my debt. I understood that these beings who wove together to form my vibrant world, from the towering alder to the tiniest ant, were alive, were on their own journeys just like me, and that while they were largely oblivious to my presence, I could gain so much guidance and security from watching the way that lived. I also understood that they were vulnerable to me, to all of us, because of our size, our hands, our minds and it was crucial that I never lose sight of that.

As studies reigned my resonance and wonderings into linear history and rational geometry, as social challenges left me feeling vulnerable and uncertain, as venturing out into the world of steel and edges to prove my worth solidified my fear, I sought solace in whatever scraps of wilderness I could find – the view of a mountain, a patch of fallow land, the cycles of the moon overhead. Gradually I burrowed into my practical, organized mind for survival, my longing to roam free fading into an aimless echo, until that ancient, wild thing in me revolted against being tamed. I began to understand not just intellectually, but viscerally, as a penned beast or manicured bush does, the way our linear plans and mechanical movements separate us from the abundant energy and inspiration and trust and awe that moves through us and all living things from a source far deeper, older, and wiser than humanity. Isolated in blocks and rows and ruts of monoculture, denied our diversity and our ingenuity, we are ripe for addiction, depression, and violence, and medicate ourselves as liberally as we fumigate our fields. We tear chunks from the world around us, hording all we can in aimless desperation for nourishment from this surrogate and unyielding reality we have constructed.

The ancient myths of interconnection that guided us have been replaced by the self-fulfilling story that struggle, and grief, and isolation are the way of the world. We have lost our reverence for the sacred patterns and spirits that once surrounded us and would be able to remind us that what we truly long for is the life we led for the majority of our existence as human beings; a life of intimate and equal exchange with every living thing that is, has been, or will ever be. That life began to fade from memory the moment we decided where the seeds should fall and which animals should mate, and our place shifted from secure participant to uncertain ruler. We have become acclimated to a world of hierarchy, to being served, to being warm and dry, to being in control while our hearts wail for wilderness, for wandering, unraveling and feeling held.

I do not know how our story ends. I do not know if our fear and hunger will ravage every last morsel of this world and each other until we are a pile of sterile ash, or if the spirits in those of us who remember the wilderness will rally to salvage the wisdom and resilience in our blood. What I do know is that new ways are sprouting through the lives of those who have the courage to trust their discontent. Activists and scholars are fighting to preserve what is left of ancient culture and wilderness. Ecopsychologists are studying and speaking about how our mental, physical, and spiritual health is inextricable from our ability to thrive together as a part of the natural world. Pioneers in organizational development are applying life-affirming themes and natural patterns to building thriving cultures. And experimental and educational permaculture projects flourish in a symbiotic network across the globe revealing ways we can adapt our way of life to embrace sustainable food and social systems. The issues all of these people are exploring hint at both a common thread and an antidote for everything I have always questioned and doubted and raged against in the way we treat other living things, the way we worship, the way we work, the way we construct our homes and our neighborhoods, the way we eat and shop and raise children and battle, always battle everything around and inside of us.

I want my own life to flow into this precious work that is slowly weaving from a way of life that is no longer working for humanity, back to something that once did, and towards an entirely new world that we have not yet fully grasped. I want to infuse this work with the amphibious way my heart overflows in cascades of curiosity, hopelessness, and insight, my spirit burrows deep into dreams rich with poetry, metaphor, and portent, and my mind deconstructs and reassembles intricate networks of spiraling vitality and harmony. As the plans for my journey abroad begin to solidify, people have begun asking me, “Why permaculture?” So I tell them about the way a forest lives, every plant and animal and stone and drop of rain in its place, layer upon layer, each replenishing what the other takes away. Would it not be a salve to our ragged earth, a salve to our lonely, frightened spirits, if we could reclaim that way of life again – relearn how to slip into the harmony of the networks of food, water, and heat around us and embrace a life of security and awe?

This work is interwoven with everything I have ever really, truly loved. The way I am fully transported beyond fear and time when I feel and speak and weep and laugh and write about every life-affirming thing I have experienced. The way the light cascading from a sinking sun in shifting shadows acquaints me with dimensions beyond our own, the way I would gaze out the window at my office job longing to describe how giant sycamore trunks resemble flows of candle wax, the way that poem about wild geese makes my hair stand on end and spirit take flight, the way every time I talk to a silent mountain I fall to my knees and weep and feel myself restored from the vibration of the earth. These beings are real. They are ancient. And we are inside each other. I want to dedicate my life to deepening my fluency in their language, to telling their story, to finding ways to cross-pollinate reverence for them. I hold only a small and melancholy hope of saving them. My more ardent prayer is that we allow them to first save us by rewarding our courage with a glimpse of what it means to lived untamed.

Nancy

 

From Wolverine, by James Dickey

“Your unnoticed going will mean:

How much the timid poem needs

The mindless explosion of your rage

The glutton’s internal fire the elk’s

Heart in the belly, sprouting wings,

The pact of the “blind swallowing

Thing,” with himself, to eat

The world, and not to be driven off it

Until it is gone, even if it takes

Forever. I take you as you are

And make of you what I will,

Skunk-bear, carcajoy, bloodthirsty

Non-survivor.

Lord, let me die   but not die

Out.”