Читать книгу Wild Mind - Bill Plotkin - Страница 14
ОглавлениеOwning up to being animal, a creature of the earth. Tuning our animal senses to the sensible terrain: blending our skin with the rain-rippled surface of rivers, mingling our ears with the thunder and the thrumming of frogs, and our eyes with the molten gray sky. Feeling the polyrhythmic pulse of this place — this huge windswept body of water and stone. This vexed being in whose flesh we’re entangled.
Becoming earth. Becoming animal. Becoming, in this manner, fully human.
— DAVID ABRAM
The South facet of the Self — what I call the Wild Indigenous One — is fully and passionately at home in the human body and in the natural world. The South Self has a sensuous, erotic, emotional, and enchanted relationship with what David Abram calls “this huge windswept body of water and stone” and with each living thing in it — and, from the perspective of the South, everything in our world is alive, each rock and river as much as every herb and animal. The Wild Indigenous One is our most instinctual dimension, every bit as natural and at home on Earth as any elk, elm, or alp.
Like a youth in midsummer (someone, that is, in the south season of life during the south season of the year), the Wild Indigenous One is that dimension of our innate wholeness deliriously in love with our enthralling, sacred, animate world. The South facet of the Self would have us dancing through sun-drenched meadows, paddling down wildly leaping rivers, rowdily celebrating the full rainbow range of emotions rollicking through the embodied psyche, and recklessly declaring devotion to lovers in the form of blossom, bison, canyon, woman, or man. When in the consciousness of our Wild Self, we’re sometimes so at home in our world, so in love with Earthly creation, so fully present to our moment and place that, in an ecstatic rapture, we lose awareness of all obligations. Canadian mountain poet Robert MacLean celebrates a liberation of this sort:
Tent tethered among jackpine and blue-
bells. Lacewings rise from rock
incubators. Wild geese flying north.
And I can’t remember who I’m supposed
to be….1
Thanks to our Wild Indigenous One, we possess an uncanny ability to emotionally empathize and somatically identify with other life-forms, and are sometimes even able to shape-shift into them. The capacity to merge our consciousness with that of other species and terrestrial forms is something we used to enjoy as a matter of course when we lived in nature-based clans. And even our own children still do this — without our ever suggesting it or showing them how. Probably even we did this in early childhood. We can remember to do so again, as did Hermann Hesse:
Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far-off farm,
I hold still and listen a long time.
My soul turns and goes back to the place
Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,
The bird and the blowing wind
Were like me, and were my brothers.
My soul turns into a tree,
and an animal, and a cloud bank.
Then changed and odd it comes home.
And asks me questions. What should I reply?2
Is everyone capable of such communions and ecstasies? You know your own psyche includes a wild, indigenous dimension if you’ve ever felt privileged to be embodied as a sensuous human animal; or if you’ve ever looked into the eyes of a wild mammal, or a companion dog, cat, or horse, and experienced an irrefutable kinship with a fellow Earthling. Without doubt, you’ve had direct, unmediated experiences of your Wild Indigenous One if you’ve ever enjoyed the thoroughly somatic experience of a powerful emotion — not just the visceral participation in fabulous feelings like joy, but also in grief, fear, and anger, too — or if you’ve ever made love with abandon, howled into a starlit night, or skied powder snow as instinctively as a dolphin dances in the ocean or a hawk rides the wind. Indeed, your Wild Indigenous One was in full play the last time you were in ecstasy as you simply chopped wood, carried water, prepared a sumptuous meal, or savored a long yoga posture.
The capabilities and sensibilities of the Wild One are especially vital for those of us born into Euro-American cultures, because our South facet has been a primary target of Western cultural suppression. It is our South that enables us to most fully experience our unconditional belonging in this world, our native kinship and interdependence with every other thing and place on Earth. And it is precisely this sense of belonging and kinship, if widely experienced, that would render impossible the Western and Westernized cultures we now live in, which, despite our aspirations to the contrary, are largely ecocidal, genocidal, dog-eat-dog, materialistic, unjust, defensive, imperialistic — in short, isolated and isolating, the obverse of affiliated and collaborative. By cultivating the Wild Indigenous One in ourselves and in our children, we’ll go a long way toward forging new cultures that are not only life sustaining but also life enhancing.
David Abram reminds us that to be fully human we must fully inhabit our sensuous animal bodies, our enfleshed forms inextricably embedded in an animate world. By rewilding ourselves in this way, we moderns will rewild our world as well. This reenchantment is nature’s windfall awaiting us once we learn again to access, embrace, and cultivate the South facet of our Selves. And although this might not be easy, it’s simple. As poet Mary Oliver advises, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”3
SOUTH LOVE: EMBODIED, PASSIONATE ATTRACTION
In the previous chapter, I suggested that while all four facets of the Self are anchored in love, each facet features its own way of loving. While the North is rooted in a nurturing and generative love, the South mode of love is sensuous, sexual, emotional, and playful, like that between uninhibited lovers.
The modern Greeks use the words philia and storge for the North variety of love, both words connoting affection between friends and family members, or the love of parents for their children. Eros, in contrast, is the Greek word for passionate love, which can be understood as a combination of romance and sexual attraction. Romance is the West facet’s mode of love (which we’ll explore in chapter 5), while the South mode of love is a carnal attraction, a form of allurement we usually think of as existing exclusively between human lovers, but which also occurs between nonhuman beings and between humans and other members of the Earth community. It helps to remember that healthy sexual attraction is a much more extensive realm than the mainstream Western fixation on genitals. Sexual-erotic allurement is full-bodied and multisensory; it engages the intellect, emotions, and imagination as much as the flesh. Healthy humans naturally experience this kind of somatic rapture with sunshine, flowers, ocean, trees, fragrance, breeze, and land shapes. More on this later.
NATIVE TO EARTH
From the perspective of the Wild Indigenous One, we are wild not in the sense of being out of control, deranged, or barbaric but in the sense that we are terrestrially natural, as a wildflower is wild — native to its particular place, surviving and thriving in its ecosystem without deliberate introduction or manipulation by others. When animated by the South facet of our Self, we know in our bones and bellies that we emerged from this world and were shaped in body and mind through interaction with the other creatures. From the vantage point of the Wild Indigenous One, we know that each thing on this planet has become what it is by virtue of its ever-evolving relationships with all other things; instinctively we know we’re not an exception.
There are at least three ways in which someone can be indigenous: culturally (of a particular people or tribe), ecologically (of a particular ecosystem or geographical place), and terrestrially (of Earth), each kind having an essential relationship with the other two.
Most Americans — in fact, the majority of contemporary humans worldwide — have lost touch with the cultural traditions, wisdom, and mode of consciousness of their ancestors, those who were psychospiritually rooted in the place they lived: their particular river valley, mountain range, desert canyon, seacoast, forest, island, or savanna. In this sense, most people today are neither culturally nor ecologically indigenous.
But the Wild One within us preserves and sustains our more general terrestrial indigenity, a resource of the greatest significance and potency, especially now in the twenty-first century. Our being native to Earth is, after all, foundational to our ever having been culturally or ecologically native. What enabled our indigenous ancestors to truly and fully belong to their geographic place and to generate life-enhancing cultures there was the fact that their physical and psychological capacities were shaped by the terrestrial world that we have in common with them. They emerged from this world in a specific place and lived accordingly. And by living accordingly, they engendered particular cultures — ways of living — that were inherent elements of their more-than-human community. Their cultures were organic fruitions of their place: indigenous. Human culture and environment were interdependent: mutually shaping and mutually enhancing.
By learning to access and cultivate our Wild Selves, we can once again become indigenous to the place we live — our valley, watershed, or bioregion — and collectively engender ways of life fully resonant with and integral to our local ecosystem, cultures that harmonize with the songline of our place. This will take a good deal of time — likely several generations. All the more reason to celebrate the small but growing number of communities throughout the Western world that are now two or three generations into this process of relocalization, of returning home to place.
CAPTURED BY THE MAGIC AND UTTER MYSTERY OF EACH THING
From the perspective and experience of the Wild Indigenous One, we are enchanted, and in two ways. First, the South Self is utterly moved by, deeply touched by, the things of this world — its creatures, greenery, landforms, weather, and celestial bodies — and recognizes that each thing has its own voice and presence. It’s as if we’re under a spell — enchanted — captured by the magic and utter mystery of each thing. And when we’re alive in our South facet, all that we do, even “work,” becomes play. The world fills us with wonder and awe. Sometimes we’re terrified by the deadly potential of terrestrial forms and forces such as tornadoes, grizzlies, and hornets, sometimes simply exhilarated, sometimes both at once.
We’re also enchanted in a second, reciprocal sense: The things of the world are allured by us and to us! We ourselves, individually and as a species, are a magical power or presence in this world. The other-than-humans recognize in us a form of mystery no less stunning than their own. We, too, place other beings under a spell (including each other).
Enchantment, most fundamentally, is about how a thing belongs to its world. To thoroughly belong to a place is to experience both it and ourselves as enchanted. Through the consciousness of our Wild One, we’re allured by our terrestrial place and, through that allurement, come to experience how we were made for that particular place. We cannot experience our own magic without experiencing the world’s. Each requires the other. Conversely, the world becomes disenchanted when we no longer feel and act on our deep and innate belonging to it. To reenchant the world requires us to rediscover, reclaim, and embody our sacred and interdependent relationships with all things. We must learn again to experience and treat each thing and the world itself as alive and ensouled, each being as having its own interior life. As Thomas Berry regularly reminded us, the world is not, in fact, a collection of objects but a communion of subjects.
Enchanted derives from the French enchanter, which means “to be sung.” The Wild One is enchanted because it has been sung into the world by the world and knows this. And the Wild One’s song harmonizes fully with the grand song of the world itself.4 Indeed, the world’s symphony cannot realize its fullness without each thing — including each human — joining in with its own life melody, each of which is one note in the composite song of the world. Industrial dominator societies have been damaging and destroying Earthly biomes, but domination is not our natural or instinctive tune. The Earth needs humans to be healthy and mature if it is to be fully itself and if it is to evolve and fulfill its destiny. David Whyte writes,
…As if your place in the world mattered
and the world could
neither speak nor hear the fullness of
its own bitter and beautiful cry
without the deep well
of your body resonating in the echo….5
IN SENSUOUS COMMUNION WITH THE WORLD
The Wild Indigenous One is sensuous and body centered. We are embodied in flesh and are in communion with the world through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin, as well as through our indigenous heart and wild mind. When animated with the Wild One’s sensibilities, we live this corporeal reality in every moment. We delight in playful contact with the flesh and fur of fellow living animals, with bark and seed, husk and fruit, wind and water. We’re thrilled by the scent of jasmine, the taste of honey, the spectacle of elk or eagle, the roar of thunder or the buzz of bees, or by full-bodied immersions in ocean, storm, or the final dazzling rays of sunset.
Our sensuous communion with the world sends shivers of seductive appreciation through our limbs — the visceral, blossoming experience of the Southerly Indigenous One aroused within us.
EMOTIONALLY HOLY
In addition to being enchanted and sensuous, the Wild Indigenous One is wholly emotive and emotionally holy. Within our embodied wild consciousness, we live and breathe the sacredness and pleasure of all the emotions. All of them. To the Wild One, there are no toxic emotions, not even shame.6 Each emotion is an experience alive in our bodies. The Wild One is exhilarated by each tremor, moan, or howl of feeling. Every emotion is a valued experience of assimilating the vicissitudes of life, of social, corporeal, and spiritual existence.
Through our South subpersonalities, however, we experience our emotions quite differently. As we’ll see in chapter 7, when we react to events through the filter of our woundedness, our emotions often seem unpleasant, and we may then end up acting on our emotions in ways that harm ourselves or others.
It bears emphasizing that the mature human — the human Self — is not a dispassionate, merely logical functionary. We do not do well in any domain of life — even (or especially) in government, business, religion, or education — without the free flow of our feelings. “Emotional intelligence” is as essential to our humanity as any other mode of intelligence, including intellectual, imaginative, sensory, ecological, and musical, to name just a few. Individual humans burn out and human organizations self-destruct without emotional aliveness.
Some people believe we’d be better off without emotions because “emotions are irrational.” But, in fact, our emotions always make sense when we’re able to fully understand ourselves, and there’s a treasure in each emotion. Without emotions, we’re not human.
Each emotion, if we know how to embrace it, provides guidance in modifying or celebrating our relationships to others, to life, to our world. Positive or negative, emotions are not experiences we choose. They occur without deliberation in response to our ever-changing relationships to self and others, relationships that manage to regularly get out of balance. The information contained in our emotions, however, can help us recover that balance, repair or refashion our world, and enable us to participate in communities in more fulfilling ways.
A short list of emotions: mad, sad, bad, glad, scared. Every emotion contains a message. Each type of emotion (for example, mad versus sad) offers a particular kind of revelation about self or about the relationship of self to others or the world. What we call negative emotions tell us that something seems off to us and that attempts at improvement are called for. What we experience as positive emotions embody our appreciation or celebration of a good thing. Every emotion suggests particular kinds of actions that can bring the world back into balance or, in the case of positive emotions, can maintain, enhance, or celebrate balance that already exists.
For example, what makes us mad or feel hurt? Every instance of anger or hurt evokes questions such as: How do I believe I deserve to be treated? How should another person or a community of people be treated, or a particular place, or, more generally, the planet? What seems to be wrong with the world? In what way might I be part of the problem?
What we believe we or others deserve is, of course, not necessarily an accurate assessment. The value of the questioning is to help us understand ourselves — our beliefs and attitudes — as well as the moral and social conventions of our people. Sometimes we discover our beliefs are mistaken. At other times our investigation yields confirmation. In both cases, we can learn how to act on our anger and hurt. In particular, we can learn how to respond to others in a way that fosters healthy relationships.
When we’re sad, a different set of questions arises: What do I love, admire, or desire that I’ve lost or fear I’m about to lose? What can I do to keep the loss from happening or getting worse? If it’s too late, how can I mourn what’s been lost? What does my love or desire say about who I am? How might I praise the things of this world?
When we feel bad (guilty or ashamed): What is expected of me? What do I expect of myself? What are the right ways for me to be and to act? What are my genuine values, and which ones have I violated, knowingly or unknowingly? How do I make things right again with others and with myself?
When we’re glad: What makes my world better, more complete? What, in general, do I rejoice in? What does this say about who I am, what I value? How might I praise or celebrate what is good?
When we’re afraid: What is dangerous and therefore to be escaped, avoided, or approached cautiously? What do I need to do to protect myself or others? What degree of risk is tolerable in pursuit of which goals? Given that zero risk can be deadening, what degree of risk is optimal? What is true security? Given life’s inherent risks and dangers, what skills or resources do I need in order to take care of myself and others?
The Four Steps of Emotional Assimilation
In healthy cultures and families, we learn in childhood how to embrace our emotions in ways that serve ourselves and others. In contemporary Western cultures, most people must learn this later in life. Many never do.
Embracing our emotions can be understood as a journey through the four cardinal directions. Ideally, each of the four steps is thoroughly completed before we move on to the next. The first step — a talent of the South facet of the Self — is to thoroughly experience the raw emotion itself, beginning with how it feels in our body, allowing the emotion to express and embody itself through us, using sound, movement, gesture, or posture. In this step, there’s no interpretation, censoring, or sanitizing of the emotion, only the full visceral experience of it. Second, from the mature perspective of the West Self, we explore what the occurrence of that emotion in that particular situation tells us about ourselves (not about others), about our expectations, values, needs, desires, attitudes, and so on. This is intended not as harsh self-criticism but rather as compassionate self-examination. Third, we express our emotions to others, in word and action, in a nonviolent, kindhearted way that makes our social world right again, or that celebrates what’s already right (nurturing action is a North skill). And fourth, we review the entire cycle of the emotional process now being completed, seeing how it fits within the big picture of our individual life’s story, and, hopefully, have a wholehearted laugh with ourselves and perhaps others about this adventure of being human (an East gift). Through this sunwise (clockwise) cycle — from south to east — our emotions support us in bringing our outer world of relationships into alignment with our inner world of experience, and vice versa.
A Full Emotional Response to Our World
When it comes to our emotions, it’s the Wild One — the South facet of our Self — that feels, embraces, and expresses the full range of our responses to our world: from our ebullient joy over the astonishing spontaneities of Earthly life, to our anguish, outrage, and grief over the devastations and deprivations of its creatures, soils, waters, and air. Wendell Berry has expressed his anguish and grief in this way:
It is the destruction of the world
in our own lives that drives us
half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
to be broken, our bodies
existing before and after us
in clod and cloud, worm and tree,
that we, driving or driven, despise
in our greed to live, our haste
to die. To have lost, wantonly,
the ancient forests, the vast grasslands
is our madness, the presence
in our very bodies of our grief.7
As ecophilosopher Joanna Macy reminds us, we humans are full-fledged ecological members of our world, a world suffering unspeakable losses every day.8 Given our interdependence with the biosphere, it’s simply normal and healthy to respond with a great wailing grief-cry over the loss of species, habitats, clean air and water, of a safe enough world for our children and ourselves. It’s normal and healthy to feel vulnerable, or overwhelmed at times, to experience a shuddering fear for our world, anger and shame over our collective human carelessness, or outright despair over the survival prospects of our biologically diverse planetary ecosystems. Profound feeling is a natural consequence of our deep belonging and participation in our world, our utter dependence on the vitality of the greater Earth community. These emotions inspire and empower us to act in defense of life.
The South Self’s emotionality is mature compared to that of the South subpersonalities — our Wounded Children, which we’ll explore in chapter 7. The emotions of our Wounded Children tend to be reactive (triggered by conflict and frustration), egocentric (self-centered), self-protective, and self- justifying, while the Wild One’s emotionality is more often proactively ecocentric (supporting our life-enhancing contributions to the more-than- human world) and worldcentric (supportive of all humans, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, capacity, or age).
When our Egos are dominated by our Wounded Children, our consciousness is anchored in childhood, especially its traumas. But when our Egos are functioning from the perspective of our Wild Indigenous One, our consciousness is rooted in a web of life as extensive and diverse as the entire Earth community, a web very, very old indeed.
THE TWO-MILLION-YEAR-OLD MAN
Much has been written about human instincts, innate behavioral patterns ascribed to primitive and enigmatic elements of our psyches that remain fully connected to nature and our origins as a species. Reflecting on this primal dimension of humanity, Carl Jung spoke of an “archaic man” or the “two- million-year-old man,” an unconscious layer of our psyche that still enjoys a full communion with all the forms and forces of the Earth community. At our depths, in other words, there remains an indigenous man or woman within each of us. Jung personally experienced this as the “primitive” within himself.
The “archaic man” within us takes nature as his guide. For him, wisdom derives primarily from daily natural occurrences, from signs and omens experienced through his senses, emotions, dreams, and visions. Jung believed that “most of [modern people’s] difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, the age-old forgotten wisdom stored in us.”9 Likewise, the cultural ecologist Paul Shepard suggests that if we are to live again in fulfillment and in balance with the rest of nature, we must reclaim our Pleistocene psyches.10 The Wild Indigenous One encompasses much of what I believe Jung meant by the “archaic man” or Shepard by our Pleistocene psyches. But a caveat is necessary: In contemporary people, much of the instinctive self is not only unaccessed, uncultivated, and unembodied but also actively repressed, both collectively as a result of Western cultural biases and individually as a result of the pathological and egocentric nature of childhood development in modern societies. Consequently, much of our South wholeness is now submerged and buried in what Jung called the Shadow (constituting the West subpersonalities, which we’ll explore in chapter 9).11
But our natural instincts need not be nearly so repressed as they are in contemporary Western peoples. Healthy, mature parents know how to preserve and safeguard something essential: their child’s original, natural wildness — her instinctive, sensuous, emotional, and imaginative qualities, those that exist before any cultural shaping. This aspect of the psyche is what Freud called the id. However, Freud’s soul-suppressing agenda was to tame and supplant that wildness, not nurture it. “Where id was, there shall ego be,” he advised.12 In contrast, one of the goals of mature parents is for this dimension of their child’s psyche — the Wild Indigenous One — to be encouraged, celebrated, and incorporated into the emerging personality.13
We need to preserve and embrace this priceless resource, our individual wildness — “our treasury of ecological intelligence”14 — in order to become fully human. And, as a species, we need the preserved wildness and diversity of the land, air, and waters in order to remain fully human.
POLYMORPHOUS EROTICISM
In addition to being indigenous, enchanted, sensuous, emotive, and instinctive, the Wild One is also the primary feature of our psyches that enables and ignites our sexuality and our polymorphous eroticism.
People with a well-cultivated South Self enjoy a sexuality that is untamed, sensual, wholehearted, playful, and intoxicating. And because the Wild One is only one of four facets of our horizontal wholeness, the sexuality of the Self is also nurturing and tender (North), magical and romantic (West), and innocent and lighthearted (East).
But what about “polymorphous eroticism”? Here we must first distinguish between the sexual and the erotic — the erotic being a far wider range of experience. Eros is the life force that allures, that draws one thing toward another, the way gravity “takes hold of even the smallest thing / and pulls it toward the heart of the world.”15 Eros, which, as noted earlier, has both West and South qualities, evokes in us a passionate curiosity, a wonderment that impels us to explore relationship and communion. Sexuality is a particular (and special!) variety of eroticism, a South variety. Sexual arousal spurs us to surrender to and avidly explore the allurement between our enfleshed self and that of another.
And here’s where “polymorphous” comes in. When embodying our Wild One, we are allured not merely by other humans but also by landscapes and seascapes, trees and forests, by ideas and poetry, art and music (rhythm as well as melody), and by eloquent spoken language and the fragrance and flavor of succulent cuisine. We find ourselves somatically aroused by the world, seduced and captivated by the everyday wonders of Earth. In the Western world, we’ve made erotic love too small; we’ve isolated it and ourselves from the animate planet within which we are immersed. As D. H. Lawrence famously lamented,
Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.16
The Wild Indigenous One is sensuously, emotionally, instinctively, and viscerally crazy about creation, enchanted by all things and possibilities.
ARCHETYPES AND EXEMPLARS OF THE SOUTH
As with the other three facets of the Self, the South has an interpersonal guise as well as an intrapersonal one, the latter — the Wild Indigenous One — having been the focus in this chapter so far. The interpersonal guise of the South is how we appear to others when we are fully embodying our Wild One. At such times, we incarnate the archetype of the Wild Man or Wild Woman — the Green Man, for example, or Artemis. (See maps 1 and 2.)
Green Man refers to nature spirits or flora deities found in a great variety of cultures and traditions throughout the world, including our own Western traditions and religions. Often depicted in carved wood or stone as a face with branches or vines sprouting from nose or mouth, the Green Man is a symbol of rebirth, fertility, or the cycle of plant growth initiated each spring. Some say the Green Man possesses the ability to work with tireless enthusiasm beyond normal capacities.
When a man has a particularly well cultivated Wild One, he might appear to others as a Green Man, an Earth-infused creature of sky and ground, tree and birdcall, fruit and herbs, effortlessly and endlessly bearing the natural abundance of the land.
Artemis is an ancient Greek goddess variously known as Lady of the Beasts, Goddess of the Wildlands, and Mistress of the Animals. She is the Hellenic goddess of the hunt, the wilderness, and both virginity and childbirth, and she brings as well as relieves disease in women. Artemis is often depicted as a huntress carrying a bow and arrows.
These Southerly archetypes are found in Western culture in many forms and guises, as, for example, satyrs and wood nymphs, Puck (the mischievous nature sprite, who also appears in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Diana (the Roman goddess of the hunt, Moon, and birthing), a variety of fertility gods and goddesses, and innumerable other characters from literature, art, and mythology. Examples of Southerly individuals in Western culture — people who seem to be fully at home in their bodies, in the more-than-human world, and among the other creatures, and who seem to be instinctive and/or sexually vibrant — include authors Jean Giono, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, D. H. Lawrence, Linda Hogan, Alice Walker, and Jim Harrison; poets Pattiann Rogers, Walt Whitman, and Gary Snyder; dancers Mata Hari, Vaslav Nijinsky, Martha Graham, and Gabrielle Roth; feminists Eve Ensler and Naomi Wolf; and environmentalists John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Jane Goodall, and Julia Butterfly Hill.
Without a well-developed Wild Indigenous One, we cannot be at home on Earth or in communion with the others, nor can we experience full emotional health and vivacity, sexual fire, or erotic vibrancy. Like the other three facets of the Self, the South grants an indispensable key to being or becoming fully human.
THE WILD INDIGENOUS ONE IN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE
The Wild Indigenous One in healthy children is fully embodied and easily observed. Human infants and children are by nature emotional, enchanted, sensuous, and erotic. In early childhood, we respond to our world instinctively and emotionally, as seen, for example, in our joyous wonder and delight during first meetings (with cat, puddle, raspberry, friend, song); our happy pleasure evoked by another’s smile, hug, or laugh; the emotional wounding of a critical word; the bodily hurt of a thunderclap or a hot stove; the sudden fright of a snarling dog or family uproar.
We are, of course, born wild, in the sense of undomesticated — naturally, perhaps blissfully, ignorant of cultural conventions and niceties. We begin life with an innate human enjoyment of an intuited kinship with all beings and things. We’re as happy to trade speech with a bird or a brook as with a fellow human. And not merely speech: we naturally desire touch and taste, too. As children, we recognize ourselves as sensuous, breathing, animate creatures in communion with — erotically captivated by — other such beings.17
Later, in a healthy middle childhood, the Wild One is expressed and experienced in the sensuous, instinctive, earthiness of free play in wild or semiwild environs — building castles on the beach and forts in the forest, gorging on wild berries, and making golden dresses out of Scotch broom blossoms. The South Self is also seen in a child’s instinctive practice of imitating the gestures and calls of birds and animals, in her endless curiosity about bugs and trees, caves and stars, in her wonderment about her own and other human bodies; in his instinctive, enchanted, audacious response to song and games and dance, and in his readiness to surrender his body to the pulse and timbre of the assorted emotions that flow through him unbidden.
And in the teen years of a healthy adolescence, the Wild One manifests in sexual aliveness and a hormone-enhanced psychosocial curiosity and exploration of the infinite possibilities of social presence, personal style, and relationships. The healthy teenager also discovers her innate yearning to explore self and world from nonordinary states of consciousness — in part achieved through Southerly pursuits such as music, rhythm, extreme sports, entheogens (psychoactive substances), and yoga — because the Wild One has always known the world is far more enchanted than has yet been discovered.
THE SOUTH’S PRIMARY WINDOW OF KNOWING: FULL-BODIED FEELING
Feeling, of course, is the window of knowing that is native to the South facet of the Self, the window most resonant with the Wild One. I’m referring not only to the kind of feeling we call emotions but also to our bodily feeling, including our awareness of our internal organs (interoception) and the positioning of our limbs (proprioception and kinesthesia, or “muscle sense”), as well as to the “feeling in our bones” (premonitions, hunches) we get about particular social gatherings, city neighborhoods, or natural habitats, not to mention interpersonal vibes, sexual passion, and our general sense of corporeal well-being, malaise, or dis-ease.
To have heartfelt and gratifying relationships with our fellow humans, as well as with the other creatures and places of our world, we must proceed, first and foremost, by way of full-bodied feeling. True communion is impossible without feeling. The other beings indigenous to our world do not speak our human languages, but we can nevertheless come to know them deeply and intimately — through feeling, through a kind of nonphysical touching.18 Our Wild Indigenous One instinctively translates by way of feeling what’s being “said” by the nonhuman flora and fauna (and stones, rivers, and forests). This ability to know-by-feeling is the most natural thing in the world for nature-based peoples. And when it comes to communion with others of our own species, we must remember that we are at least as much feeling infused as we are linguistically inclined. What on Earth would our relationships be like if we couldn’t sense social vibes, read the emotional field, or discern the bodily states of our friends and family? (Well, actually and sadly, the worst of contemporary mainstream Western culture is an all too apt answer.) And certainly our sexuality is founded on our capacity to feel, in all senses of the word. To be fully human we must fully feel.
THE WILD INDIGENOUS ONE’S PLACE ON THE MAP OF THE PSYCHE
What is it about the cardinal direction of south that resonates so surely with the Wild One? The south (for people in the Northern Hemisphere, that is; for those in the Southern Hemisphere, this is the north) is the place of greatest warmth and light, the south being where the Sun is at its midday zenith. The south-facing sides of hills, groves, canyon walls, and dwellings are the warmest and brightest. At all times of year, the winds from the south are generally the most temperate and often, but not always, the mildest.
South, then, is naturally mated with the flowering and growth of plants, the early development of young animals, and the child’s emotions and vulnerabilities, as well as with his playfulness, delight, and sense of wonder. Because of its direct connection with the warmth and comfort of the Sun, the south is also affiliated with the warmth of the human heart and emotional connectedness. And in the warmth of the southerly season of summer, people are outside for longer hours and have greater opportunities to explore the other-than-human world.
Consonant with these qualities of the south, the Wild Indigenous One is emotionally alive and expansively at play and at home amid the fecund wonders of our more-than-human world. The Wild One celebrates its embodiment and its communion with all living things, just as nature does more generally in the warmer parts of the day and year. Both the Wild One and our experiences in the cardinal direction of south are lush, sensuous, abundant, energetic, and animated.19
PRACTICES FOR CULTIVATING THE SOUTH FACET OF THE SELF
Not everyone has well-honed access to their Wild Indigenous One. This is especially true of contemporary Western men who’ve been taught from the get-go that feeling is unmanly. Feeling is in fact a foreign faculty in immature men mired in macho and military misconceptions of manhood. The fully embodied man, in contrast, is in a sensuous and emotionally vibrant relationship with the diverse beings and things of his world, which enables him to be most empathically responsive to, appreciative of, and supportive of his fellow humans, the other creatures, and the shared environment in which they are all participatory members. This is, of course, equally true of the fully embodied woman.
Actually, it’s rare for the South facet of the Self to be well developed in anyone in the contemporary West, because of the culture’s pervasive alienation from the other-than-human world. Few Westerners experience kinship with undomesticated fauna. Few are deeply moved or inspired by rivers and mountains or by any flora beyond the garden. This is primarily due to a lack of exposure or interest. Too few families, schools, and religious organizations introduce children to their greater world in any meaningful or comprehensive way.20 As noted earlier, the Wild Indigenous One is actually a direct threat to industrial dominator societies. If a majority of Westerners were to viscerally experience the sacred kinship they naturally have with all life, we’d see an abrupt collapse of the extractive, synthetic economy and imperial politics on which contemporary Western culture is built. Egocentric, patho-adolescent culture has a major stake in suppressing the South of our Selves.
The good news, however, is that cultivating the Wild Indigenous One is not difficult. As with the North facet, the primary and most portable means of accessing the South is to simply call on it, because it is, after all, waiting within our psyches.
For example, sit outside, or even by an open window in your city apartment, and feel the wind or sun move across your skin. Let the distinctive mood of that place on Earth and its weather penetrate you like the sound track of a rousing drama. What feelings are stirred in you? Or, at any time and any place, very carefully observe your emotions and bodily sensations, even the subtlest ones, as you encounter another person — a stranger sitting across from you in a train, or your own beloved, or anyone else. What do you feel between you? What vibes do you detect? Or walk through un-domesticated country and offer your full-bodied attention to each unexpected thing you encounter — a flower, frog, rivulet, bone, stone. What is the particular feeling of that thing, your embodied knowing of it? While there, very consciously take in all the fragrances and whatever they evoke in you — images, memories, or bodily sensations. Do the same at home as you roam through your spice rack. Again, what feelings (bodily and emotional) are evoked? Or, if your circumstances permit, take off your clothes and let your whole body fully feel your world — perhaps in a meadow, your backyard, or your living room. What feels good against your skin? Not so good? What emotions or longings are evoked? Or offer your full attention to the sounds of the world, preferably while outside in a wild place, discovering the auditory nuances, distinguishing different pitches, melodies, and rhythms. Make a song of them. What feelings are stirred?
At any moment of the day, whether you’re at work in the shop or office or garden, at play on the field or court, at home with your family, or en route between one and the other, remind yourself of your wild, sensuous, emotive, and erotic indigenity. As you re-member yourself in this way, what do you notice about the way you physically move through your activities? What shifts do you notice in your relationships? What now feels most alluring or compelling? How’s it feel to be in your body? In your animate surroundings? What emotions are viscerally present? How’s it feel to be immersed in the land? Are you fully at home? How could you be more so?
Your Wild One Awaits Deployment
Consider enrolling in a wilderness program that gets you traveling by foot or boat or skis in unpredictable weather through untamed lands or seas. Or simply wander off on your own, if you have the skills and knowledge to do so. Take experiential courses in animal tracking, birding, gardening, or per- maculture. Study massage (and get some) or other somatic practices such as Feldenkrais. Sign up for courses in sensory awakening, Gestalt awareness, sacred sexuality, yoga, drumming, singing, or dance.
And here’s one of my favorite South practices: skipping! Yep: Bouncing from one foot to the other while maintaining dynamic forward momentum. Just do it, for at least five minutes. You can skip in the hallway or on the sidewalk or field, but if you really want to supercharge your skipping practice, try it on earthen trails with a downward slope of, say, ten to thirty degrees. Then you can really catch some air between hops. Sure, be careful. Take it slow at first. But if you do this for five minutes, you’ll be surprised at how alive you become, how your blood surges, your emotions stir, your senses become vibrant — your eyes feasting on colors and textures you had previously missed, your ears now awakened to the songs of birds and the calls of animals and the murmur of wind in the pines, your nostrils flaring to take in the fragrance of roses. Your body feels, well, a bit more wild, yes?
Voice Dialogue, Four-Directions Circles, Dreamwork, and Deep Imagery with the Wild Indigenous One
Turn to the appendix to get a better feeling for these four core methods of cultivating wholeness, including your Wild Indigenous One.
South Walks
Wander into a place with no or relatively little human impact. Let your Wild Indigenous One feel your way in. From your South perspective, be in embodied relationship with the things and creatures you encounter. How does each thing feel? How does it provoke or inspire you? Take in both the minute details and the big picture. Let yourself be moved by the way light plays upon a rose or the way a cloud’s shadow races across a hillside and what these experiences stir in you. Touch things you’ve never touched before, or as if you haven’t. Sing the songs you feel emanating from things. Drum their rhythms. Dance for or with them. Echo birdcalls, or offer your own language in response. Play with your capacity to be immersed in all your sensory fields simultaneously. What do you hear? (The wind? Surf? Crickets? Trees creaking? Water flowing?) What are the fields of fragrance, sometimes subtle, that you move in and out of as you stroll? Can you feel the changes in air temperature or humidity as you approach or leave a watercourse? Are there berries to taste? Salt in the ocean air? What does all this arouse in you?
As you walk in full embodiment of your Wild Indigenous One, what opportunities for communion or celebration arise? What insights emerge about your authentic place in the world or about the integral way you belong as a member of the more-than-human community of life? What emotions surface? Record impressions in your journal.
Wild Conversations
Here’s one approach, in five steps, that will catalyze conversations with other-than-human beings, or what Gary Snyder calls “talking across the species boundaries.”21 Feel free to add or subtract steps or do them in a different order.
1.Go wandering outside. Bring your journal. Be prepared to offer a gift — a poem, tears of grief, an expression of yearning or joy, a song, a dance, a lock of hair, tobacco, cornmeal, water, a handful of your breath. Early on, cross over a physical threshold (a stream, a stick, a passageway between two trees) to mark your transition from ordinary consciousness to that of the sacred. Beyond the threshold, observe three cross-cultural taboos: do not eat, do not speak with other humans, and do not enter human-made shelters.
2.With the perspective of, and through the embodiment of, your Wild Indigenous One, wander randomly until you feel called by something that strongly draws your attention because it attracts, intrigues, allures, repels, or scares you. This might take some time. Don’t simply choose something with your strategic thinking mind; wait until you’re called. It might be a bush, boulder, anthill, waterfall, or snake, or maybe a rotting animal carcass. Sit and observe it closely for a good length of time, offering your full sensory and emotional attention. Record in your journal what you observe. Perhaps offer a gift at this time.
3.Then introduce yourself, out loud. Being audible is important. Tell the Other about yourself, who you really are, but from the perspective of your Wild Indigenous One. Be prepared to go on for fifteen minutes or more. Perhaps tell it why you have been wandering around waiting to be called — not merely because someone recommended it, but because of the ways the idea resonated with you. Then tell your deepest, most intimate truths or stories that arise in the moment, or your greatest doubts or most burning questions or yearnings, or all of these. In addition to ordinary human language, you might “speak” with song, poetry, nonverbal sound, images (feel yourself sending these images to the Other), emotion, or body language (movement, gesture, dance). Then, using the same speech options, tell the Other everything about it that you’ve noticed. Describe its features (out loud, if using words, song, or sound), and respectfully tell it what interests you about its features, and what the fact that you find them interesting tells you about you. Keep communicating… until it interrupts you (if it does).
4.Then stop and be receptive — with your senses, intuition, feeling, and imagination. “Listening” to the Other (direct, prereflective perception) is different from fabricating metaphors (such as a tree “telling” you to stand tall). With true listening, you’re simply being receptive to the Other through your feeling and imagination without striving for a response. Fabricating metaphors, on the other hand, consciously enlists the strategic thinking mind, which asks “What is this like?” and reaches for an answer by means of reasoning. To really listen, it helps if you expect to be surprised. If you “hear” something predictable, you’re probably not really listening.
5.Keep the conversation going for several rounds. Don’t end the interaction prematurely. In your journal, record or draw what happens. Offer the Other your gratitude and a gift, if you haven’t already. When you’re ready, return to the place of your original threshold and cross back over, ending your observance of the three taboos.
In this practice, the Other might reflect something back to you about you, but, more generally, the goal is to learn something about the Other. Or about both you and the Other. Or about the web that contains you both. It’s best to enter wild conversations with the central intent to become better acquainted with a nonhuman being, rather than, say, to receive some oracular information about yourself.
THE SOUTH FACET OF THE SELF AND THE DESCENT TO SOUL
The underworld of Soul is a wilderness — an outback defined not by a particular geographical location but by a state of consciousness, a frame of mind, a realm of the psyche in which meaning, metaphor, and symbol percolate from their generally invisible depths and flow through our moment-to-moment experience like creatures from another world. Sometimes it seems to be a circus world, but more generally it’s a sacred one, a heaven or a hell exuding eloquent signs of portent or promise. Here, denizens of our personal unconscious mingle, strangely, with archetypes of the collective human unconscious and creatures of the terrestrial wild, and it is often difficult to discern which are which. To our astonishment or bafflement, our own individual Souls might appear in a great variety of shapes and guises. Characters from dreams and nightmares materialize out of nowhere. We find ourselves faced with unavoidable and seemingly fated tasks and trials — supremely challenging adventures, perhaps impossible but nonetheless necessary ones — and we recognize that how well we engage with these quandaries will determine whether or how fully we’ll realize our destiny in this lifetime. Every move we make seems critical and fraught with significance.
In order to thrive in such circumstances — and certainly to benefit psy- chospiritually — we require an instinctive aliveness, an ability to respond without thinking, or prior to thinking, like an animal with corporeal faith in its natural embeddedness in the world, an animal equipped with instincts not merely for survival or defense but for imaginative response and enchanted play. What is needed is an experience of belonging to one’s place so profound that it seems as if the place itself thinks and feels for you, that it opens the way for you to proceed simply by virtue of the fact that it knows you and recognizes how you are meant to be there.
In other words, in the underworld, you need to be rooted in your human wildness and your indigenous belonging.
