Link to join tomorrow's workshop at bottom of post.
“You’re a quitter,” my dad says.
I let the silence hang between us on the phone for some time before he continues, “Quit, quit, quit, that’s all you do. Who do you think you are?”
I assume he’s talking about my job, which I worked at for thirty-one years before leaving, but he could also be referring to my choice to abandon our family cult when I was 17, which he still hasn’t forgiven me for.
I didn’t tell him I quit my job. As things go in small towns (and family cults), one of my sisters mentioned it to him and he called the other for confirmation, and then he called me to complain and express his disappointment.
“It was time,” I say.
“I’m ashamed of you,” he says.
What’s new, I think, but I’m not a teenager, so I don’t say it. Choosing to work for myself is part of how I’m moving toward wildness, and that’s not something he values.
It’s not something many people value in a consumer culture, where success is measured in dollars. Maximizing earning and building net worth means winning the game in our culture.
Re-wilding may require disappointing people. While re-wilding feels necessary and natural to me, it’s not particularly valued in our contemporary society.
I work hard to rewild myself, so that my work smells of wildness. The wildness comes, if I am lucky, in the form of a touch of genius, a gushing flow of creativity, a lush animation, and a fierce energy. I am not saying that I always get there, only that I keep trying. In ecology, rewilding means rebuilding diversity and abundance. In life, rewilding means:
grounding
reconnecting with the song-lines and the energies of the earth
reconnecting ourselves with the energies of each other, strange as they can be
regularly discharging the energies of the internet
decolonizing the Western mind becoming native to place again
~Janisse Ray
I loved my career. I loved designing syllabuses and writing curriculum and helping students learn, and I loved having a consistent paycheck, which enabled me to raise my children with security.
And I’ve done that.
Now I crave time more than money. And I want the freedom to control my time, spending more time with people I love, more time outdoors, more time writing. I want to stop defining myself by my roles, wear fewer masks, get reacquainted with nature (out there, and in here), and enjoy a more integrated and authentic life, playing infinite games. And it’s been a joy to connect with others on this path.
Who have you disappointed recently?
What risks have you taken?
What have you said no to in order to protect your wild self?
Those of us who value wildness express our wildness in different ways. That’s part of being wild. Here are the voices of two wild women writers, whose work continuously inspires me.
Barri Leiner Grant
There is a strange and powerful place from where my wild learned to grow. From a cut so deeply seared into my being, I feared I could not survive its score. And that pain--that became my wild.
I was certain from the second you asked, that is indeed where it was birthed. Or born. For I was hungry, lost and weary. My feet taken out from under. My heart so broken I did not believe it would beat exactly the same way, ever. Or again. You see my wild emerged from a place so raw and rare, I needed to scream it into being.
On a day that felt like any other to most, I had returned to work after the sudden loss of my beloved mother. Ellen. There I stood atop the well-warn marble steps of Grand Central Station as I had for decades before, to catch the subway. I watched as other travelers went about the business of their usual. Catching trains, and kissing hello. And so long. Tickets to a certainty they knew. That I used to.
It was there that I shouted from the top of my beleaguered breathless lungs. “Don’t you know that my mother has died”, it echoed back at me. “Where the fuck are you all going?”
I needed the world to stop for just one precious moment for me. For her. It was vital, primal. I wanted the world to know that it could not spin on its access any longer if she was not on it. In it. Of it.
And right there in the chaos of my undoing – my wild woman took flight.
Sally Doran:
A fit organism won’t stop at survival. It attaches to what it needs to grow and thrive.
This has been my key to staying wild. Not living small and surviving on what I’m given, but pushing my vines to reach out and grow. My wildness feeds on new growth.
Other people call it being brave or “doing hard things,” but I think I l’d rather call my outlook “staying wild.” As the quote says, I don’t want to just survive- I want to grow in all directions and attach my vines to many other equally growing and thriving organisms. Then if one section of my growth is hindered, I can still live and thrive in other directions.
When I was much younger, I was what many called a wild woman, a dangerous risk-taker who often made bad choices in pursuit of a more interesting life. But now I see being wild as untamed, growing freely, and capable of survival in difficult surroundings.
And if you’d like me to showcase a photo of one of your wild experiences, respond to this email with a photo attachment and a caption.
I’d love to hear about your experience with wildness. Respond to this email, or share in the comments below!
Thank you for reading Forager Fridays — your support allows me to keep doing this work.
Our first generative writing workshop will take place tomorrow,
August 31 from noon-1:00 PT.
Free for all paid subscribers, at any level.
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Thank you for being on this journey with me. I am grateful for the gift of your presence. Walking this path, knowing so many of you are walking it too, gives me hope. May we continue in our recovery, in relationship with one another and with the anima mundi, supporting each other’s growth, like a mycelial network. If you’d like to continue this conversation in person, consider enrolling in my small group writing workshop at the Maloof this October, or engage in the weekly comments section below.
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