The wind at dawn has secrets to whisper
Don’t go back to sleep!
~Rumi
I don’t know exactly how many generations back my ancestors were hunters, but here I am, in the confines of captivity, hunting for wild women, using the tracking skills of my late mother, and appreciating the ways she maintained her wildness amidst the taming of high-control religion.
As far back as two million years, until approximately 10,000 years ago, almost every human practiced hunting and gathering as a subsistence strategy. Which means, for 99% of human history, we found what we needed to survive within the natural world. Of the 100,000 generations that gave birth to who we are today, only the last 500-600 generations lived in semi-permanent structures, with agricultural methods as a primary food source.
We all evolved to live in the wild, with wild plants and animals as our companions and our nourishment. We are not only part of nature. We are nature.
To live an enchanted life is to be challenged, to be awakened, to be gripped and shaken to the core by the extraordinary which lives at the heart of the ordinary. Above all, to live and enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again.
~Sharon Blackie
I’ve begun asking wild women I know how they’ve stayed wild, or in what ways wildness lives in them still.
Last week, I asked my mentor Laurie Stone, a writer I admire for her boldness and humor, to share with me the ways she recognizes and maintains her wildness. She told me she didn’t know what that meant, but she answered me anyway, in the form of a story:
At the time I met Richard, I was standing at the end of a pier. I had come to the end of something, but you don’t know that when it’s happening. I retain a happy memory of a visit we took early on to a wildlife preserve in Arizona. It's a happy memory according to a story by Lydia Davis. In the story, for a memory to remain a happy one, both people have to have been happy at the time and also still to like each other when they look back. Often when we walk on Warren Street in Hudson, Richard will say, “Stand up straight.” I say, “Please, kill me." He says, “I won’t have to kill you, if you look out. Look, up the hill at that cherry tree.” And we continue walking, and I’m on a road, and I can see myself and I cannot see myself, and I feel free and I feel held by our connection, and I cannot give a name to the sensation that is going through me except wildness.
Can being around other wild creatures increase our own wildness?
In what ways do you recognize the sensation of wildness in your life, who do you share these sensations with, and do you recognize the inherent mutualism within wildness?
Mutualism
Before we eat, Mother wants to show us something. As she peels back the outer layer of the yucca flower, she points to a moth living inside the seed pods.
“There are four kinds of yucca moths, each adapted for one species of yucca,” she explains. “The female moth gathers pollen from a flower, rolls it up and takes it to another flower. She then lays a few eggs inside the flower and inserts the pollen. The pollinated yucca flower becomes a pod filled with seeds, which the moth larvae eat before becoming moths. The larvae eat about half of the eggs a yucca plant produces. Neither the yucca plant nor the yucca moth can exist without the other. No other insect pollinates the yucca plant, nor does the yucca moth pollinate any other plant. They are dependent on each other for their existence, which is called mutualism.”
The cultural conversation around ecology has changed since I was raised on the Mountain, and much of what Mother taught me has become common sense. More people now recognize that nature is an interconnected whole, that organisms can’t be understood in isolation.
A fit organism won’t stop at survival. It attaches to what it needs to grow and thrive. Like the lichen, we can make a life in places where we couldn’t survive alone.
~Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult
Do you like wild people?
Do you consider yourself wild?
Do you want to be more wild, or less?
Thank you for reading Forager Fridays — your support allows me to keep doing this work.
In honor of Forager Friday’s one-year anniversary, I’ll be hosting generative writing workshops on Zoom every month for the next year (free for paid subscribers).
Our first workshop will take place on August 28 from 1:00-2:00 PT.
All paid subscribers will receive a separate email with an invitation to each monthly workshop, with guidance on how to prepare.
If you’re not in a position to pay for a subscription, the referral option gives you all the same benefits as paid subscribers. How to participate:
1. Share Forager Fridays. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.
2. Earn benefits. When friends use your referral link to subscribe (free or paid), you’ll receive:
First month paid membership for 3 referrals
Second month paid membership for 5 referrals
Founding membership for 25 referrals
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 in our 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.
My ecological worldview in a nutshell. Thanks for sharing!
I know a lot of wild women.