Return to Your Wild Heart

WILDNESS.

Wildness is scarce in modern life. With modernity has come much comfort, safety and pleasure but what has been lost in the process is a connection with our more wild and animal selves.

Wildness is not be confused with chaos or violence; it is who we are without our layers of social conditioning, some of which are essential and some of which have tamed our passions and dulled our souls.

Robert Bly writes “One can keep one's job and still be wild; one can remain married and still be wild; one can live in cities and remain wild. What is needed is a soul discipline that Gary Snyder calls "practice of the wild"".

Bly describes the wish in boys to see some wildness in their fathers, to see them “dancing or carrying on”. And he reminds us that “Some boys are so afraid that they will become domestic that they become savage, not wild.”

Wildness he is suggesting, should not be buried in a man’s shadow.

In denying our wildness, refusing to visit it even occasionally, we may also be denying ourselves and the world our greatest gifts, and repressing our deepest aliveness.

Galway Kinnell’s poem ‘Middle Of The Way’ beautifully expresses the true freedom and spirit of connection that can come from allowing ourselves some wildness, describing the heart aching beauty of the Pacific coast. It closes with these two powerful lines:

‘But I know I live half alive in the world,
Half my life belongs to the wild darkness.’

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