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The Wild Inside
An excerpt from Eco-Types: The Archetypes of Ecopsychology
by Cynkay Morningsong, MA
The Wild One living within each of us experiences the natural world as the breath, blood and bones of existence. There is no separation, and no duality, in the relationship between this archetype and all beings. The wild one lives to sleep in thickets, dig her toes into the mud, and peer out at her more civilized brothers and sisters through the dense brush she hides behind. If you blink, you’ll miss her!
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If we give a home to our wild inner nature she will jump out into our lives, ready and willing to come to our aid, teaching us to jump from boulder to tree, howl at the moon and babble with the brook. You say you don’t want to jump, howl, or babble? Well, do you want to see in the dark, protect yourself and your cubs, or find your way home when you thought you were lost? To do any of these things you must relearn how to use your senses, really open your eyes, smell the trail, and feel the winds breath as it whispers its secrets to you while standing on the mountaintop.
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When you open up to doing these things, your eyes may begin to gleam yellowish in the night as you find the full moon pulling a howl from deep within your belly. You begin to sense the Wild One sniffing around your feet, teasing you with joy and the wild love that you had forgotten. The wild one is waiting to abandon convention and flirt with the falling leaves; waiting for you to join in on the fun. Open up and howl!
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This wild creature is the part of our psyches that encourages us to protect ourselves. When we are feeling wounded, she will help us to seek the cave wherein we retreat to lick our wounds and regain our strength. This retreat isn’t a running away, but more about finding our center; that place we return to when we are off-balance. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her book ‘Women who Run with the Wolves’, (1992) reminds us that when we, for whatever reason, are unable to allow the Wild One into our lives we lose our ability to care for and protect ourselves, or to nurture ourselves when we are in pain.
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This attitude is what has driven the Wild One into hiding. Like the mountain lion, if she is seen she will be hunted down and quite possibly killed if she cannot be tamed. Just the sight of her shaggy hair and long teeth are enough to scare the civilized person off the streets. And where would we be then, Wild creatures roaming at random and the streets unsafe for civilized people? Isn’t that almost what we have now? Except that the creatures roaming at random are so terrified of where our culture is heading that they’ve fallen prey to the more extreme and dangerous influences that our culture has developed. Violence is all around us, and this violence is created out of fear and denial. We’ve forgotten that humans have no more rights to love, and joy, and life than other beings, and that all beings are equal.
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In forgetting this we have opened a Pandora’s Box containing all of the violence, hatred, fear, denial, jealousy, envy and death we are confronted with every day. Many of us don’t even have the option of entering into the natural world; our city parks have been invaded by this culturally created beast, a beast that has no respect for the rights of others, that feeds on fear and terrorism, and that looks at its own death day after day in the eyes of its victims.
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So how do we send this beast back into the pits from which it was created? Until now we have passed laws and locked the beast up, living denial that we, ourselves have created the beast. By letting go of our own inner wild nature we have driven this part of our psyches deep into shadow. Not allowing our Wild Ones to see the light doesn’t make them go away, they are simply fighting in the darkness. If we don’t trust and open up to the good in this archetype, then only the negative will find its way into full expression.
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In characterizing the Wild One as some part of nature, we might compare her to a forest. Left to its own defenses, the Wild One easily lives within the system it finds itself in. All needs are taken care of in a simple, yet fulfilling way. The Wild One moves easily in the wilderness, both the wilderness within and the wilderness without. Allowing this type into one’s life allows a person to not only find the freedom to climb trees and swim in rivers, but also enables us to move through city streets while maintaining the same awareness and compassion with which we hike to the mountaintop.
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Through innocence and out of love we may inadvertently create destructive situations; but with that same innocence and love we can find the strength and commitment to make everything right again. We learn that whatever mistakes we make can be turned around by owning them and taking responsibility for our actions. The wild one allows us to do this. We may make mistakes, perhaps that is part of our growth, but we also have the ability to learn from those mistakes so that we can move past them and create a new and more harmonious world to live in.
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Another aspect of the wild one can be found in the archetypal image of the child. This child can be seen as the innocent who, because of that innocence, is able to exist unconditionally in the world. Children have the unique ability to simply be, with no excuses, no façades, no elaborate need to put on an act for the purpose of impressing anyone. A child can freely and openly set up a mud pie picnic under an oak tree on a warm summer day to share with any fairies or teddy bears that happen to visit. The child can watch polliwogs swimming in a creek and feel a sense of wonder at tiny, half formed legs sprouting out from under a tale. An adult knows this to be a part of the developmental process of the frog, but the child sees it as some sort of magical transformation.
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Our culture has done much to inhibit our ability to accept this part of ourselves. We are expected to be refined and civilized. Children are to be seen and not heard, and they should never act in ways that are inappropriate (and what is inappropriate anyway? Isn’t that whenever you act in a way other than how others believe you should?) We must bathe every day lest dirt be seen upon our skin and to get rid of any wild gamey scents that might offend the noses of civilized men and women; after all, we are not like the common beast-we are culture, not nature.
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Our culture even has a tendency to treat children the same way we treat nature-as if they aren’t intelligent, or capable of reason-as if they need to be subdued, inhibited, kept under control. Thomas Moore describes our relationship to childhood as “something to grow out of. It is the cause of all present trouble” (Moore, 1992). Perhaps if we could somehow learn to honor and respect our children, as well as the wisdom and insight they possess, we could allow them to lead us back to our own innocence, open us to the joy and love that is always around us, help us to again find that sense of wonder we once felt upon finding a birds nest or seeing polliwog legs.
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In the earliest manifestation of our species we were much more in tune with this part of our psyches. Wildness was not only around us, it was within us as well. We lived in caves and found our nourishment from the plants and animals we found in our immediate vicinity. When we discovered new methods of food gathering, such as agriculture, and new ways of food preparation and storage, such as cooking and basket weaving, we began to move away from total dependence on the whims and grace of Nature and towards the belief that because we can protect ourselves from the natural world we could also separate ourselves from that world.
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The biblical story of the fall from Eden, tells of humans living in a perfect world who, out of ignorance and selfishness, take it upon themselves to change the status quo between humankind and God. We began to believe that because we no longer lived in this perfect paradise, we could re-create the world as if we were the only truly viable part of it. In short, we began to lose our sense of “wildness” and created a new system called “culture.” In this new system we are Lord and Master, and if any part of the “outside” world dares to encroach upon our supremacy we simply destroy it, like shooting the mountain lion that kills a human while protecting her cubs, or burning down the rain forest to feed fast food hamburgers on the hoof.
The wild one is with us always even though we do our best to deny that part of ourselves. We experience this type when we “feel” a sunset or smell the rain. My Wild One emerges when I walk through wet grass in my sandals, dampness tickling my toes, or when I finally reach the mountaintop; hot, sweaty, and joyfully reaching up to touch the clouds.
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These are the times I feel the wildness of my soul aching to break tradition and find new paths to walk.
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I realize that I’ve come to trust most those who are also willing to break free of culture’s shackles. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, we are shown how if a prisoner in a cave of darkness, where the only images seen are the shadows of images, were to become suddenly unchained and allowed to view the real world, he would very likely be unable or unwilling to know this as reality, instead believing the shadows he knew before to be the true reality. And, for him, they are. Eventually, he would come to know the outside world as reality and know the cave as the place of illusion. If he then were to return to the darkness, he would no longer be able to see in the dark because his eyes would have grown accustomed to light. The other prisoners would believe that “up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think about ascending.” They would lose all desire to leave their imprisonment (Jowett, 1968, p. 273).
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In many ways, this is what our culture has encouraged us to do. We live in a cave of darkness believing that the shadows being shown to us are, in fact, reality, and whenever someone returns from the light, we deny their story, believing instead that they have been blinded by falsehoods. It is much easier to be imprisoned than to set out into an unknown daylight, knowing that a return to the cave will show us the illusion of our former reality.
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When we allow our wild one to guide us we almost certainly find ourselves outside of our comfortable cave with our eyes squinting in the glaring nakedness of the bright light of truth, never again willing to accept illusion and shadow as reality. Our friends, family and fellow prisoners, who have not left the cave and have never experienced the truth as we have, know only that we have somehow changed and become blind to their experience of reality.
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The wild one would much rather live in the brightness, even though the first exposure to daylight causes pain, then to remain shackled to the wall of the cave doomed to a lifetime of darkness.
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If we can find it within ourselves to explore what the wild one teaches, we begin to understand that wildness also allows us a freedom to explore new ways of being in the world. We discover the ability to raise ourselves above our earlier expectations and limitations. Our personal existence becomes fluid and dynamic, rather than static and unchangeable; and we begin to move from a place of understanding and compassion for the other life forms around us. We begin to live and act from our hearts and our bellies. Instinct and intuition guide us onward, past the walls and boundaries that our intellect, and our culture, tells us is the furthest we can go. We become stronger, more surefooted, more open and loving.
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In many ways, finding our Wild One can be compared to Maslow’s thoughts on “peak experiences.” Peak experiences are ego transcending, self validating, ecstatic, and enable one to view the world as valuable, worthwhile, good, beneficent, and loving. With these experiences we begin to develop a greater capacity for integrity and honesty because we see and believe in the truth of our own experiences. We lose the need to have others validate who we are and our abilities because we are able to validate ourselves. We find new ways to express ourselves, ways in which we express more love and understanding for those around us.
Our relationship with ourselves becomes more accepting and loving as well, for we begin to see ourselves as valuable and worthy of love. When we learn to acknowledge this worthiness in ourselves we also begin to see that the others in our lives are also worthy of love. We stop thinking of them as being superior or inferior to us, finding instead that we are all equally worthy of unconditional compassion and love.
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Our personal experiences of life lead us in many directions, but as the saying goes, “all roads lead to Rome.” When we allow the Wild One to emerge from the depths of our consciousness we begin to understand that we are all on this “road to Rome” and we find it easier to honor and accept the paths that others choose to follow. We lose the need to control and dominate, finding that a “live and let live” attitude is much more conducive to our growth. We begin to accept that others have their own lessons to learn and their own ways of doing things that may not have much in common with our ways of doing things. And that is all right!
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We honor, and even enjoy, diversity; knowing that through diversity we all become stronger and more able to make it through the tangled brush and hidden snares that sometimes seem to block our trip through the forest of our lives. Acceptance of the ways of others becomes acceptance of our own ways. We become freer to love unconditionally, knowing that love is only a gift when it is given freely, without asking for anything in return. And we learn how to give it wholly, with no demands or expectations that others must love us in return. In this, our relationships become more honest, and we are more willing to let others be exactly who they really are.
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When we encourage the Wild One to be a part of our lives, we also begin to see a deepening of our relationship to all of life. We begin to see how we fit in with the rest of existence and that we do, indeed have a relationship to the rest of the world. We are only a small part of one universal system, and that universe does not revolve around the thoughts and desires of humankind. Humans, birds, animals, trees, rivers and stars all exist within, together with, and as parts of the universe. We find it easier to simply just be with the lives that are around us.
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This is one of the lessons I have learned from my experiences of going into the wilderness. There we are confronted with a system that is an honest, naked expression of full acceptance of all members of the system. In learning this lesson, we discover that it becomes easier and healthier to accept all members of the systems we are part of. Our bio-regions expand and we revel in the diversity of plants, animals, and humans that we find within our communities. We begin to understand that if we don’t encroach upon the territory of the bears and coyotes, they won’t come down and eat our pets or our garbage. We begin to see the value in having clean water for the fish to swim in and for us to drink. We begin to let go of the boundaries between human and nature, knowing that humans are nature, just as bears and fish are nature. Once again we can feel that we do in fact, have a place in the “grand order of things.” That place is right here, right now. We can love the creek in our backyard just as we can love the woman who gave birth to us, or the child we gave birth to. We can accept that we do have a relationship to the food we eat and the air we breathe, and the trees, and the water, and the rocks in our backyard. The question is whether that relationship is one that honors and respects, or one that destroys.
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