This morning I encountered a tiny dog. One of those itty-bitty purse sized fluffy things that has been bred to look like a puppy it’s whole life. It was cute, and it was pathetic.
I tried to imagine the wolf spirit inside this little fluff ball of a being. Was it still there? This dog still had animal instincts — sniffing, suckling, barking. But it had also been bred to be docile, stupid, amenable to laps.
It’s owner was a strong adult male, with beautiful tawny skin mostly covered by jeans and a sweatshirt. Walking a little leashed dog on a Tuesday morning through the concrete jungles of Oakland.
I pondered our own species’ domestication. What wild spirit lives inside that man? How might he live if he let that spirit lead?
Do any of us really have a clue how our own human equivalent of wild wolf spirit feels, looks, sounds, moves? What are the fiercely beautiful animal instincts we’ve lost along the way? How have we bred ourselves for our own domestication?
Walking home from a business meeting, these questions announced themselves. And my own life force responded: for most of us, short of the Into the Wild approach, we answer by living a dual life.
One way to define the spiritual path is the soul’s determination to reclaim it’s wildness. We have all tasted this call at some point in our life — a childhood memory, a camping trip. A love affair, a David Deida workshop. Giving birth, watching death. And yet most of us don’t live in alignment with our wild nature all the time. We choose to remain participants in this thing we call civilization, with its many taming forces that guard us against the vulnerability of our own true nature.
Still, most of us make some time and space to touch our inner wildness. The only alternative is depression. We all have our favorite ways to touch in with our untamed selves — meditation, sexual liberation, laughing. Backpacking, football, dancing. Hunting, drugs, dreams.
And then, we come back. We go to work, pay our bills and our dues. We stay faithful to our partners. We eat processed and packaged mono-crop foods. We sit at desks in rooms sheltered from storms. We make choices.
Many of us find ourselves caught in the constant tug-of-war between the practical realities of a domesticated society and psyche, and that flame inside that pushes us forward in our own unpredictable unfolding. With no map. That’s the irony: the wildest game in town is these days is in the human experience of finding our way back home.
It’s also where we differ from Fluffy.
Where wild beasts at least know their own territory, on this strange journey we find ourselves on as modern humans, we’re on an epic Lord of the Rings kind of quest — hungry and scaling cold mountains, on a conscious pilgrimage toward our own preciousness. Our untamed ancestry. Our missing sense of tribe and belonging. And the quiet of our creaturely minds.
Meanwhile, together, we are marching on in a society gone mad. These concrete jungles grow wilder by day, more violent by night, and our hearts and our nerves can’t keep up.
So we get house plants, and patios, and lap dogs. And we take them for walks in the morning sun, needing movement and air, just like them. Pale and domesticated as we may be, we’re still creatures, and spirit embodied.
Our wild hearts can never be broken.
I tried to imagine the wolf spirit inside this little fluff ball of a being. Was it still there? This dog still had animal instincts — sniffing, suckling, barking. But it had also been bred to be docile, stupid, amenable to laps.
It’s owner was a strong adult male, with beautiful tawny skin mostly covered by jeans and a sweatshirt. Walking a little leashed dog on a Tuesday morning through the concrete jungles of Oakland.
I pondered our own species’ domestication. What wild spirit lives inside that man? How might he live if he let that spirit lead?
Do any of us really have a clue how our own human equivalent of wild wolf spirit feels, looks, sounds, moves? What are the fiercely beautiful animal instincts we’ve lost along the way? How have we bred ourselves for our own domestication?
Walking home from a business meeting, these questions announced themselves. And my own life force responded: for most of us, short of the Into the Wild approach, we answer by living a dual life.
One way to define the spiritual path is the soul’s determination to reclaim it’s wildness. We have all tasted this call at some point in our life — a childhood memory, a camping trip. A love affair, a David Deida workshop. Giving birth, watching death. And yet most of us don’t live in alignment with our wild nature all the time. We choose to remain participants in this thing we call civilization, with its many taming forces that guard us against the vulnerability of our own true nature.
Still, most of us make some time and space to touch our inner wildness. The only alternative is depression. We all have our favorite ways to touch in with our untamed selves — meditation, sexual liberation, laughing. Backpacking, football, dancing. Hunting, drugs, dreams.
And then, we come back. We go to work, pay our bills and our dues. We stay faithful to our partners. We eat processed and packaged mono-crop foods. We sit at desks in rooms sheltered from storms. We make choices.
Many of us find ourselves caught in the constant tug-of-war between the practical realities of a domesticated society and psyche, and that flame inside that pushes us forward in our own unpredictable unfolding. With no map. That’s the irony: the wildest game in town is these days is in the human experience of finding our way back home.
It’s also where we differ from Fluffy.
Where wild beasts at least know their own territory, on this strange journey we find ourselves on as modern humans, we’re on an epic Lord of the Rings kind of quest — hungry and scaling cold mountains, on a conscious pilgrimage toward our own preciousness. Our untamed ancestry. Our missing sense of tribe and belonging. And the quiet of our creaturely minds.
Meanwhile, together, we are marching on in a society gone mad. These concrete jungles grow wilder by day, more violent by night, and our hearts and our nerves can’t keep up.
So we get house plants, and patios, and lap dogs. And we take them for walks in the morning sun, needing movement and air, just like them. Pale and domesticated as we may be, we’re still creatures, and spirit embodied.
Our wild hearts can never be broken.
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