The Rewilding: Part 1 (of 6): Redefining “Wild”
The term “rewilding” has been used by diverse writers and even appropriated by a wildlife conservation organization, but was coined by Animá Center’s own Jesse Wolf Hardin in 1976, and first saw print in in 1986 in the following serialized essay. As a result, Wolf was assigned to write the Rewilding entry on page 1383, Vol. 2 of The Encyclopedia of Religion & Nature (Thoemmes Continuum, 2005). I encourage you to send this series to others, by clicking on the “Share This Post” button below. Photos (c) J. W. Hardin. Blessings. -Kiva Rose
The ReWilding
Part 1 (of 6): Redefining “Wild”
by Jesse Wolf Hardin (www.animacenter.org)
The world is a wild place. Even now, increasingly enshrouded in a crust of asphalt and concrete, with more and more of its life forms driven from its face, its scenic and historic character all too often usurped by tasteless development. That said, the world is a wild place still, true to the process and essence of its own intrinsic, inherent nature — rhythmic patterns of impermanence and change. The birth and death of her varied parts are the flex and pause of earthen heart muscle pumping new life through the arterial causeway of time. The earth is whole and wholly “out of control.”
For someone or something to be wild is to be willed, directed and empowered by its own inner nature rather than some outside force or idea. And we too are wild originally, deeply willed and willful. For safety, certainty and comfort we may try to deny our wildness, sacrificing our will as we seek shelter in the relatively tamed, the safe and predictable. Yet in spite of all the artifice and constraint we remain instinctual, dreaming beings who suffer in direct proportion to the suppression of our instincts and dreams. We’re mirrors made of dancing flesh, interterrestrial sensors, activated nerve endings of the earthen ganglion. At our best we’re wild reflections of this greater whole, acting out our true natural being, our instinctive need and purposeful gesture free of the over-regulation and desensitization of the modernist paradigm.
Wild (adj.) 1. Occurring, growing, or living in a natural state; not domesticated, cultivated or tamed. 2. A natural, unrestrained life or state; Nature.
Wildness can be thought of as a condition of oneness with our bodies, desires, needs, sensations, instincts and dreams. Wildness is oneness with the wild planet we are agents and extensions of, free of abstraction and projection, a world where even turbulence manifests itself in purposeful patterns more akin to art than artifice.
Anima teaches that social and ecological imbalance and trauma, from the polluting of rivers to the oppression of women, can be directly related to the deep insecurity that comes from disassociation with the natural world and the needs, feelings, blessings and propensities of our true individual natures. The results of this insecurity include epidemic fear of sexuality, mortality, dark forests and animal urges, disassociation from those we allow to be victimized in our behalf and from the life support systems that not only human kind but all of life depends on. The cure for our digression and distraction, subjegation and self-repression, can be found in the reclamation of our wildness, a high-dive into the potent flux of natural forces and the response-ability to act.
In order to facilitate the unimpeded dismemberment and marketing of the natural world, civilization had to first construct and tend a perceptual schism between the living planet and its human constituents, a doctrine of separateness, a cultivated separation between body and intellect, vision and reality, self and planet. We find the evidence of this campaign in those other, modernist definitions of the word “wild.” The same dictionary I cite above, also includes the description: “unruly, desolate, out of control, extravagant, fantastic, furiously disturbed or turbulent, risky, random erratic, deviating, disorderly and disarranged.” The definition of wilderness has thus been transformed from one of “uncultivated unrestrained profusion” to that of a “bewildering wasteland.”
Today, “wilderness” is a legal definition protecting designated areas from being developed or destroyed, a boon to certain creatures and the cause of unbearable restrictions for various kinds of people. In reality wilderness is simply the real world, a condition of profuse nature that includes but is not determined by the populations or creations of natural humans. For those who seek deeper elemental contact with the forces and spirits of nature, it’s a place and opportunity to act out a wildness shared and enjoyed equally by the inspirited natural landscape. Those escaping the boundaries of propriety and objectification are characteristically fun and to one degree or another feral.
Feral (adj.) 1. Existing in a wild, untamed state, especially, reverting to such a state from one of domestication. 2. Characteristic of a wild animal; savage.
To the dominant global society, wild means unruly, out of control and hence dangerous. A few generations after escaping into the thickets, feral hogs have turned the tables on many an unwary hunter. The feral creatures are the ones who have returned to their true nature and their natural context, a freedom worth guarding once obtained.
Society refers to a willful child as wild. “Darn wild weeds.” “Don’t pick up the wild cat. Beware the feral dog, the savage wolf, the savages of ‘lesser’ societies.” We can learn so much about a civilization by the application of its language. We read common expressions like “savaged by a bear,” and witness people yelling at their kids for behaving like “little savages.” The word itself is derived from the Middle English sauvage, from the Latin silvaticus, meaning “of the woods.”
Savage (adj.) 1. Untouched by civilization, undomesticated, uncultivated, wild. 2. A primitive, uncivilized person.
For the “civilized,” “primitive” has come to mean simple, untaught, coarse, barbaric. But to the earth-centered seeker, it means primary.
Primitive (adj.) 1. Of or pertaining to original state. 2. Primal.
If this is our original state, the condition of our true beings, then why the denigration and fearful vilification of the primitive? What does sophistication have to fear from the simple, artificiality from the authentic? Or civilization from the savage, the primitive, the primal? It’s afraid of the shift in perception and priorities, from denial to exuberance, from scheduled production to spontaneity and sensation. Civilization fears what Nature teaches: the ascendant power of present time and the primacy of direct experience. Going feral is a conscious and deliberate exercise in self-realization. Voluntary primitivity embodies the negation of a ruling state and the celebration of connection. Nature teaches us what’s most important.
Primal (adj.) 1. Original, archetypal. 2. Of first importance; primary.
The human spirit is diluted and debased when it is tamed, and the human species cannot survive the deliberate unraveling of contextual Nature. The scientific community has belatedly come to this realization of the full extent of biotic interdependency, the ways in which even the most minuscule of living components may hold the key for the health of the entire ecosystem. Ultimately, civilization’s war against nature is a war against ourselves. The individual’s struggle against the contemporary techno-industrial paradigm is, for all its assertiveness, an act of preservation: a celebration of diverse life and the fullest living of our lives.
Oddly, and sadly, civilization must continue to expand or else perish. The economic, social and political systems of the modern world cannot survive either stasis, contraction, or balance. To the contrary, the natural world functions perfectly with checks and balances, responding to ever changing conditions with falls as well as rises in specie populations. In nature, any single species impinging on its fellow life forms, any one growing beyond the capacity of its ecosystem insures its own downfall. As has been pointed out elsewhere, endless growth is exclusively the dynamic of the cancer cell. And cancer cells are in the long run suicidal.
One response has been to blame the human species in general, resulting in an unhealthy kind of self hatred. But by recognizing perception as the instrumental element in our estrangement and resulting malignant behavior, we have the option of participating in the inevitable cure. The return-to-balance spoken of by most primitive cultures requires a reduction the human population now dangerously tipping the scales, necessarily preceded by either the vagaries of catastrophe or the deliberate shifting of the total weight of human perception. The best solution for the disheartening human condition – and for the living earth in total – may be our imminent re-wilding. Human existence, as a continuous part of this planet is possibly contingent on our return to our original nature, and our return to the extended nature that surrounds us.
Indeed, humans were once and could again act as integral parts of the biological fabric. The problem is not exactly the nature of humanity, but more the loss of its inner nature. The problem isn’t humanity per se but our vaulted civil paradigm, the encroaching manifestation of a particularly harmful system of perception. It’s not the only way we perceive, mind you. Nor is it yet the primary perception of the majority of humanity, half of which remain indigenous land-based people. And certainly not the model of perception as practiced throughout the 50+ thousand year plus history of human society, such as the Penan tribes people of Sarawak, Malaysia who continue to eschew much of the modernist opus while battling to keep their forest intact. The aboriginals of the outback. The Gwi’chin of A laska. The Hourani of Ecuador. The pygmies of Africa. The villagers of Tibet and Samiland. Home schoolers in North Carolina and social activists in the American West.
Primary human perception — the ways that the animals, our ancestors, primal peoples and all children before certain age experience and engage their world — is encompassing, integrative, and symbiotic. It’s non reductive, mutually affirming, and serves to connect the perceiver and the perceived rather than segregating and delimiting the elements of interactive perception. Original human mind is as magic as the spirits it ponders and the brilliant cascades of water that stimulate its receptors. It is an adjunct, an equal and ally of the human body housing it. Original mind is an integral component of the Anima, of terrestrial mind, planetary mind, and is thus free of the imaginary or enforced schisms between mind and matter, feeling and thought, creator and creation, nature and society, spirituality and physicality, man and woman, human and home.
The sudden changes in behavior essential to our future and crucial to the continuation of evolution itself, can only follow a change in how we perceive. The perception of the world as live, sentient, willed and inspirited is the perspective of the wild. The world will in the end be wild, no matter what we do to tame, deaden or control it. In geologic time, the worst of what we can do will be erased by the evolutionary fruiting that will follow. The exciting option is to join in that native fruition, to rejoin the dance, to precipitate the reinhabitation and rewilding of self, culture and place.
Categories: Jesse Wolf Hardin – Essays & Tales, Understanding & Practicing Animá
SOFIAT
Good reading,thanks