Writing Animá Stories for Cowboys and Conservatives
When I tell alternative-type people that I write basic Animá truths an insights into articles for all kinds of audiences including rural and conservative, the revelation is often met with an uncomfortable silence. And those able to get over the shock of imagining my work in right-leaning newspapers, antique firearms journals and pro-cowboy publication, will usually ask me for examples that might make such a scenario more plausible. For those of you making this simple request, we offer here an entire column, introducing a positive definition of wildness to which even wise-use advocates and public lands grazers have a at least a wild chance to relate. Feel free to copy and forward it to any and all audiences.
ReDefining Wild
by Jess Hardin <canyonfamily@gmail.com>
There’s been a hijacking I realized, not only of our inalienable rights but a large portion of the English language! It doesn’t make us hip, only trendy, when we use the word “bad” to compliment something good, or to say “it’s all good” when there is so much bad that needs us to responsibly resist, improve and change. It’s absurd to cite the protection of our “freedom” as the reason for stripping away constitutionally granted personal liberties. And ”responsibility” doesn’t have to mean distasteful obligation that we should try to escape or avoid, we can think of it instead as a conscious chosen state of awareness of response.
Similarly, the word “wild” has long suffered from colloquial misuse as well as downright slander. The term has long been suspect in the eyes of mothers afraid of their daughters going out on dates with hormone-driven boys, and of teachers trying keep their Spring-addled students sitting still in their classroom seats. More recently it has been damned by private land and logging advocates who associate “wild” only with congressionally mandated forest preserves where their four-wheel drive trucks are banned, but not even the iconic naturalist Henry David Thoreau was talking about restricted wilderness when he said “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” He wasn’t referring to setting aside land for parks, as much as the N.E. part of the country was no doubt already been in need of such… but rather, he meant the actual quality of wildness that energizes all of creation including us, causing a mouse caught in a trap to protest its fate, driving bull elk to bugle and then mate. It is this wildness that inspired American patriots to dump crate after crate into the sea, of Boston-bound, English taxed tea – wildness that gifts certain men with “the right stuff,” while provoking some gals to finally tell an abusive boyfriend that “enough is enough.”
I was disappointed with the newscasts once again today, hearing some talking head describe global economic travails as the result of some “wild investments” on the part of a handful of banking companies. Those weren’t wild investments, they were brash, reckless, irresponsible, cynical, and in hindsight downright criminal and fairly unforgivable. “Wild” doesn’t mean undisciplined but “willed.” In this way, wild is anyone and anything that’s self-willed, living according to its own natural instincts and beliefs, responding to its genuine needs, slave to nobody and boss to none. Wild is true to its nature, free of outside manipulation and control, suppressing nothing and being all it can be.
“Don’t let them tame you!,” the early American dance choreographer Isadora Duncan used to tell her young students. In actuality, every kid before a certain age could be considered a “wild child” crying or striking back when they’re hurt, laughing and playing whenever they’re okay. To them the difference seems obvious enough and the choice clear: tame is a stallion gelded and bridled, a land robbed of excitement and risk, earth girdled with all too many fences and roads, a little girl forced to wear white at a picnic, a boy suffering from too-tight brogans and Sunday go-to-meetin’ tie.
On the other hand, wild is the fiery eyed horse that breaks out of the best laid corrals at the first peal of mountain thunder, and it’s insistent seeds sprouting beneath pavement and pushing up through the cracks towards the sun. It’s ungovernable weather, prickly-pear cactus fruit and undammed rivers. Tart canyon grape wine, and jokes that go just a wee-bit over the line. Wild is the beautiful flower that helps keep us from taking life for granted, part of a patch by the house that no one claims to have planted. The boy or girl girl who can’t wait to get where her teacher can’t see, before skipping and crawling on grass-stained knees! Wild is untamed folk cherishing their wooly ways, the mavericks that are more escapees than they are strays. It’s those still wide open spaces, and smart grins on young faces. It’s land undeveloped and undomesticated critters, and a place for us to go when the stress of the city leaves us with the jitters. It’s taking our lives and destinies into our own hands and facing up to both official and self-serving lies, as well as that too often misspent spirit of adventure we hope will never ever die.
(photo of dug-up N.M. rifle receiver and wagon hook (c) 2009 by Jesse Hardin)
Categories: Jesse Wolf Hardin – Essays & Tales, Understanding & Practicing Animá
Jane-Singing Deer
Glad to hear that you have an expanded sense of your readers–and rightly so! As someone who currently lives in a very rural area with its share of cowboys and seven-generation ranching families who tend to be conservative, I very much admire the people here–what I’ve experienced of their self-reliance, their practical nature, do-what-needs-to-be-done-no-complaints, faith, and kindness. Inquiry too. Often they have a connection with this land that is matter-of-fact and in their hands. So much is already within them, lived. They are not wimps or whiners! I see very much how what you offer is in a language that speaks to what they know to be true, and what they yearn to have preserved from their mythic soul. There is much that is endangered regarding people who live on/with the land, no matter what and how they do it.
Keep on ‘ritin’ along!
~Jane
Emma
Thanks for sharing this! I, too, was curious about what sorts of articles and essays you write for those publications.