Pick a word, they said. A word that will be your focus for the year. I think I am supposed to pick gratitude, simplify, or maybe even justice. I pick wild. I spend the year thinking about it, and then another year, and several years later I’m still thinking about it. The word conjures something elemental inside me. I feel an upwelling, a surge, like a subterranean source of water springing forth, or tongues of flame flickering, or lush, insistent vines.
Saying the word feels like an adventure. It begins as a question why, then curls around the tongue before coming to a stop. Like a cat racing up a tree and pulling up short at the end of a branch, debating their next move. Only my wild feels like it’s contained, held back by a spigot; a banked, smoldering fire; a vine, floundering, with nothing to climb. A creature pacing in a cage. I would let it out but I don’t know how.
What does it mean to be wild? I ask myself. All I know is that it has something to do with nature.
As I look around the examples seem to be:
- Sell your belongings and walk the Pacific Crest and/or Appalachian trail, alone
- Skydive
- Scuba dive
- Hike up a really high mountain, preferably in the snow
- Go live in a cabin and trap/grow your own food, also alone
These examples require bravery which I think I could summon, but also things that seem less findable these days like energy, exertion, and fitness. Wild seems to be a destination or something you can only find when you leave behind what you find familiar. But how can this be? Wild lupine can grow in the same peaceful meadow year after year and still be considered wild. So why do I have to leave home?
I should know better, but still, I check the dictionary:
Merriam Webster says wild is:
- living in a state of nature and not ordinarily tame or domesticated
- growing or produced without human aid or care
- not inhabited or cultivated
- not amenable to human habitation or cultivation
- not subject to restraint or regulation
- emotionally overcome
- passionately eager or enthusiastic
- marked by turbulent agitation
- going beyond normal or conventional bounds
- indicative of strong passion, desire, or emotion
- characteristic of, appropriate to, or expressive of wilderness, wildlife, or a simple or uncivilized society
- deviating from the intended or expected course
- having no basis in known or surmised fact
I don’t particularly like any of the definitions. The definition about intense passion or desire seem to get closer but this meaning feels incomplete and precarious. Wild is a word that has been weaponized, used to label those behaving in ways that somehow threaten those in power. Also, I don’t know anything more calm than the wild sequoia.
Some of the definition suggest wild is the opposite of human. Or at least it is not in alignment with the parts of humanity that we have decided sets us apart from other life. Wild are those things that do not maintain the order important to being human. At least according to the dictionary.
So being wild is about being not-human. The creature pacing inside me, which by now I am fairly sure is my soul, fervently disagrees.
I turn my focus to the word wilderness hoping for some clues. It’s a concept that has been evolving, challenged by thinkers, scientists, anthropologists, writers, and most acutely, by Indigenous people, particularly those connected to their cultural worldviews which inherently include the land where they live and have lived.
The suffix “-er” typically means “more” while the suffix “-ness” indicates “quality of”. So “wilderness” should then be a place or state with the quality of being more wild. So according to the writers of dictionaries, wilderness is the place with the quality of being more non-human.
By now, however, the idea of “pristine wilderness” has been fully debunked. Few such places have existed despite what colonizers of the Americas may have thought upon arriving in the new-to-them world. In the article “How “Wilderness” Was Invented Without Indigenous People” Claudia Geib describes the repeated failure of colonizers to recognize the land management that had occurred in the Americas for centuries. This was particularly true of those raised in the extractive mentality that was thriving in the wake of the Industrial revolution. People refused to and perhaps simply could not recognize practices of tending land that benefitted the entire ecosystem, not just humans. As more and more ecosystems were disrupted and eliminated, the conservation movement emerged to save the remaining “pristine” or “untouched” lands. In truth they were quite touched, tended, and shaped—just not by White hands. It seems those who choose to see humans as separate from nature, or from the wild, also lose the ability to envision co-existence.
While Indigenous people, in general, had no such concept of “wilderness”—or at least not such a binary, polarizing one, they nonetheless now live in a world—as do we all—in which the concept now refers to the areas of land that haven’t been as deeply impacted or destroyed by human activity.
In Wilderness and Traditional Indigenous Beliefs by Corey Himrod, Polly Napiryuk Andrews points out “It is true that my Cup’ik ancestors had no word for Wilderness… But we’ve adopted these words and concepts for the modern, altered, and changing world we now live in.” Rather than rejecting the word, Andrews reframes it: “In the wilderness it is possible to sense most keenly our membership in the whole community of life on the Earth…We deeply need the humility to know ourselves as the dependent members of a great community of life…to know the wilderness is to know a profound humility, to recognize one’s littleness, to sense dependence and interdependence, indebtedness, and responsibility.”
In the same article, Bernadette Dimientieff provides a Gwich’in perspective: “More than any other modern land category or management system, Wilderness recognizes our way of relating to the land and the Earth. The wilderness idea that humans are part of a larger “community of life” (and should act like it) has been known to my people for millennia.”
I am drawn to the emphasis they both place on community. Wilderness sounds less like a location marked on a map and more like a verb, the act of making wilderness, a shared endeavor.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language is a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.”
In Kimmerer’s words I feel the same stirring as when I think of wild. The idea that we might all be alive together: bays, rivers, people, animals, days of the week enlivens something in me I didn’t know was dead.
I grew up inside a binary concept with human on one side and wild on the other. If this is a false dichotomy then the word should lose all meaning for me. And yet it doesn’t. If some people can reframe, reclaim a word—wilderness— a word that sought to erase their incredible impact on the world—and turn it into one of inclusion, community, and hope—then can I find my way into a new definition of wild? One that can explain the swelling of my spirit whenever I encounter it?
Wild
It feels like a bridge that will carry me not just into freedom, but back to connection, community. It’s a pair of wings, a swift current, an avalanche. It feels like the most powerful spell I know. The more I say it, the more I want to say it, chanting it over and over (Wild! Wild! Wild!) until something (what?) comes true.
What needs to come true?
Wild
Wild
Wild
I repeat the word until, finally, one ordinary day it comes to me: I need to come true.
I am the wish, the story, the dream. Just as you are. Wildness is the truth waiting to spill out. A secret I’ve been keeping overlong and for reasons lost to time.
Instinctively, I knew I could not scale a cliff to reach my wildness because that isn’t the thing that will help me come true (but maybe it’s yours). Wild is made up of all the ideas, feelings, and embodied states of one’s truth and authenticity. To be wild is to be fully and unequivocally oneself. I see now how I’ve envied this in animals: a musky, unapologetic scent; a confident gait; a bossy, insistent shriek. It is the heart of justice, the recipe for simplicity, the bringer of gratitude. It is our wild self that belongs, that is in relationship, in community, not just with others of our kind, but with whole ecosystems, with our entire universe of aliveness.
Do you now see the bars of the cage? They are made of things like politeness, whiteness, salad forks, apologies, underwire, pleasant conversation, bathroom scales, and other assorted tackle, tact, and tactics put in place by others and ourselves. We’re overdue to break out.
So say it with me:
Wild
Wild
Wild
May it be so.