Cultivating the Forgotten Parts of Ourselves
Walking to my pilates studio every week has become a sacred ritual, ten minutes of sunshine, fresh air, and a clear destination. That ten minute walk changes my whole day. I evangelize about the benefits of walking constantly, on the podcast, here on Substack, anywhere that anyone will listen really. The single greatest free life hack. What I don't usually mention is that the sidewalk is called the concrete jungle for a reason.
This last week was no different than any other week unless you’re into astrology, which July’s planets have a lot to say. I'm tapping the concrete cubes, listening to my spiritual podcast, when out of my peripheral vision, I see a woman charging across the street straight towards me. I’m a little overwhelmed and there’s little room or time to flee. Within a second, her face is in front of my face. I have never been in a physical fight, I like to talk things out. I throw my hands up and say “I don’t want to fight!” I surrender, wholly and completely, to what seems like is going to be an inevitable physical altercation. I fully believe I’m about to get socked…for the first time in my life. I’m hosting an event that evening, I see a flash of me entering with black eye in tow. My brain is at tonight’s event but also here, clocking this woman in front of me. A man cleaning the parking lot across the street yells, "What's going on over there?" And as if an energetic shield has wrapped itself around me like a protective dome, she swerves past me, her eyes pinning me in place, screaming, "You fucking bitch." Relief and adrenaline wash over me at the same time, which is its own strange physical experience.
It takes me until the end of pilates to come back into my body. As an ambitious Virgo, I find surrendering to life very challenging. To aid me in the process of letting go, I constantly enlist new tools because I know a loose grip often creates the best results, counterintuitive as that seems to my conscious mind. Currently, I have been reading Michael Singer’s The Surrender Experiment to support me. Interesting that in that moment, when fight, flight, and freeze were all technically available to me, I chose surrender. You might call that freeze…I guess I'll have to ask my therapist. But I held my hands up and said I don't want to fight because I don't. On the other side of me is her. Coming face to face with her dirty blonde hair and the fine lines sewn into her cheekbones, I saw the primal part of me. It made me realize how far I am from that space, how untapped it is.
Craig Foster, the filmmaker behind My Octopus Teacher, talked about this on the podcast Insights from the Edge. He describes humans as carrying two selves: a tame one and a wild one. We’ve existed as Homo sapiens for roughly 300,000 years, nearly all of it lived outdoors, embedded in terrain, weather and survival. We have historical memory baked into our bodies. Yet, because we were born into an industrial world, our conscious mind and body has not had that training so we end up split. The wild part of us frightened of the industrial landscape it’s landed in, and the tame part of us frightened of the wildness it came from.
It's not the first time I’ve been confronted by something wilder than me. A couple of months ago, we had what I dubbed Raccoon-Gate at my apartment building. Every few years, a family of raccoons finds the crawl space under our building from the 1920s and moves in. They make a terrible amount of noise, activate every dog in the building, and threaten our peace. It messes with the upper units more than mine, so I wasn't too ruffled, until, at two in the morning, coming home from a DJ gig, on the short walk through my backyard from my garage to my door, I was greeted by a deceptively cute raccoon on its hind legs, hands up (the irony is not lost on me). I later learned that standing on its hind legs is a defensive posture, which did not make me feel great. Surprisingly, standing tall, the raccoon was roughly half my height. After that confrontation I was scared for my dog to be in the backyard but mostly I was scared to come home, night after night, to a three-foot-tall creature waiting for me. I found this Youtube sound to repel my defensive friend. According to the mass of comments, it works? Though it’s hard to believe it’s not satire. My landlord promptly received incessant phone calls, care of me, until the trapper arrived. Alas, I am woefully unequipped for the wilderness. I don't like camping. I don't particularly like intense heat or the cold. I'm an indoor cat. If the apocalypse hit tomorrow (which is unfortunately top of mind these days), I could rally the troops, build a plan…but if it came down to just me against the elements, I'm pretty sure I'm toast.
The feral part of me has long gone unattended. How do I reclaim some of it? Where would I even begin? Foster’s suggestion is gentle, he emphasizes proximity. Get to know the nature nearest you. Then a little further out. Let yourself relax, incrementally, into what and who your body already knows you to be.
Swirling in the back of my brain is the question of who cultivates their wildness, and who abandons it? Some of us are forced to cultivate it and some of us spend our whole lives disconnecting further from it.
Humans have an intrinsic fear of nature, but we are also part of nature, we've just built enormous distance from it. And the more comfortable we are, the further we tend to live from any wild edge, far enough to forget we came from one at all. Despite the massive wealth disparity in America, if you earn more than $52,000 a year you are in the global 1%.¹ Though in a city like Los Angeles that same number is low income. By sheer nature of the American standard of living, we are less in touch with the elements than the rest of the world. During this summer’s European heatwave, much of Paris was forced outside, feet in fountains, as the majority of housing is sans air conditioning. They were pushed into community and shared misery but also the elements. In the United States, we consistently aim to minimize our discomfort and as we do so, we get farther and farther from each other and our most wild selves.
What does wildness look like for me? Is it hiking in Bhutan with the monks (who wants to go?!) or walking the Camino de Santiago? I don’t know if either of those count but maybe it's a start. I don't think the version of me exists yet that is ready for more than that but I’ll only know once I begin to test Foster’s theory.
Sources Cited:
1 .MacAskill, William. Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference. Gotham Books, 2015.