Wild Mind. Bill Plotkin
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erotic indigenity. As you re-member yourself in this way, what do you notice about the way you physically move through your activities? What shifts do you notice in your relationships? What now feels most alluring or compelling? How’s it feel to be in your body? In your animate surroundings? What emotions are viscerally present? How’s it feel to be immersed in the land? Are you fully at home? How could you be more so?
Your Wild One Awaits Deployment
Consider enrolling in a wilderness program that gets you traveling by foot or boat or skis in unpredictable weather through untamed lands or seas. Or simply wander off on your own, if you have the skills and knowledge to do so. Take experiential courses in animal tracking, birding, gardening, or per- maculture. Study massage (and get some) or other somatic practices such as Feldenkrais. Sign up for courses in sensory awakening, Gestalt awareness, sacred sexuality, yoga, drumming, singing, or dance.
And here’s one of my favorite South practices: skipping! Yep: Bouncing from one foot to the other while maintaining dynamic forward momentum. Just do it, for at least five minutes. You can skip in the hallway or on the sidewalk or field, but if you really want to supercharge your skipping practice, try it on earthen trails with a downward slope of, say, ten to thirty degrees. Then you can really catch some air between hops. Sure, be careful. Take it slow at first. But if you do this for five minutes, you’ll be surprised at how alive you become, how your blood surges, your emotions stir, your senses become vibrant — your eyes feasting on colors and textures you had previously missed, your ears now awakened to the songs of birds and the calls of animals and the murmur of wind in the pines, your nostrils flaring to take in the fragrance of roses. Your body feels, well, a bit more wild, yes?
Voice Dialogue, Four-Directions Circles, Dreamwork, and Deep Imagery with the Wild Indigenous One
Turn to the appendix to get a better feeling for these four core methods of cultivating wholeness, including your Wild Indigenous One.
South Walks
Wander into a place with no or relatively little human impact. Let your Wild Indigenous One feel your way in. From your South perspective, be in embodied relationship with the things and creatures you encounter. How does each thing feel? How does it provoke or inspire you? Take in both the minute details and the big picture. Let yourself be moved by the way light plays upon a rose or the way a cloud’s shadow races across a hillside and what these experiences stir in you. Touch things you’ve never touched before, or as if you haven’t. Sing the songs you feel emanating from things. Drum their rhythms. Dance for or with them. Echo birdcalls, or offer your own language in response. Play with your capacity to be immersed in all your sensory fields simultaneously. What do you hear? (The wind? Surf? Crickets? Trees creaking? Water flowing?) What are the fields of fragrance, sometimes subtle, that you move in and out of as you stroll? Can you feel the changes in air temperature or humidity as you approach or leave a watercourse? Are there berries to taste? Salt in the ocean air? What does all this arouse in you?
As you walk in full embodiment of your Wild Indigenous One, what opportunities for communion or celebration arise? What insights emerge about your authentic place in the world or about the integral way you belong as a member of the more-than-human community of life? What emotions surface? Record impressions in your journal.
Wild Conversations
Here’s one approach, in five steps, that will catalyze conversations with other-than-human beings, or what Gary Snyder calls “talking across the species boundaries.”21 Feel free to add or subtract steps or do them in a different order.
1.Go wandering outside. Bring your journal. Be prepared to offer a gift — a poem, tears of grief, an expression of yearning or joy, a song, a dance, a lock of hair, tobacco, cornmeal, water, a handful of your breath. Early on, cross over a physical threshold (a stream, a stick, a passageway between two trees) to mark your transition from ordinary consciousness to that of the sacred. Beyond the threshold, observe three cross-cultural taboos: do not eat, do not speak with other humans, and do not enter human-made shelters.
2.With the perspective of, and through the embodiment of, your Wild Indigenous One, wander randomly until you feel called by something that strongly draws your attention because it attracts, intrigues, allures, repels, or scares you. This might take some time. Don’t simply choose something with your strategic thinking mind; wait until you’re called. It might be a bush, boulder, anthill, waterfall, or snake, or maybe a rotting animal carcass. Sit and observe it closely for a good length of time, offering your full sensory and emotional attention. Record in your journal what you observe. Perhaps offer a gift at this time.
3.Then introduce yourself, out loud. Being audible is important. Tell the Other about yourself, who you really are, but from the perspective of your Wild Indigenous One. Be prepared to go on for fifteen minutes or more. Perhaps tell it why you have been wandering around waiting to be called — not merely because someone recommended it, but because of the ways the idea resonated with you. Then tell your deepest, most intimate truths or stories that arise in the moment, or your greatest doubts or most burning questions or yearnings, or all of these. In addition to ordinary human language, you might “speak” with song, poetry, nonverbal sound, images (feel yourself sending these images to the Other), emotion, or body language (movement, gesture, dance). Then, using the same speech options, tell the Other everything about it that you’ve noticed. Describe its features (out loud, if using words, song, or sound), and respectfully tell it what interests you about its features, and what the fact that you find them interesting tells you about you. Keep communicating… until it interrupts you (if it does).
4.Then stop and be receptive — with your senses, intuition, feeling, and imagination. “Listening” to the Other (direct, prereflective perception) is different from fabricating metaphors (such as a tree “telling” you to stand tall). With true listening, you’re simply being receptive to the Other through your feeling and imagination without striving for a response. Fabricating metaphors, on the other hand, consciously enlists the strategic thinking mind, which asks “What is this like?” and reaches for an answer by means of reasoning. To really listen, it helps if you expect to be surprised. If you “hear” something predictable, you’re probably not really listening.
5.Keep the conversation going for several rounds. Don’t end the interaction prematurely. In your journal, record or draw what happens. Offer the Other your gratitude and a gift, if you haven’t already. When you’re ready, return to the place of your original threshold and cross back over, ending your observance of the three taboos.
In this practice, the Other might reflect something back to you about you, but, more generally, the goal is to learn something about the Other. Or about both you and the Other. Or about the web that contains you both. It’s best to enter wild conversations with the central intent to become better acquainted with a nonhuman being, rather than, say, to receive some oracular information about yourself.
THE SOUTH FACET OF THE SELF AND THE DESCENT TO SOUL
The underworld of Soul is a wilderness — an outback defined not by a particular geographical location but by a state of consciousness, a frame of mind, a realm of the psyche in which meaning, metaphor, and symbol percolate from their generally invisible depths and flow through our moment-to-moment experience like creatures from another world. Sometimes it seems to be a circus world, but more generally it’s a sacred one, a heaven or a hell exuding eloquent signs of portent or promise. Here, denizens of our personal unconscious mingle, strangely, with archetypes of the collective human unconscious and creatures of the terrestrial wild, and it is often difficult to discern which are which. To our astonishment or bafflement, our own individual Souls might appear in a great variety of shapes and guises. Characters from dreams and nightmares materialize out of nowhere. We find ourselves faced with unavoidable and seemingly fated tasks and trials — supremely challenging adventures, perhaps impossible but nonetheless necessary ones — and we recognize that how well we engage with these quandaries will determine whether or how fully we’ll realize our destiny in this lifetime. Every move we make seems critical and fraught with significance.
In order to thrive in such circumstances — and certainly