As a modern human and woman, what does it mean to embrace my wildness? Am I wild or domesticated, and what does that even mean? I explore that and my feelings about it in this week’s podcast.
Episode Highlights
00:30 When we look at our pet cat and dog, and the birds outside, we believe that they have something we don’t have, and we call it wildness.
01:01 We preface the word “instincts” with “wild,” and feel there’s something magical and mysterious going on there.
01:15 We have the sense that there is something very powerful and intense and desirable about wildness, but most of us shy away from identifying what that is or connecting with it.
01:20 Humans crave connection with the wild part of ourselves, but we get weird about how we embrace it.
01:37 We criticize ourselves for the qualities we identify as being wild, even if we desire more of those qualities in ourselves.
02:10 If I can’t predict what someone’s going to do, that’s scary.
02:50 We have plenty of rules about how we are supposed to be, act, think, and even feel. Rules about what it means to be a good person.
04:05 If I go out and lay in a soggy heap on my lawn, which is what I feel like doing, what will my neighbors think? That’s not acceptable as a civilized person!
04:45 Part of me is intensely jealous of my cat’s ability to lay in inconvenient sunbeams and give zero fucks if it makes it hard for us to walk down the stairs.
05:15 Am I allowed to just lay in a sunbeam because I think that would feel nice right now? That I even question this is proof I’ve lost my wildness.
05:30 It’s the tiny impulses that we squash because we judge them as too ridiculous to pursue, but those small impulses are our wildness calling us to play.
06:01 Faced with my inaction, I come up with a lot of excuses.
06:17 The truth is that I could do things, I am just NOT doing them.
07:09 What are the things that a wild human would do that I am not doing?
07:42 The wild part of myself is the one who wants to kick off all of the made-up responsibilities I feel compelled to enact every day.
08:25 Thumbing through Instagram for an hour every day doesn’t make me feel embodied or great about being human, but skipping with glee over a hill can do that.
08:40 Are we capable of taking a minute to be barefoot and connect with the ground with our bodies without thinking about what it all means?
11:13 I don’t see humanity breaking out of our narrow paths of acceptable behavior very often in ways that are fun and unthreatening, but I want more of that.
11:23 Most of us follow the routine that we built up over the course of our life without ever questioning it or trying something too different.
11:41 There’s no other creature who uses alarm clocks. This tells us a lot about people in comparison to the rest of the natural world.
12:00 The power of our minds and emotions is that we can sabotage ourselves from doing something that comes naturally and make it hard just by thinking about it too much.
13:11 Wild creatures don’t agonize or lament their activities, they just do them and move through it.
14:10 Our language when speaking about our instincts is often about giving up or giving in.
15:40 Our la
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