Oh, How I Envy the Wild Ones
On Shamelessness, Honesty, and Heart-Based Connection
To begin, I’ll share a poem I wrote at the peak of the Cooties-19 pandemic:
and speaking of falling in love with feelings,
I took a break from Facebook
(she writes on Instagram — how Meta! 🙄)
which I've done many times in the past,
and in those days it was always nice to come back.
but ever since the fabric of reality got torn
by the threat of air, and the manufactured fear of touching other human beings,
most people
do most of their socializing
mostly online now
...and it shows.
so I no longer look forward to the return,
to the shatter-shimmer-churn of the virtual void,
to the demands made on my time whenever I'm not there, the "Alicen I miss your energy! You're so magical! You give me hope!"
Listen, I like to think I'm pretty good at comforting people
but I'm a spitfire first and foremost,
and frankly,
this place isn't real
and you are an addict
and i am not your friend.
and speaking of drugs,
you probably already know about that study where
first they gave a bunch of rats a heroin addiction (because science! TRUST IT)
but then they filled the rats' little world
with games and wonders galore —
a rat utopia!
so then the rats forgot that drugs were even a thing
because they became so happy living
IN the world, IN their skin,
instead of dying in a drip-fed dream.
and speaking of rats,
I get so bloody jealous of animals
of every species, who —
compelled by the same raw, wild instincts we've
suppressed inside ourselves, in favor of never-ending digital dopamine drips —
when they see these things called hands,
have the stupid nerve
to paw their way up to any human stranger
and arch their back and
go all doe-eyed and
whimper and
purr and
press against the palms —
knowing
just how fucking pleasant their fur would feel between
our fingers, knowing
all bodies are covered in nerve endings, all of which can feel more pleasure than I bet you've found out about yet
(because like i said, you're an addict), knowing
damn well
the body-heat-deprived human
will always
always
always
say yes.
i get so jealous of how
any animal can walk right up to any person
without even a shadow of shame!
pleading
so earnestly
so innocently
with their whole body,
"Touch me."
It’s no secret that humans are a domesticated species.
A slave species, if you will.
We work to “earn a living,” which suggests that we’ve forfeited our inborn right to exist freely—and I’ll remind you here of the double meaning of free: free as in “no cost,” and free as in “autonomous.”
This slave mentality is evident in the abundance of unnatural things we do: we wear clothing because “we have to,” we go to school and work 9-to-5’s because “we’re supposed to,” and we pay taxes because “it’s illegal not to.”
None of those things are actually obligatory, by the way—but how many people have stopped automatically-submitting to “the law” long enough to find that out?
Mindless obedience is the most widespread disease of the “civilized” human, and its pathogenic source is the Unholy Trinity of fear, guilt, and shame.
Fear, guilt, and shame are powerful reinforcers of domestication. But I would argue that, of those 3, shame is the most powerful. Here’s why:
Fear says, “Something outside of me is wrong.”
Guilt says, “My behavior is wrong.”
Shame says, “I am wrong.”
Wrong for living. Wrong for existing. Wrong for being.
With shame left to fester unexamined at the core of our souls, we become sickly in spirit, contorting ourselves to fit into ever-tighter constraints, in the hopes of finally obtaining that elusive True Love we’ve heard so much about.
But finding True Love — real, raw, heart-based connection between souls — can be easy. It can be spontaneous. That’s another thing I learned from The Wild Ones.
The Shamelessness of Wild Creatures
I love animals. So much. I think about them a lot, and these contemplations have been quite fruitful in my own self-development.
While the “civilized” human wrongfully condemns animals as brutish and stupid, the plain fact is that, in some ways, animals behave better than we do—because they haven’t allowed themselves to be corrupted by culture.
As I said in my post about the Wild Dogs I grew up around, Wildness is predicated on the unfuckwithable knowing that we are born free and continue to be free as long as we’re living.
That freedom begets a clear, pure form of honesty.
For example: if a Wild One doesn’t like you, you’ll fucking know.
Being free in body and spirit, a Wild One has no qualms about showing you, with their whole body and everything, that they don’t like you. Think of how a cat will just walk away — or worse, swat you — if they don’t want you in their personal space.
The reason Wildness begets Honesty is that when you know you’re free, you don’t feel “obligated” to conform to cultural pressures to “be polite” or accommodate someone else’s fragile ego. If I don’t like you, then I don’t like you—and I don’t “have to” pretend I do. I know I’m free, so why would I tell you—with my voice, face, or body—anything other than the Truth?
Wildness effortlessly collapses false pretenses.
The uninhibited nakedness of wild animals is another testament to their freedom. I envy the dog who can eat until they’re full, and not self-consciously suck their stomach in afterwards, or resentfully pinch at their bloated belly in the mirror, as I have too often done. “Body shame” is simply not a thing with the Wild Ones.
I also envy the girlcat in heat, who can sit on the windowsill and shout at the top of her lungs for someone to come and fuck her, NOW!!! — instead of being a deceitful, domesticated human, so ashamed of these powerful sexual urges that she subconsciously chooses her makeup and clothing, and subliminally flirts, with the taboo but futile hope that someone will read her complex-coded signals, find her attractive, and fulfill the desires she won’t even speak of.
Subtext? What’s that? Never heard of it, says the Wild One.
The Wild One asks for what she wants, and gets it.
In fact, this may be the thing I envy most about Wild Ones. Like I said in the poem at the beginning of this post, if an animal wants to be touched affectionately, they just walk right up to you and ask for your hands on their body. There are no twisted, sexualized cultural “meanings” ascribed to this action. They just know that they’re free, and that cuddling feels good, and that affection is a key to life.
Why tiptoe? Why speak in codes?
There is no good reason.
I think too often, of how deeply under-touched the “civilized” (civil-lies-ed) human is. We are made of nerves. We are intelligently designed to touch and be touched. So why do we starve ourselves of this necessary expression of love?
I grieve the affection we dare not share with each other, lest it “turn creepy.” I grieve for the degree of heart-based connection we could have as a species, if dishonesty were done away with once and for all and intentions were made pure, giving us no reason to fear that someone would ask for something (cuddles) while secretly expecting something else (sex).
This is a degree of Truth that the Wild Ones have been keeping alive in their sacred bodies, like an eternal flame, inextinguishable, lighting the way.
The Wild Ones don’t downplay their feelings. They express emotion fully, with their whole body. Just watch that compilation video above. Observe how dogs do not hold back when they’re excited. They experience joy in a full-body, head-to-tail way — not how we do, stifled and contained by social codes of conduct and the fear of inciting jealousy in others.
The Wild Ones also see food and go for it — they don’t have the scarcity mindset we have, of “property” and “possession.” They can’t comprehend that we, the humans in charge of taking care of them, would be stingy. If my guardian has food, why wouldn’t they share it? the Wild One innocently asks.
One time, while walking around in a wholesale warehouse, I wandered into the grains aisle and saw that a bunch of sparrows had pecked open a bag of millet or something; now they were flitting about, helping themselves to the spilled grain, with not even a hint in their body language that they thought they were “doing something wrong.”
There was food, and they were hungry, so they took the food.
Isn’t that so simple?
But the thought occurred to me, as I watched these sparrows in the grocery store, that if a human did the same thing, that human would be punished by law. Charged with theft and possibly jailed. They would be punished for eating when hungry. The most basic animal instinct, penalized.
People would say, “Well we let the birds eat because the birds don’t know any better.” But don’t they?
Food is free. All food literally comes from the Earth for free. The birds “don’t know” that they’re “supposed to” pay money before they’re “allowed” to eat food, and frankly, I think that’s one way they know better than we do.
Besides, this warehouse store was full of food — way more than they probably would ever sell. And I’m almost certain that, like most un-purchased food in most stores, it was going to get tossed anyway.
Why do we toss perfectly food when our bosses threaten to fire us for giving it to the homeless?
Because we’re domesticated idiots who blindly follow orders, that’s why.
One more thing I love about animals: The way they play instruments. Ugh, it melts my heart!!!
They don’t concern themselves with familiar musical structures (time signatures, verse-chorus-verse-chorus formulas, scales, etc.). They play for the joy of playing. They play to feel and enjoy the vibrations.
When they dance, they don’t bother with contrived symmetry or rhythm. Theirs is a sacred way of dancing, a chaos which follows only personal instinct, rather than directions given by others.
To conclude, I offer you this quote from The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians by Magus Incognito, in the context of a chapter about how man wrongly assumes he is automatically “more evolved” than animals despite having no mastery of Self:
If a pebble in our boots torments us, we expel it. We take off the boot and shake it out. And once the matter is fairly understood it is just as easy to expel an intruding and obnoxious thought from the mind. […] It should be as easy to expel an obnoxious thought from the mind as it is to shake a stone out of your shoe; and till a man can do that it is just nonsense to talk about his ascendancy over Nature, and all the rest of it. He is a mere slave, and prey to the bat-winged phantoms that flit through the corridors of his own brain.
Yet the weary and careworn faces that we meet by thousands; even among the affluent classes of civilization, testify only too clearly how seldom this mastery is obtained. How rare indeed to meet a man. How common rather to discover a creature hounded on by tyrant thoughts (or cares or desires), cowering, wincing under the lash—or perchance priding himself to run merrily in obedience to a driver that rattles the reins and persuades him that he is free—whom we cannot converse with in a careless tete-a-tete because that alien presence is always there, on the watch.
It is one of the most promising doctrines of certain schools of occult philosophy that the power of expelling thoughts, or if need be, killing them dead on the spot, must be attained. Naturally the art requires practice, but like other arts, when once acquired there is no mystery or difficulty about it.
And it is worth practice. It may indeed fairly be said that life only begins when this art has been acquired. For obviously when, instead of being ruled by individual thoughts, the whole flock of them in their immense multitude and variety and capacity is ours to direct and dispatch and employ where we list, life becomes a thing so vast and grand compared with what it was before, that its former condition may well appear almost antenatal.
Great timing with this! Am hugging folk with fervour these days as so many I see are looking weary or down.
Love the quote too! I think it's incredibly huge with respect to it's truth, a simplistic yet paragon practice of stopping any unnecessary thoughts and it's freely available to all of us!! It's NOT too good to be true 🙏🥰
When I was younger and living in the interior of BC I used to explore up in the desert hills above a canyon in the South Okanagan and sometimes the wild horses that call that place home would come up to greet us. (this clip shows the area https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ3MT6MGX5s , please forgive the abrasive language, I was in 18 year old mentality at the time of recording). I would bring an extra apple from my parents orchard incase I was blessed to cross paths with them to share with them. The first time I saw them it was the stallion who came running up to greet me. my conditioning from living in "civilization" in this life told me to be afraid and run, but something deeper in me, something wild within my heart and spirit that recognized the stallion as my brother told me to stay. I stayed and he stopped within a foot of in front of me, lowering his head in a gesture that moved my heart.
Now I live in southern Ontario where most of the wild four legged beings have been killed or driven away to the north (in the name of "progress", industrial agriculture and urban development) so I strive to engage with that which is wild through connecting with and nurturing wild rooted beings.
One such wild being that I have invited to call my garden home is Malus sieversii
For more info : https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/the-wild-apples-of-the-tian-shan
I feel that in order to embark on a path of re-wilding and healing our relationship with the wild, we must invite people to fall back in love with the wilderness and the wild beings that dwell there. No amount of threatening, guilt tripping, bribing or other top down methods will convince the lost humans to change their ways. It has to be love. Thank you for walking a path guided by love and encouraging our human family to remember their innate love for our fellow beings.