Your
Wild Nature
“The
goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match
your nature with Nature.”
Joseph
Campbell
I’ve
been rereading Sam Keen’s book Fire in the Belly. It is subtitled On
Being a Man and was first published in 1991. He writes so well about the
modern notions of manhood as it relates to both women and the instinctual
nature of men. I’m especially interested in what happened that made “masculine”
synonymous with “violent.” Do you ever wonder why we idolize men’s sports—football,
especially. Is it the modern version of the gladiators, the
conquistadores, or the crusaders? Is there something in us that likes to watch
violent clashes between men? I know these are questions only a woman would ask,
because men don’t need to know the why’s of it. They just know that they enjoy
the game, the strategy, the physicality, and the ability to connect on a
perfect pass. I can’t answer my own questions, except to say that maybe games
like football speak to a lost wildness within us.
In Fire
in the Belly, Keen wrote about an occasion when he was horseback riding on an
old fire road and encountered a grizzly bear. Somehow, he and his horse got
between the female and her cubs quite by accident. He dismounted to calm his
horse, although the horse was apparently not alarmed by the presence of the
bear. Keen’s total body alarms were sounding off because he believed himself to
be in the worst possible position to survive. In his panic, in his
head he ran through a list of options and consequences, none of them good. Then he
says, “a quiet man I scarcely know instinctively takes command of the
situation and orders me to continue walking calmly and slowly between the tree [where
the cubs were] and the mother bear.” One hundred yards later he found the
courage to look back and witnessed the bear collecting her young and ambling on
up the hillside. In that moment of panic, he had tapped into his instinctual
man, who knew exactly what to do and how.
Because
we live in cities for the most part, we have very few opportunities to
encounter our earthly cohabitants, such as elk, deer, bears, coyotes, and
wolves. We have, as a result, too few encounters with our own wildish nature,
our instinctual knowledge. We fear the animals, who like the bear in Keen’s
tale, just want to live in peace. We feel so threatened when they show up in
our environment, that too often we kill them rather than relocate them. At least,
that’s what happened here when coyotes began showing up in town. One local
community killed fourteen coyotes rather than relocating them to one of the
state parks where deer populations are excessive and badly in need of thinning.
Where’s the wisdom in that?
Wendell
Berry says, “Now it is only in the wild places that a man can sense the rarity
of being a man. In the crowded places he is more and more closed in by the
feeling that he is ordinary—and that he is, on the average, expendable…You can
best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.” I’m
with Wendell. We—men and women—need to reconnect with our wildness so that we
can learn the wisdom of our instinctual nature. It’s still there. We just need
to make time for a visit.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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