Here’s your weekly reminder to choose what serves you. What might be useful and beautiful for you today?
I was once wild.
Scratch that. It’s true, but not the whole truth. I have untamed wilderness still in me. I can feel it when I do weird things like kneel in child’s pose on my bed with my forehead against the quilt and think about how I came to be so domesticated.
You do that too, right? Lay face down and overthink? I’m curious, have you ever wondered how your life would be different if you weren’t so concerned with keeping other people comfortable?
Domestication
Wilderness is what nature is, naturally. When humans don’t do anything to it.
Can you picture a wild forest? A thriving, biodiverse ecosystem? Its complexity and variety is how it survives, all the little pieces giving and taking, balancing while constantly changing. Organisms form symbiotic relationships, helping and being helped. They also compete. Each leaf grows to maximize its exposure to sun and rain. There is disease and death, but it makes way for new life. Cycles repeat, the forest evolves.
Now imagine a forest where humans have harvested all the trees, killed the weeds (i.e. any plant that is not useful nor beautiful), then planted baby trees — all the same species — in tidy rows. It’s gone from a forest to a tree farm. It’s resembles nature but isn’t wild. It’s now something for humans to use.
It’s all coming back to me now.
I think this is what happened to me.
I remember being wild, following my curiosity, delighting in learning, experimenting, evolving.
I even got a job where people told me they wanted that wilderness, the outside perspective.
But then I was inside.
And I became something to be used.
Inside, you have to get in line and be nice and don’t be too weird or infringe on anyone else because we agree that everyone ought to be given equal opportunities (even though we’re status obsessed). We’re civilized, logical, rational people and we’re all adults here.
Structures are put in place, in service of comfort and predictability. Everyone is sorted into houses boxes with levels and similar job titles. You can’t trust people in other siloes because if they win, we lose. Everything is measured (KPIs, ROI, CPC, YoY, etc) because “what gets measured gets managed” and if it can’t be measured, it can’t be controlled. Wilderness becomes domesticated. Kind of.
I wrote that in passive tense because it’s not clear who’s doing the structuring, boxing, and measuring. Maybe it’s a “best practice” or a long-forgotten mandate. Regardless, the status quo persists even if everyone complains about how broken it is.
It’s not actually the well-oiled machine (farm? I’m mixing metaphors) that managers wish it were. It’s more like a shanty-town zoo with barely-contained animals all trying to not get eaten. Gazelle managers weave stories to drum up sympathy for the malnourished lions, scaring the whole watering hole into keeping their heads down. Meanwhile, the beavers are overworked keeping the foundation from collapsing and the feral copywriters just want to write something beautiful. (I love all of you.)
Humans working together at scale create a complex system. It’s beautiful in its messiness, if you really stop to consider all that’s happening1.
But humans having jobs (work to live) is not the goal of capitalism. Business doesn’t want our beautiful and unwieldy complexity, it wants progress, money, and power for a few (live to work). In order to change nature (our wild selves) into something we can use, we must exert control. Never-ending effort — all that coordinating, agreeing, weeding, feeding, trimming, fertilizing, and so-called nurturing.
Our need to control creates even more problems to further control. Like raising monocultures which are susceptible to disease and pests so we spray more pesticide which spreads pollution which causes more disease, etc2. We look around and realize we are sick. Our fear intensifies. We try harder to control.
Rewilding
I’ve been listening to the universe and the signs say I need to be more wild.
Specifically, they’re telling me to embrace being a heron and a curse-breaker. But those are stories for a future letter.
Enter my new favorite metaphor: Rewilding.
Rewilding is how a tree farm (among other previously inhabited environments) may become a natural forest again3. It’s about letting a place become wild once more.
Wilderness exists without our “help”. It grows how it must, not how humans want it to grow, to suit their needs.
We were all born wild then slowly domesticated to function as a member of society. I know this is true because I have kids (9yo and 11yo) and they are feral about 80% of the time.
I’m not sure this is good for us. At least not complete domestication. Dimming my light to make others comfortable didn’t end well for me anyway. I was laid off. Then I got cancer.
I think I need to rewild.
What does that mean for me?
Stop worrying so much about what other people may think. Stop tucking in loose ends. Moss over.
Let myself grow in ways that may not be useful or beautiful to anyone else… anyone inclined to prune me, tie me back to better suit their idea of valuable.
I no longer exist to be used. I am a forest, not a farm. Delight in my wilderness! Heck, go ahead and use what I can offer. Be a hunter gather. Or try ecotourism. Just don’t try to alter me. I will push back.
Damn.
That would have made a great end to this letter.
Alas… I can’t lead you on like that.
I’m not that badass. I’ll never be completely rewilded. I live in society, not a shack in the woods. I must work in this economy, and that requires some amount of politeness.
However… I’m not a commodity. Neither are you. You don’t have to act like one.
Could you do something wild today?
Note: I’m not claiming expertise related to biology or rewilding natural ecosystems. However, I at least know that rewilding often involves connecting natural corridors for carnivores to travel freely across the land. I like the idea that I’ve been harboring isolated carnivores who are finally able to move about and make little carnivore babies and keep my internal ecosystem healthy.
Thank you for reading. Your attention is a gift. You allow me to cast a little spell, plant a little seed, that is changing my life and may someday change yours.
Love,
Kate
p.s. Like this letter? Help others get value from it, too. Please tap the heart, forward it, share on your socials. Pretty please. Thank you.
p.p.s. If you’d like help with your rewilding, send me a note. I coach brilliant people who wander between wild and cultivated.
If you like reading about the complexity of humans working together, check out
andhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewilding
Whenever I read/hear/see something about humans relationship to the wild, it conjures this remark by Aldo Leopold. It was an essay on marshes, but the idea was it applied to all of 'the wild':
“Thus always does history, whether of marsh or marketplace, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish."
Now I'm trying to take that wise observation and see how that applies to your remarks about independence, autonomy, authenticity, etc. Like, if you were able to completely rewild yourself, maybe it would be important that you didn't realize it? Or, putting it another way, when is self-awareness the paradox? 🤯
Yesterday I went down an Internet rabbit hole looking up scenes from “Office Space.” That movie still sticks with me because that was exactly how I felt at my first newspaper job, which was as a copy editor. It was not glamorous. It was many hours spent at a tiny cubicle, with lots of noise and fluorescent lights. (It was on my mind because this week I wrote about my regret about not becoming a wildlife scientist. So this theme for your post definitely resonates!)