Re-Wild

Photo by Karen Cantú Q on Unsplash

What does it mean to re-wild myself? I’ve been asking this question all summer, although not in anything as concrete as words. Instead, I am growing my hair out, already longer than it’s been in years. I am letting my garden go, and ignoring the herbs ready for harvest. I watch them bloom and crowd each other, a fragrant tangle. This land that I call home seemed to hear the wild call of my soul before I did and has responded with a torrent of new growth; planting thistles protectively in the beds by our front door and beneath our bedroom window, sowing milkweed in the meadow where it never grew before, and growing a single poke weed right next to my herbs. My spirit has thrilled to to all this rampant wildness, the effects of having left much of our property as untouched as possible (without growing an entire miniature forest) for six years now. After two years of reaching out, of connecting with the living things that share my space, it feels as though they are reaching back: thistles for boundaries, protection, purging and banishing negativity, and breaking curses; milkweed for protection, nourishing feminine and nurturing energies, healing, and calling messengers of the dead; poke for transformation, healing, protection, courage, purging, and breaking curses.

All of these plants were common on my parents’ property, and I find myself appreciating the familiarity. I have had great need of their properties this summer. Like a dog on a chain I have been circling, circling, worrying a path into the ground and calling it progress. The stake that holds me is my own wounded childhood. No, it is my anger, my inability to forgive my parents and accept myself, then and now, as I am. I have outgrown this chain, this path, this safe circle; Mother, in her infinite wisdom, has brought to me the means of breaking free. To move forward I have to dig down, first. I have to go back, not to condemn but to receive. I owe who I am to those who came before me, and I am finally ready to find out who that is. I am ready to embrace my wild.

“What this means on a practical level,” writes Michaela Boehm, author of The Wild Woman’s Way, “is stripping away the layers of stress, muscle clench, coping, and other related habits to reveal our deeper nature, the discovery and reclamation of the innate knowledge our body holds, reconnecting to our nature, our rhythms, and our unique gifts¹.” Not since I was a child have I felt such a strong desire to sit outside under a tree, or stand very still and gaze up at the moon. This deeper, calmer nature is calling to me—she has been all along but I’m only now able to hear her again. The more frequently I walk through the meadow and around my house, brushing my hands through the leaves of each tree I pass, the stronger and more insistent becomes the call. “The Wild Woman,” Boehm insists, “is a part of each of us.”

She is not the crazed and uncivilized creature she is sometimes made out to be, but the part of us that is deeply and inextricably connected to natural life; she is the ancient part of us that knows of the rising of the moon and the movement of the tides…She embodies knowledge of curing and healing, ritual and prayer; of the tracker, hunter, gatherer, and shaman. She is connected to all things in nature, including her own body, whom she cares for and utilizes as an instrument of perception.

She is, writes Boehm, first and foremost an archetype.

Archetypes were brought to wider awareness by the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung. He understood archetypes as universal, ancient images and patterns that arise from the collective unconscious. Because they are unconscious, they have to be brought to light and awareness through examining art, imagery, myths, dreams, and human behavior.

One method that Boehm encourages her students to use in reconnecting with their inner Wild Woman is writing about the Wild Woman archetypes that have influenced them. I had some time yesterday, so I made a list of those that came to mind. Here are my Wild Women.