into the wild that is my mind

I have a document on my computer called ‘stream of consciousness.’ I have been adding to it for the better part of 7 years. Anytime I am overwrought, confused, frustrated or in over my head in some area, I find myself here. It is an area where I am allowed to be anything that I am, and all that I am. I have no word limit and the grammar police is always out to lunch. It’s a place where punctuation and perfectionism go to die. There is no word count, and no backspace. The only rule is that there are no rules. It is a space for my mind to spill out of my fingertips at any speed she pleases, to spell out my feelings and deepest thoughts before my eyes.

It’s a wonder to me that most of my favorite writings have been done in this document, and yet I’m just now connecting to the idea that I do my best work when I stop filtering, controlling, and subduing myself. I find my voice when I allow myself to just be. When I am able to sit still, to be quiet, calm and full of feeling that is when I say what I mean—the first time. This document is my therapy, and my sanity. It holds my secrets, and my questions, making equal space for them to be. It’s the place I go to release pressure, as if my nail beds were equipped with steam release valves as my fingers type away furiously.

This month my mind is on the fact that I often feel pressure coming in from all sides of me—to do, to accomplish, to impress. I feel incapable of all of it, most of the time.  But when I don’t think about doing, when I think about being, when I consider moving for the sake of movement, not attraction, then I like who I am. When I am trying to achieve in order to squeeze my way into the good graces of the world for the fantasy that this will make my life easier to operate inside of these broken systems, rather than on the periphery, that is when I lose my will to exist. That is when I forget what to call myself, my age slips out the back of my head and I feel nothing.

This world is a demanding place, it’s biggest demand seems to be to forget your humanity. I see it everyday, people pretending to be robots, people operating as if this is the life they dreamed of as a child—to be indoors everyday, to mask our natural scents with body disregulating poisons, to live under the toxic blue light of ‘environmentalism’ while ignoring the fact that the sun has sustained all life on earth for millennia, or the fact that the sun, and our relative distance to it is one of the biggest reasons life on this planet is even possible. That, and the amount of wild waters surrounding us on this floating orb. So we strip our water down to it’s most basic chemical component—one oxygen atom and two hydrogen, h2o— and we play hide and seek from the sun “protecting ourselves” from these life forces through chemical means.

With all of these ‘protections’ introduced in the last century, one wonders how we ever survived without chemicals. Our soils are being depleted of minerals, creating an epidemic of less nutritious foods, but where do our soils get their minerals if not from the waters that cover them, and the life that surrounds them? We are willingly stripping ourselves of the things that fill our bodies and souls. We are turning our noses up at the substances that have sustained our lives throughout our existence on this planet. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of years on this planet, but now all of a sudden, we need chemicals, and drugs to survive? It’s too preposterous to stomach.

If it were up to me, I would live a life of the land, on the land, and for the land. I would dedicate my time, attention and learning capacity to stewarding this planet and these natural resources towards optimal health for all. I would not deal in money, but in trades—in the energy of love that exists in true craftsmanship. I would trade leather for sturdy wood, and food for physical labor. I would teach and educate for free to anyone who seeks to remember their wildness. I would dedicate my life to the untaming of our world. To the re-wilding of the wild things.

It is my feeling that at some point on our journey to this modern age we passed right over Utopia and into Dystopia. We have everything we need for every life on this planet to live a fulfilled existence, and the only things we’d truly be giving up is our toxic power dynamics, our control tactics, our dependence on manipulative life-sucking systems of government, and our greed. These are things that I would happily live without, but our modern societies would crumble if they were ever released. And good riddance, too.

Music: Into the Wild by Josh Baldwin