It kind of all started with a break up. Sort of at least. Maybe it started with returning to being clergy, not that I ever really stopped. It is a place to start to say the least.
I start here maybe because I had to rebuild a shattered heart. It is in that painful process of healing and creating and restoring and rehabituating, that I started to learn the true nature of my heart. A wild heart. An untamable heart.
Or maybe in the heartbreak, I somehow took with me a part of the heart of my Muse. Maybe in our love, I grafted something onto myself from her. Maybe I earned some wildness. Maybe it was just always there and that was why are hearts found each other, and at the same time why are hearts just could not intertwine. Maybe neither of us knew the nature of our hearts, and couldn’t admit to what things might have been, maybe society had beaten our wild hearts back for so long we could no longer recognize them, or see them in another.
She is still my Muse. She is still inspiring this. She is still within me, as experience, as memory, like a dance move or the chords to a song on guitar or piano, internalized.
In re-building my heart, I discovered my own trauma, or rediscovered would be a better way to put it. That trauma was always there. It was not the kind of trauma that makes it impossible to function in the world, not the kind that gets hidden away only to return in moments of paralysis. My Muse may have had that, she may have had that kind of trauma. My trauma was fear of someone I loved, the fear of a parent who would fall into chaos. It was the fear of safety from the very person that was evolutionarily meant to keep me safe. It was evenings with my Dad coming home, unpredictable, sometimes irrational. Never violent, just chaotic, unreliable, that’s the way to say it, unreliable. My trauma was a parent who couldn’t be counted on. My trauma was also being set on my own in a world at a young age. With parents that had enough of their own things that I learned a kind of self-sufficiency early. I was feral. I fended for myself. I made up my own rules. I lived in the world I created in my head and didn’t always know where reality began and my thoughts ended.
Maybe its here that my wildness started.
Thoreau said that the mass of men led lives of quiet desperation. He said that in Walden, as a young thirty something. He knew he was wild, he knew he didn’t fit the mold. In other places, he speaks about how most men are content to be tame, to be civilized, to live in the city. I wonder which is true. Do we suppress wildness? Or does it come from Trauma. Maybe Trauma, at least the kind I endured—not the more severe kinds, is simply not receiving those wildness countering life lessons. My trauma resulted in a lack of civilizing. Maybe my Muse, also an only child, never received civilizing the ways others did, maybe she received more severe trauma than I can imagine.
Maybe some of us are just born wild. Maybe some of us are just born with a streak that keeps us unaccountable. And boy am I unaccountable. By many metrics of civilized society I am a lost cause, irredeemable, I am twice divorced and another man raises my children with their mother. I carry this weight with me like an albatross around my neck, but it maybe points to something. Maybe it points to my trying to be something else than what I really was.
I’ve spent time in therapy, I’ve spent time on the self. I’ve spent time trying to determine what the hell kind of self I have. I believe I can get “better”, that I can be healed. It is clearly an affliction if there is some sort of pill I can take, a chemical that can set everything right.
Maybe creating some narrative about wildness is an excuse. Maybe its just a way to ease my pain, to gloss over my trauma. But what if my trauma is the world trying to set me straight. What if it wasn’t my alcoholic father, but rather the schools that labeled my learning disabilities, the teachers who told me to take a chill pill, the kids that made fun of me for being different, sensitive, the society that told me how I had to settle down, get married, have kids. And I did that whole-heartedly. I bought it all hook line and sinker.
But some of it wasn’t wrong. My two sons are beautiful beyond measure. Commitment and monogamy have a place in my heart. I still seek to do the just thing. I have love that I have given, freely.
It brings me back to being clergy.
I am suspect of the narrative that has come up around it, that it is for “holy” men. What does it mean to be holy? In its purest sense, holy—at least when tracked from the Greek or Hebrew—means to be set aside. Maybe clergy are set aside not because they are the most pure, or of the highest moral fiber, or the exemplars of society. Maybe clergy are set aside because we are too wild to do anything else. We can’t do life the way everyone else does, we can’t abide in the tame. Some of us may try and force ourselves to do that. Some clergy might actually be the exemplars of society, and pushed into the profession for the wrong reason. Maybe that’s why so many of our churches are failing so catastrophically, from indifference. This is different than church failing due to the misconduct of their pastors, that’s something altogether different.
Maybe those truly meant to be clergy are called because they need to be set aside, they don’t see the world in the same way, they see it upside down, they see it inside out, they dream that it might be more. Maybe the true clergy are wild beyond measure, wild poets of vision and liturgy and a strange hope that tears at the fabric of society the way the anti-heros of old did. Maybe they are meant to live in metaphor and myth and stories and outlandish propositions. Meant to straddle a world of mysticism with a world of reality. Maybe. Maybe the robes and vestments and clerical collars are an effort to tamp down their wildness, to keep them from going to the market place in camel hair, chewing on locus and honey.
Maybe its just a kind of clergy that exist in that realm, like the shamans of old.
Maybe I exist in that realm.
Maybe my Muse does as well.
Maybe she lives somewhere else, as an artist, as a creator, as a yin to the clergy yang, or would it be vice versa. My call to exist in the throes of mysticism and God-wrestiling, her’s in the throes of trying to make sense of a world around her and tell a different story. I am started to realize she is untethered, at least not the way most are tethered. No she is more like a mountain, or a vast field of flowers, creating beauty unconsciously, simply existing, too large to get a sense of from any one angle, to vast to be curtailed into beginnings and ends, to beautiful and wild to be brought into pasture. Yes, she is like a mountain, who in her seasons bears the beauty of change. She is ever changing, fluid, moving, imperceptible. I am rather like a pilgrim, or a naturalist, ever wandering, restless in my chore of exploring. I do not know what I seek, maybe it is no more than beauty. For a season or two I got to stay on the mountain of my Muse, the field of wildflowers that is so vast, yet so fragile, born of tumult and fire and harsh winters, along with beautiful springs and thunderstorms that cause tears of joy in their beauty.
Maybe I am just telling myself all this to make myself feel better.
But it feels more like I have discovered wildness, something more innate within myself than I expected. It feels more like that ocean floor under a dark sea, something concrete to hold on to. It feels like the way I am meant to be, the wild mythology of the ancients, groomed from a wisdom that understood that wild people are as important to society as those deemed responsible and trustworthy.
Which brings me to Jesus. I think he was a wild man. John the Baptist, now he was a real wild man, but I think Jesus was too, maybe a wilder man. Wild in that way that he knew he was different, knew he was set aside for something else, that he couldn't just be a carpenter, that he had to go out and be and wander and risk and love and suffer, that the role of father and husband and maybe even friend was not going to work for him. He was something else.
Not that I am comparing myself to Jesus, that’s irresponsible, but Jesus is in all of us, he is a representation of humanity, a representation of what can be, what could be, if we were willing to risk the same, to be wild like him. Not that we can all be wild like him, or John the Baptist, or Thoreau, or St Theresa of Avila, or Fanny Lou Hammer, or Charles Bukowski.
We make Jesus too sanitized. When we try to make him perfect, without sin, we lose him. We lose what it really takes. To be wild.
Now wild does not mean evil. I think evil can be defined as the destructive forces of the world, of disrespect for creation, it means selfishness. Too often when one thinks they need to get “wild” they head towards the this kind of destructive force. Goodness I think is creative, restorative, gracious, gratiful, It is very possible to be wild and good. Maybe the bigger mistake we make is that we align goodness with being civilized, with fitting into cultural norms. For those of us that don’t know the rules, or really care that much about those rules, we can get put out, labeled as evil or sinful. Wild is more about letting go, letting the garden go unkempt, it is about embracing the ways the forest balances itself out in its own ways.
Its hard to know, do all people need wildness? Is wildness innate, does it come in varying levels in different people? Is it something all people need to dive into? Maybe embracing wildness is nothing more than being honest with one’s self. Be honest about what one wants in life, what they can give in life, what they can receive.
At some level, I realize my wildness means I have to run off and climb and hike and play in the snow once in a while. That I can not meet the expectations of what some people expect in a partner or in a friend or in a co-worker. that i see the world in different ways, and that its OK.