#bryanward

“You came into the world covered in blood, shit, and mucus.

For one glorious moment, you were elemental and wild.

Then the nurse hosed you down and diapered your ass in plastic, ushering you with all haste into the world of man-made conventions.

And you've been in that world ever since, living the tidy, right-angled life they've given you.

But you can't help but feel that something essential has been washed away.

You are estranged from the wild. Estranged from the world of meat and mud and swamp and smoke we all come from.

You are estranged from your own embodiment in the world, your elemental nature made foreign to you.

And the estrangement makes you restless. For you know in your bones that your wild underpinning is not counter to civilization, but the animating force that upholds it.

When you awaken your body to its embodied nature, you awaken your mind to the instincts and energies necessary for a free life.

It's not only a re-immersion in the elemental world. It's the accompanying rejection of a tamed life in favor of one more boundless.

It's trading in the shepherd's pen for the forest.

Rather than clamoring to find some person or institution to shield your weakness, you become strong.

Rather than bleating in panic for some pen of false protection, you become the wolf.

Not to prey on the sheep, but to properly equip yourself to revel and flourish in the real world.

Once you've escaped to the forest, you look back to the sheep you left and see their station for what it is: a pen where the gratefully enslaved are fattened for slaughter, fed to feed the belly of the shepherd. You see that the pen was made not to keep out the wolves, but to bar the sheep's escape, should they wake from their stupor.

So wild your life.

You don't have to grow out your hair or raise chickens in the backyard.

You simply vet the tools, titillations, and technologies of man with extreme prejudice. You use only the man-made products and practices that serve your freedom and your power, that enable you to live a wilder, more embodied life.

One day at a time, replace that which is plastic and deadening for that which is elemental and animating:

Surround yourself with wood, stone, and soil.

Put a chiminea on your porch.

Plant herbs.

Light a candle at your desk.

Write your first drafts with pen and paper.

Swim the icy river at dawn.

This isn't some return to barbarism. These aren't throwback materials we've "evolved past." They are lifelines to your true nature, gateways to the joyful life of the body your plastic-coated routines have stolen from you.

Once you've uncorked this old elixir, your life begins to shift:

You become bolder.

Your decisions become more instinctive.

You become strong, catlike, relentless.

Best of all, you awake to the simple animal pleasures you had forgotten.

Your life becomes more than just a long slog through the machine of progress, slaving for some distant light:

Joy comes back to the journey as you are able, once more, to revel in the light of the evening sun, in the smell of warm food, in the crackling of a fire, in the gift of the heart beating within your chest for one more day.”