Walking to Wild

From the Feral

Dear Staunch,

The triggers and traumas that inhabit my body have had quite a time dancing with reckless abandon in this latest storm—whooping and hollering, spinning about, calling all the moves until the cows come home.

My nervous system hasn’t had a workout like this for a while. . . Now I’m taking time to rest + repair in preparation of the next storm because storms, they will come. One never knows when the next trigger will get triggered—such is living in the now.

In this aftermath, as I nurture my nervous system back to calm, I best keep an open mind, cultivate more clarity. Otherwise I alienate, as is my wont. Every tempest: a teaching. Every day: a lesson. Responses such as isolation, denial or avoidance are not options—those are false romances, pretenses of protection.

We are always inextricably interconnected. All forms of energy impact all forms of energy. And so it goes. Inevitable, the world.

Meanwhile, grace, kindness and (self)compassion are some of the truest stars I invoke in order to navigate. Look up, sing praises.¹

Calming my triggered-self necessitates becoming myself; “work going beyond survival and fear tactics.”² This includes actively participating in a quiet, calm, outdoor, physicality that helps to battening down the spin out. To steady the shrill and quivering rope lines of my nervous system while loosening the clench in my gut.

So I walk. I walk with purpose. Walk in. Walk through. Wall away. Walk there. Walk over. Walk up. Walk down. Walk towards. Walk back. I walk to wild.

Walking to wild is to pass through feral: Re-routing my un-mappable fearful + chaotic trigger responses of fight, flight, freeze and fawn—that discombobulate + confuse my body, mind and emotions.

Wild adapts; feral is undisciplined. Feral feels unproductive and untrustworthy; dark, with no opposition of light; one thousand momentary deaths with no glimmer of one redeeming or reconciling procreation. Having escaped captivity, my feral outsources shame, blame and burns down bridges to any interior introspection. Feral feels like destruction with no Phoenix rising. Feral conjures feral stories—cornered + poisonous narratives with spirit-crushing endings that demand my attention. Hungry ghosts ceaselessly murmur torments with forked-tongues—pushing chisel into granite to carve their fixations into enshrinement—a most solemn + durable form of delusion, grandeur and obfuscation. Feral can spew distraction and judgment, snaring obedience. Feral has no house training. It could help with the dishes but won’t. It doesn’t say please, thank you, ask questions or make eye contact. Feral doesn’t feel safe.

So I resist, I resist, I resist. This is good—not futile. This is exhausting—this is empowering. Gaps come in cultivating an on-going awareness of that which is feral and that which is wild. A discernment, a softening. Moving from fear, denigration, aggression, censoring—towards spaciousness, grace, curiosity, creation.

Note to self: Everyone is on their own journey with nothing more attached thereto.

So this:

1. I’m committed to privately writing through my triggers for myself only. Part of this practice includes daily Morning Pages from The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. This stream of consciousness is creative release. There’s no right or wrong. Here I can purge my feral into words never meant to be sentences nor read by any others’ eyes nor spoken into any others’ ears. What good could possibly come from sharing this kind of shit show? That is a rhetorical question.

Living in anger begets anger; rage begets rage; silence begets silence. These are endless, futile, despondent, dissociative, habitual, fearful ways of being. This is not an original thought.

Meanwhile . . .

1. I am getting to know my anger, appreciate it. Woo it. Work with it. Sing to it. Move it. For my growth³. Because like Banner/The Hulk, I’m always angry.

2. My body knows what safety and home feels like better than I do. I have my digestive disease to thank for teaching me this.

3. For years, I served up my daily cup of righteous indignation that flowed like self-serve free-refills of scorching, black + bitter coffee at an empty 24-7 gas station off the loneliest highway in the loneliest world—then I repeated a similar ritual in my kitchen, same toxicity though literal; daily doses of alcohol drank liberally through the evening once NPR’s All Things Considered theme song⁴ hit and all this nearly killed me. I allowed all this to nearly kill me.

   Even though the feral stories I told myself were awful, I determined them true and right; even though my cynical addictions to righteous indignation and alcohol felt like crap; even though I always felt worse, more anxious, more frail and more aggressive afterwards—and even though I felt trapped in a hell of my own making and that I was so sick + disgusted of being stuck—I still clung to make-believe pedestals built out of my unimpeachable anger. Why?

4. What an asshole.⁵ I, as idiot. Those are not rhetorical statements. These are parts of me, parts of my story. Cue; self-compassion.

So yes:

Now, now, now, I am devoted to my healing,⁶ to my radical teetotaler life, to clarity and to this: mining the roots of my anger, triggers inherited or otherwise. I suspect the ancients aka Fear and Grief are originators. Perhaps I’ll keep you posted on what I discover. Perhaps not. These are my caverns of native elemental minerals for me and me alone to mine. I’m betting all of us have our own. I leave that to you.

And please:

Go ahead, call this being self-absorbed. Or vulgar. Or whatever else you want. Close this window, stop reading, unsubscribe, turn the dial. It’s okay, I take no offense. You don’t have to be here, there’s no attendance taken. And besides, I no longer hold myself to the impossible account embedded in the insidious programming of A Girl Must Be Nice in order to be liked + to please everyone, meanwhile failing everyone and anyone, including me.

To paraphrase the illimitable Pema Chödrön, ‘Why would I care what you think of me?’⁷ In other words, that’s just stupid.

Because:

There’s no time to waste. I have no time to waste. “Do not waste my time,” my gut says, “We have things to do.” It’s all process.

Now:

“The only rule is work.” After the storm, I dig and dig and dig. I walk with purpose,⁸ with healing, with horses.

I walk from feral to wild.

When a horse shows you who they are, believe them. ~ old interweb adage.

Lastly:

A few things I’m reading and what’s been scattered around my bookshelf of late including some #SoberOctober lit:

Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker

Stash: My Life in Hiding by Laura Cathcart Robbins

The Small Bow newsletter mostly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio and Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it.

Susie Middleton’s Sixburnersue newsletter on Substack

The Liar’s Club, by Mary Carr

Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book

Chelsea Hodson’s Tonight I’m Someone Else

Geoff Rickly’s Someone Who Isn’t Me published by Rose Books, its #001 title. (see Chelsea Hodson) and this review of the book by Catherine Spino: Crisis of Character on Black Lipstick.

The Left Hand of Darkness by writer Ursula K. Le Guin

Thank you:

I gotta go take my feral and wild⁹ out for some air. Thanks for reading. I love you. Even if I don’t know you, I love you. I’m glad we’re here together. Peace.

Alice

1. Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

2. The Three Commitments: Walking the Path of Liberation by Ani Pema Chödrön, Audio.

3. Audre Lorde, 1981: The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism

4. Decades ago when I first toyed with quitting alcohol I thought if I stopped listening to All Things Considered in order to eliminate the pavlovian-like response I had to it, this would help me stop drinking. That didn’t work. Nothing worked until it worked. Message me if you want.

5. I am a former ostomate. Consequently, I will never use the word ‘asshole’ to disparage the mighty and miraculous anus.

6. When Hannah Frances talked about being devoted to her healing at my kitchen table, I stole that right off and haven’t looked back since.

7. The Three Commitments: Walking the Path of Liberation by Ani Pema Chödrön

8. Anna Darrow, professional teamster, horse-whisperer.

9. This discernment of feral and wild was inspired by the author, mythologist, storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw. I’m sorry to say that I can’t cite exactly where in his published works I heard this inkling or if it was a direct quote of his that sparked something within me. Either way, Martin Shaw, thank you.