From Inside These Wild Ones: Dispatches from Somewhere in the Entanglement

Some years ago, I launched an experiment: for most of a couple years, I lived almost entirely outside in local forests. Either with a tent or without, with only the breathing sky as heart-home roof, I called redwoods and rivers my home, my kin.

As the poem ‘The Silent Here of Things’ puts it in From Inside These Wild Ones: “I never walked so slow, never inhaled so many trees / savored so many stars / Dawn hung around my neck / like a sigil / river stones became emblems / of radiant belonging.”

Sometimes I would nudge into morning breakfast with swallows, mallards, deer, silver lupine, and the poet William Stafford or Ko Un on the riverbank. Other days were met with the scent of bay tree and bear, peregrine and the treasures of storms.

All this was by choice, a decision I made in order to live closer to the land, learn from the seasons, and align with my purposes. I wanted to lean into a multi-species, embodied, and soulful participation in the unfolding symphony of life. It was simultaneously one of the most grounding and exhilarating couple years in my life. It was not always easy, but never have I felt so consistently alive.

But truth be told, it was also a feeble attempt to escape—or at least not overly invest in—the values and conceits of Modernity, and its accumulated noise, machines, waste, and wars. While the story of that wrestling match is a different one, I can say that it provided me with both the perspectives and fuel to be able to stay rooted while also staying with The Trouble.

When I crossed the threshold of that pilgrimage, I had said I was apprenticing to the seasons and deep listening. To the call of poetry and guiding people into their own versions of deeper belonging in their own lives. The lessons and insights are incalculable, ones I am still integrating.

I learned everything is a window. I learned Everywho speaks and is unabashedly themselves. I learned a keener inter-dependence with the living and dying more-than-human world. I learned to caress the contours of a Grand Meandering pouring mountain hearsay into the ears of the sea.

Above all (below all?), I learned that whatever deep belonging is, it is something not earned, but inherent, by virtue of our intimate relationships within the animate web of life, as citizen of the Cosmos. There can be no loneliness in such a robust community.

All these are lessons and messages that can be difficult to hear within the stale scripts of an OverCulture that we inherited, one that has severed us from so much that is our human birthright.

This experiment in threshold living was the context in which the poems in the first books Re-Membering, High-Cooing Through the Seasons, and One Bright and Real Caress were born, as well as the majority of the poems found in From Inside These Wild Ones.

An anarchist ecology would remind us that we’ve only been inside this rusty cage of the OverCulture for a few seconds and here as humans for a few minutes, from the perspective of Deep Time.

Most of those minutes have not been cursed with the burden of over-civilization. Yet we’ve been here as Earth and Cosmos for billions—this ‘We’ is infinitely more entangled than we generally appreciated.

As ‘We Are’ puts it: The Era of I-Over is over. Deep We is calling.

The miracle is: we can always still lean into the raucous conversion of a world abuzz with vitalities. We can invoke our stardust and mycelium citizenships into threshold experiments. The biopoetics of fungi and watershed intimacies, of esoteric amphibianism and whimsical time-banditry with tree people suggest ways to not only join with coyotes stalking the perimeter of chronically-successful/gloriously-failed empires, but playfully put down paw prints into the dirt of a post-imperial butterfly earth.

In the end, my hope is that From Inside These Wild Ones can be a call to re-member and rejoin the animate web of life—welcoming mystery, longing, intimacy, and sensual delight as integral to belonging on/with/as Earth, perhaps sparking new apprenticeships along the way.

These are dispatches from somewhere in that Entanglement.

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You can get From Inside These Wild Ones from Amazon, Indiebound, or directly from me signed