Let's Go Wild
#152: 17 May 2026
Doing lots of travel this week and next, taking the easy route for this post by quoting someone else. I do believe that Modern, by stripping us of our ancestral inheritance and world view as well as any “rite(s) of passage” has done near-irreparable harm. Remembering not just how to be Wild, but the mechanisms that facilitate that understanding can only return great results. What ritual have you heard of that you miss experiencing yourself? Please leave your comment…..
One thing my teacher said to me one day has never left my heart.
He told me, quietly, like he was naming something obvious that we all spend our lives avoiding: most adults are only adults in body.
Most people never crossed a true threshold. No rites of passage that demanded honesty. No sacred initiations that burned off the performance. No wise elders watching closely, calling you forward, refusing to let you keep hiding behind charm or hustle or intellect. No living cosmology—no old, steady map of what it means to become human with dignity. So a lot of us grow up tall, pay taxes, sign contracts… and we’re still little kids inside, dragging our bruises through the world in an adult costume.
And I believe that is why ancient wisdom, rituals, and ancient cosmologies are so essential to remember. Not as nostalgia. Not as aesthetic. As medicine. As maps. As the missing architecture that helps a human soul actually grow up—inside.
Once I let that land, so much started to make a strange kind of sense.
So many “adult” behaviors suddenly looked like the wounded child in different disguises: the need to dominate a room, the addiction to being right, the panic when control slips, the tantrum dressed up as policy, the sulking dressed up as silence, the cruelty dressed up as “strength.” You can feel the small one inside the big body, grasping for safety with whatever tools it found.
And that recognition does something to the heart.
It deepens compassion, not the sentimental kind, but the kind that sees clearly. It softens the reflex to demonize—without pretending harm isn’t harm. Because when you can see the child, you can stop being hypnotized by the mask. You can hold the grief of it. You can stop taking the bait.
And it also sharpens boundaries.
Because understanding the wound doesn’t mean volunteering to be wounded by it, seeing the child doesn’t mean letting the child drive the car.
And then there’s the part that makes my chest tighten, every time I say it out loud: we are “ruled,” in so many places and ways, by people who are still acting out their uninitiated pain—tantrums with budgets, unmet needs with armies, abandonment wounds with propaganda. A child’s hunger for attention scaled into a national mood.
That’s the heartbreak. That’s also the invitation.
If the world is full of uninitiated adults, then becoming truly adult, in the old sense, the sacred sense, stops being a personal self-improvement project. It becomes an act of resistance. A vow. A devotion. A way of refusing to let the wounded child run your life… so you don’t hand that wound to everyone else.
It becomes a Wild life, lived by a Wild soul.