When I first read an article about the Rewilding Institute, its mission undertaken for habitat conservation in the American Mountain West, I felt a sense of being called home. Awesome to behold a convergence between our tremulous human hold on earth, air and water--while population explosion is spinning off climate breakdown with destructive weather in ever more places, along with extinctions, water shortage, urban sprawl--and now this team of people has set out to restore--re-wild--degraded open lands that less than a century ago were strongholds of creatures like grizzly bears. A valid question: What might more and more Americans discover they've been craving? Truer answers might go a long way toward resolving widespread depression, apathy and morbid sedentariness / obesity among our kind. Earth was created to be home to a grand documentary of living species that we have seen pictured or read of. Don't many of us long, based on what's being lost, for a world that replays for us its most cherished legends that come back and back to us out of documentary and folklore, that upholds for us a realm of familiar, exotic or evidently perished types of creature, including the potential that we could meet them out of doors? What if we could live as neighbors with a spectrum of wildlife in all sizes and classes that we'd find ourselves describing while talking to each other? How about a habitat mosaic that could turn out to be historic at the same time as real. For a moment, take fear of the alien out of the picture and concentrate on the magnificent and the lyrical.
Why have people devolved to thinking that becoming civilized means paving over natural land, denuding it of long grass, brush and trees and controlling the outdoors as nearly as possible as if it were hallways, bedrooms, kitchens and conference floors? Yes fear, Dick DeAngelis reminds us in his documentary "BeWild to Rewild" featured on the Rewilding Earth website--and in great part a failure to know ourselves as extensively as we might.
What if we were taught early in life what justifiably warrants fear, out of a ranking of most to least likely sources of danger surrounding us? Most of us were as little children conditioned to fear living things like germs we can't see in the outdoors. Ongoing guidance about the storied hazards from venomous reptiles, rats, stinging insects, toxic bacteria and other threats to our health stemming from nature around us would provide us with reassurance about basic avoidance, or medical treatments easily available for treating what injuries might, if we're even a bit careless, occur. We could be taught to place fears of predators hidden in wild bushes, freshwater, grass and leaf litter in a realistic low ranking, below threats from muggers, shooters, leaking chemical storage sites, trucks careening out of control, etc.
If more and more people saw, instead of perils, the kinship between what grows in garden, grove and thicket we might be able to apply a fascination with the small-scale wild to bigger habitat that some still like to call wilderness, in a future when the mega-growth of our industrial civilization has, via natural calamity, plague and unspeakable tragedy been contained within a new understanding of limits. I'm leading to a theme of utopia here, yet what's inadmissible about utopian visions, especially in a present day when our collective modes of getting around and raising food and maintaining our comforts are so badly out of step with our life support here on earth?
Fear and shame underlie lifestyles so intensely tied to bodily comforts--luxuries, they used to be called--that half or more of us habitually eat much more than we need, sit our way through all forms of work and travel and contribute to climate havoc with the expectation that everything we do is substandard if it's not automated. Fear of bugs, bears or other vicious beasts goes way back and continues today; fear and shame about heading outdoors, having strength and muscular co-ordination enough to walk uphill and down are more and more the lot of modern people whatever our age, remarkably. Apart from people who suffer crippling diseases or neuromuscular trauma, ordinary folk in industrialized societies like ours have given in to a premise that riding something with a motor is their preferred option anywhere they need to go. With the mental acquiescence comes the body's own. With that mindset in possibly a majority is the acceptance of controlled, artificial indoor living and work space as a perpetual ideal.
On the larger topic of fear and shame, I found myself emotionally caught up in an article in The Sun magazine, issue 562 for October 2022, "All in the Family" by Mark Leviton, which was an interview with therapist Faith Friedlander. She cited common issues between adopted children and adoptive parents, leading up to her co-founding of a clinic in Ventura County, California with her husband, specializing in care for the adopted and for adoptive parents. Herself an adopted baby girl in the 1940s, she had tried kindling a friendship with her biological mom whom she had located during midlife but had met with a cold detachment and anger from the woman, by then a mother and grandmother several times over, who had given birth to her during a World War II military career. Single at that time, the mom had had a series of affairs with men unwilling or unable to make a commitment to her and did not know who the father was. As a trained therapist, Faith, warmly befriended by her newly-found half sister, could justify her birth mom's rejecting treatment on the grounds of intense shame she had undergone in that mid-20th century era when women who bore a baby out of wedlock were hushed and hidden by agencies set up to manage their collective plight. In today's terms it was a much-reflected-on genre of scandal in which women much more than men were held to blame.
I was riveted by the concept of shame and humiliation, but from my own daughter's perspective, from what she experienced through her growing up as a stepchild in two households. Though in each one we adults, at least half of us, tried to make her feel like a welcome and promising girl on her way to competent womanhood, she was also made to feel during some intervals like a mistake who belonged out of the way of the adults. I won't point out those who were most culpable but for my part try to rate myself as a loving, earnest mom who never-the-less had my own preoccupations, was negligent in ways my child didn't understand how to point out, but still spent hours, days, emotional energy, gasoline, frustration, worry, money and statements from the heart making sure this daughter knew I loved her, that her future beckoned, that she abounded in capability and had wonderful talents surpassing my own and surely others'. But still, now that she's far away, in her thirties and in a lucrative chosen profession, I never hear from her except in text messages, remote in tone and timing. She's a minimalist in regard to family ties. Yet I've come to a point of seeing that admitting to this as estrangement pains her; she has denied that it is estrangement. True to her character all the way back, she wishes not to hurt me. The article pointed out to me that our underlying problem is her humiliation, a thing I could never undo or apologize enough for if even she'd give me the chance.
Why there are these intense, generation-long frustrations and losses of privilege in all of our lives, ironies whose purposes we often struggle to name, which we could never have believed would happen to us, boggles us as we privately or out loud attempt interpretations, the process fading with the decades. We hope and pray there will evolve an ideal, gratifying outcome. Along with everyone, I suppose, in our smaller, vaster, more or less agonizing ways we've been wounded. And many wounds prove useful.
Last evening walking in golden October, with a chill like winter's from a cold wave lurching, abnormally early, from the Arctic all the way south to the Gulf coast, I thought to myself that art projects--I have two mixed-media watercolors pending, waiting for my return to a setting of cliffs and cedar tree configurations--are on a parallel with wounds to the heart. Or if wounds sound overly dramatic, then they're piercings. A fair number of us let such accidents happen to us by exposing ourselves to them in a scene not under our control, either sought out or unwitting. Our hearts and inner eyes were penetrated suddenly, tantalizingly or painfully, which we felt and still feel. To someone else the same thing might have only been something that just unimportantly happened--if to them it even happened. But as piercings or holes in us, they've left scars, and a scarred place in the act of healing is what an unfinished artwork somehow feels like. To heal as fully as we can, we have to finish the piece of art, thoroughly, attending to all details. We keep at it, even come back to it. By the end there'll be a healed scar and a creation we undertook, whatever it may be worth in the world beyond ourselves.
