Who The Wild Things Are
A new way of seeing when feeling out-of-body + reminiscing about South Africa
This past week I’ve forgotten almost entirely that I’m an animal. Not that I remember often enough to begin with, but lately I’ve been forging ahead at light speed with my entrepreneurial day job without stopping to feel what I feel—longing, heartache, joy, pleasure, curiosity. These spaces that pull me in and intrigue me and lead me away from work-work and spin me deeply into soul work. At the moment, I’m allowing myself to be a mind on legs in service of a machine; in service of not-yet-existent but sensed future treasures that need my mind more than my body. My body is clear: it’s okay not being an animal, just for right now.
I like remembering I’m a warm-blooded, soul-having animal though. An animal with a magic ability—creativity. It’s one of my favorite aspects of humanness. And slowly, with time, I am learning that my prowling lioness, who moves alongside endless inspiration, is not meant for constant contact with my human life. Sometimes shit just has to get done and it’s stagnating to the animal in me and it is what it is.
However, when I go too long without dancing through the center of my self, I get irritated and cynical. That kind of dancing is precious, and I do my best to make time for it even if it’s only tiny hits. It makes sense that we weird Westerners don’t willingly take more time to revel in our bodies and pick out the splinters lodged in our souls; it’s often painstaking, pattern-breaking work, and there are always be more important things to do, like craft an image and make money and stow it away for the dying days. But the dying days are now. They are all dying days.
The mind is a terrible master, a wonderful servant, and it’s incapable of perusing this physical plane. The animal can run further, wider, and wilder. But for now, the animal in me is voluntarily fasting and resting while the mind serves it. An unexpected prize: not giving her too much to feed on makes every small experience of creature-hood feel heightened, electric.
Sipping water and feeling its coolness run down my throat.
Luxuriating in the warmth of another’s body touched, barely, to indicate I need to squeeze by in a tight corridor.
Experiencing the shift in temperature as my forearms warm up over the stovetop while I cook.
Washing my hands of sticky film from handling cut autumn squash.
Being looked at by a stranger in a way much heavier than a gaze. And feeling watched.
Sitting on the floor in mental exhaustion only to discover that I can lie down and twist my lower body from one side to the other, my legs an entire planet spinning on their own axis.
It’s only in starving the animal that hunger becomes so acute.
I wrote this issue’s poem during my trip to South Africa this past June. I came across it today when I was feeling so out of body. I’ve been really interested lately in exploring love as an entirely physical experience, and it spoke to that. I love when poems become prophecies—though I did do some present-day editing of this particular poem.
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