Mourning the Wild Destroyed

Mourning the Wild Destroyed

There is a word in Welsh that has no English language counterpart. The word is Hiraeth. It is homesickness for somewhere you cannot get back to. Although generally this happens because things change over time, and is primarily used to refer to a kind of nostalgia, it can also happen suddenly when a place is destroyed. This essay is a reflection on the loss of a dear place destroyed by a person who purchased the land to ‘develop’ it. What they meant was to colonize it. To subdue it, to subjugate it, to place it into subservience, to tame it, to domesticate it, to render it ‘park-like’, of which they were proud. What they did, rather, was to tear the wild heart out of a pristine place, turning a living cathedral into a golf course. The video attached is filmed at this place: my response to discovering it thus raped, filmed the day after I came upon the destruction. –Natureza Gabriel, October 3, 2022

One of the key themes in our work is the awareness of the degree to which domination paradigms have harnessed and suppressed full emotional expression, which is often associated with the wild, the untamed, the primal, the indigenous, the pagan, and the feminine. This pattern of annexing our fully human responses tracks back at least to the Greeks, who forbid certain kinds of mourning rituals, and is then re-iterated in historical documents from the 4th through the 14th centuries. During plagues in particular, mourning was outlawed because authority wanted to utilize this energy for its own purposes. Authority doesn’t want it dissipated on something it cannot control.

One particular feature of whiteness, and the white mask that Franz Fanon describes, is its orchestration and suppression of emotions. Whiteness doesn’t want people to be too demonstrative, too loud, too vocal, too passionate. As a control structure it normalizes restraint and containment. We are taught not to be too free. The logical extreme of this statement is something like, “It’s against my religion to feel the movement of energy in my own body.” This kind of suppression effectively prohibits the full experience of our own interiority; circumscribes the kind of interoceptive contact that we are ‘allowed’ to have with our own internal experience. Our own internal wildness is foreclosed: it is off-limits. To contact it is demarcated ‘evil.’ This is the domination paradigm in distillate.

The great and obscene cost of this is that we become cut off from the spontaneity of our own vitality and intuitive responses to life. Allopathic medicine doesn’t even have a word for life force.* Its definition of life is negative. It cannot tell you what makes you alive, only when life departs and vital functions cease.

Yet all we have to do is watch young children from any culture to see this original energy in action. In Lakota, the word wakan heja, refers to infants and small children. Some of you may recognize the word wakan from Wakan thanka, which is how the Creator/ Creative Energy is referred to in Lakota. One translation of wakan is holy, or pure energy. Wakan thanka can be understood initially as Holy mysteriousing (Lakota is a verb-based language), or, as our friend, colleague, and mentor Tiokasin Ghosthorse teaches us, to apply mystery to everything. Heja is comprised of two words. He means here. Ja means energy coming from someplace. So wakan heja is pure mystery right here from someplace: infants. Uninhibited in their gestures and articulations, unacculturated into suppression of emotion, they express purely and spontaneously in the moment.

Anyone who has even taken care of a toddler knows that rage can sweep through them like a midwestern thunderstorm, out of the blue, but that it will pass completely leaving a clear sky in its wake. Small children express completely, hold nothing back, and do not accumulate residue. It is only when we begin interfering in this process, conditioning it, judging it, constraining it that they begin to become tangled in their own emotions.

Many of the diseases we treat in our work have their origin in the distortion of our primal energy processing templates. These are distorted relationally, in families, by faulty attachment when caregivers are not present, attuned, emotionally available, prioritizing the best interests of the children. They are distorted by lack of safety. They are distorted by lack of boundary clarity. They are distorted by whiteness, by the society-at-large, by rules of social convention and propriety.

Within this domain of expressing fully, one of the principal lacks in our modern society is around grief ritual. We do not have mourning rituals, either individually or collectively. If we understand that grief is love–is the response of our bodies when something we love has been taken from us, we can understand that to grieve is to love. When we experience relatedness with someone or something, a person, a pet, a place, and that thing is taken from us…when it dies, when it disappears, when it is destroyed, this relatedness is shattered, and grief is the primal expression of that loss.

So in a way, reclaiming our grief is also reclaiming our love. If we cannot grieve, we cannot truly love, because love, as an energy, needs to move through us.

In the thousands of trainings we have offered, we’ve never worried about people who were crying. It is the people who cannot cry that we are worried about. Because like anything that stagnates, when energies that primal do not have a place to move, they putrify, and when emotions putrify they turn into decay and death for self or others.

The video attached here is a response to the loss of a dear place destroyed by a person who purchased the land to ‘develop’ it. What they meant was to colonize it. To subdue it, to subjugate it, to place it into subservience, to tame it, to domesticate it, to render it ‘park-like’, of which they were proud. What they did, rather, was to tear the wild heart out of a pristine place, turning a living cathedral into a golf course.

I find myself wondering, in the face of this small loss that I could barely stand, how the Indigenous peoples of the world have tolerated our destruction for 500 years. I find myself weeping as I write this. Earth have mercy on us. Our ignorance rends my heart.

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*The romance language with this terminology, French, expresses it as élan vital: vital force. In Sanskrit, the life force is prana. In Mandarin, chi. In Japanese, ki. In ancient Egyptian, ka. In Tz’utujil Maya, N Kasea, which translates literally as ‘the ember yet glows.’ In Aramaic, the word is hayē. In Ioruba, Axé.

With deepest appreciation to Tiokasin Ghosthorse, to Carri Munn for your distillation around religion, and to Marilise Tonto, Molly Mcbride, Cathy Lamenzo, Lucy Viele, Moira Theede, and Susan Estep for holding my grief with such care.