Maybe because it is Summer. Or, because I am experiencing what I call a recycling of emotional energy, as time loops in a spiral. Or, because mortality has been visiting. Or, because I have been sleeping on the ground, to keep myself low and simple.
Whatever the cause - this personal season has included the return of the Wild Son. There is, equally, a Wild Daughter. But because of my maleness, and more visceral relationship with the masculine, the archetype explored here will be mostly referred to in its male representation.
I became consciously aware of the Wild Son in the book Sweat Your Prayers, by Gabrielle Roth - a pulsing, poetic, elegant system which lays out the theory of her Five Rhythms movement practice. A must read for any embodiment freak or dancer. Once it was presented and broke into conscious awareness, I began noticing the rising and falling of various waves and rhythms as they naturally occur in daily life.
The Wild Son is primal instinctual energy. He rebels against structure and authority. He rebels against the dutiful, rational, dryness, and authority of the Father. He wants to remain free at the coastline - both physically and metaphorically – where the most powerful and raw elements meet in a dynamic way – sun, sea, wind, and sand. In the Soul’s realm it is where we find fire and water together - the alpha and omega of elements. If this energy is indeed close to the sea, as it is on the west coast, then the Wild Son is an emanation of Poseidon energy, producing a volatile, sexy, instinctive, alive masculine energy that takes form as surfers, beach bums, rock n roll princes, or movie star heart throbs.
At the core of his push, expression, strength, and power is the desire for Freedom. U2’s, Where the Streets Have No Name is a Wild Son song:
I want to run, I want to hide
I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside
I wanna reach out and touch the flame
Where the streets have no name, ha, ha, ha
I wanna feel sunlight on my face.
Then, there is a wild-er-ness poem that I wrote recently:
Rain in Summer
Heavy rain came that summer,
the sky was vapor, the soil
plump and deep.
Serpents rose from their
holes, looking for higher
ground,
Turning toward golden light,
yearning for gleam.
Someone opened the gate
to the wilderness inside
us,
We wandered as wild sons
and daughters,
Wanting everything, breathing
up and through, and roundabout.
Flesh, desire, music -
Energy bodies made of stars.
We are the poison.
We are the medicine.
Life force will not be denied.
If we have lost vitality, passion, sexuality, animal nature, or exuberance, we have probably lost contact with the interior Wild Son or Wild Daughter.
The 1999 film, American Beauty, depicts Lester Burham’s mid-life crisis as his life has become as stale and boring as cardboard - practical , but dry and lifeless, then easily discarded. As events unfold and his imagination is set on fire by his daughter’s best friend – who becomes a kind of muse for him – he regains his Wild Son by buying a 1970 Pontiac Firebird, starts smoking pot, lifting weights in the garage, and finally finds brings some backbone to his marriage, where he had previously been passive and asleep.
Rebirth of the Wild Son!
The Spiritual Prince
The Wild Son is passionate and intense, exuberant, and emotionally expressive. He takes risks, rides the edge, and we cannot deny the inherent danger that hovers around him. Some are drawn to that flame, and some are afraid of it. Some both.
In my last men’s circle, our session was focused on Buddha nature. One of the topics that organically arose was the necessity of challenging and intense practices in balance with softer, receptive, and gentle practice. The loveliness of peace, comfort, and ease along with the need to trash it and go the edge of your will.
The Wild Son tears himself away from the warm breast of the mother. He is Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers. He is Buddha under the Bodhi tree, declaring he will not rise until he has attained enlightenment. He will sit in a Zen sesshin for 7 days, meditating most of that time, stripping away what is comfortable. These are top of the pyramid Wild Sons, evolved and seeking truth and transcendence. They are emissaries, upon which centuries of dogma are created, then handed down through generations. They are rebels with a cause.
Warnings of the Wounded Wild Son
The Wild Son or Daughter is often connected in a visceral way to their wounds. It can be a cavernous wound which makes him more feral than wild. More disorganized and chaotic without enough skill, discipline, or self control to play a Jimi Hendrix guitar riff or stay atop a big wave. Or, finish college and get the degree. He can fall deeply into addiction and never surface again. Or, he may ride lightning and for a variety of reasons, does not have the nervous system to contain it or regain equilibrium. There are a lot of Wild Sons on the streets who broke and keep surviving in this more animal than human existence.
My own distinction between wildness and feral is that wildness finds healthy, more mature expression aligned with gifts and purpose. It finds a way in the world and the culture to express and share itself. A race car driver harnesses speed as he hugs the turn. An entrepreneur harnesses wildness in building a business and selling it for millions. A hunter rides the wildness wave, spending long periods in the elements, deals directly with life and death, and stays close to the food chain. Finding the electricity, the current of the Wild Son and opening to its vitality, or creating something worthwhile is part of the potential of this energy.
Being feral is unharnessed, undirected, sometimes wounded or trauma-based, and often addicted. Shoeless addicts waving their arms in the air at the corner and asking for a buck are feral. The woman under the bridge looking for meth is feral. People with severe mental illness and psychosis that are uncontained or too unruly are more feral than wild. Feral expression can become criminal or psychopathic as well. This is part of the danger that vibrates behind Wild Son or Wild Daughter energy, when animal nature and shadow forms possess and take a life under.
We all have wounds. Some of us ignore them. Some of us consciously work with them. Hopefully, our psyche is strong and developed enough to contain and grow from them. And some of us, still break.
In Buffalo, growing up, one of my best friends had an older brother. My buddy and everyone in his family was high level, intelligent. The older brother was part of that generational wave that came about 5 years before me. Some segments of that group partied a lot harder than we did. The story was, he did too much acid and lost his mind. Became feral. When my buddy and I were in our teenage prime and I would come by and pick him up to go out for the night, big brother was always lounging around in his underwear. Didn’t go anywhere. Didn’t work. Just had that low hanging gaze that seemed to express his bewilderment from having crashed on the rocks of life.
There is a current crisis among a large segment of young men. It’s real and growing. As a believer in reincarnation, I sometimes wonder how many men’s souls are carrying trauma from our collective, ugly history of war and killing. How many men died at 18, or 20, or 22 – or held their buddy’s belly together while it bled out – and simply don’t know, or don’t have the “habit” in them of living into middle or old age?
The Wild Son’s edge can harness a great tech idea at the right time and place, and create a Steve Jobs, or it can self destruct.
The Wild Son’s shadow cannot be denied, and we would do well to take its intensity and potency to heart. We want to direct the potent life force of the Wild Son to express ourselves authentically or artistically, to claim and live our sovereignty, to break free when we feel caged in, to build a business, to express our purpose, or to make art. If this primal energy goes in the direction of hurting others, lashing out, acting without a moral compass, or most often, being self destructive – then, its shadow has gripped us. While the Wild Son is often characterized as a party boy, I strongly believe that mixing this primal energy with alcohol or drugs is risky business. The spark of life force can quickly become a blaze we can’t control. California is America’s home base for the Wild Son energy. It’s interesting that one of its bigger challenges of this terrain is Wild Fires. Sobriety and the Wild Son actually make for a purer blend of vitality. We see this most often in athletes and disciplined artists, who once partied hard, but reach new zeniths of creative power and success once they become sober, and take care of their bodies.
Wild Son as Artist
Many Wild Sons find and express themselves as artists. Actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, poets, and spiritual leaders. To the extent that they are infused and expressed with the vital, creative, pulsing thrum of nature – then the Wild Son lives through them.
Wild Sons in our era:
Jackson Pollack
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Led Zeppelin
Mick Jaggar
Early U-2
The band, Tool
Race car drivers
Jim Morrison
James Dean
Early Marlon Brando
Osho
Whether you call yourself an artist or not, or whether you have an art that you practice and share - we need ways for the Wild Son to inhabit our psyche without destroying us. We need its vitality and aliveness and make our own blend of animal nature, human nature, and spiritual nature. A good alchemist can carve away the gold (medicine), and sequester the lead (poison). That’s what we need so that the Soul is both alive and developing. We can certainly evolve or rise past our primal nature, into higher, more peaceful, elegant, refined dimensions of being - but as Ken Wilber’s evolution mantra suggests, we must transcend and include, not transcend and repress. And then, there is the Dionysian dictum: everything in moderation, including moderation. Moderation is the middle way. But if we get too comfortable, cling too tightly to safety and boundaries, we close ourselves off from the extremes and polarities needed for the disruptive, creative chaos needed for art, zest, and wisdom in life’s inevitable cycles of death and rebirth.
How I Keep my Wild Son Alive
Dance - One of the healthiest ways I have found to contact and live the Wild Son is in ecstatic dance. Barefoot. Sole (soul) of foot to ground, to earth. The first contact with gravity, earth. Different tempos, changing rhythms – loud, hard, fast, then slow, syrupy, sweet. The Wild Son is let out of his cage, makes contact, finds union in movement, releases what has been held or suppressed. In the middle of a dance, Chaos often erupts – where masculine and feminine meet. This is when I roar. Just to hear him. Just to know that he is still in there.
Cycling - Another way I make contact is riding my mountain bike outside. I have a great trail near my house that cuts through the over grown concrete development of Houston. The bayou runs through it. It’s swampy, damp, with plenty of bird howls, squirrels, rabbits, and occasionally a snake sliding on the trail ahead of me. Cycling takes me back to my childhood roots and excitement in summer. My bike was my first instrument for Freedom, my first Wild Son instrument. Some boys get a guitar. Others get a bike. My first vehicle for exploration - to see, feel, smell, and hear the wilderness of my neighborhood. To hop on and peddle away, to explore, to leave the familiarity of home and family. To go to where I wanted to go.
Soma – Soma is the Greek word for body. It’s also an ambrosial drink of immortality in the Rigveda. Somatic work – which includes working with movement, breath, posture, and emotional awareness, muscular contraction and release – for healing or pranic circulation and expression – are ways to free the Wild Son and remove obstacles to his flow. The Wild Son or Daughter is deeply connected to nature, and to the animal nature of being human. The body is a product of nature, a form that slid out of the Tree of Life. When we breathe deeply, make sounds, press into blocked, tight areas in deep muscle, feel both the pain and possibility of being alive, when prana moves though us like a storm, or soft rain, when feeling strikes like lightning, or we dissolve into emptiness and float around the room – the Wild Son is alive! Embodiment is core to his connection with Life.
What is your relationship to your Wild Son or Daughter? Has it been locked away in a room for a long time? Are you past middle age and have told yourself, “I am too old for all that intensity. I just want ease and peace and security now.” Are you young and free and sovereign, but somewhat feral? Haven’t figured out how to express your art, or make a living for yourself, or struggling with addiction? Always living on the edge. Has your wildness turned dark, aggressive, self destructive and needs to find ways toward healthier expression? Have you given up completely on what was once wild and free in you?
May we all find and cultivate wise ways of wildness. And may that energy keep us healthy, vital, on-purpose, and joyous.
If we are lucky, part of us grows old and dies.
And something else remains forever young.
Blessings on your journey!
Ψ
Beautifully written, Robert! I've been trying to touch in with more of the Wild Daughter (thanks for the term) in my painting. Of course, my man Subhuti was a Wild (never feral) Son, disciplined by his thirst for spiritual understanding and freedom.