Walking Your Wildness Into the World
There’s your wildness right there.”
I wake from a dream with these words in my ear — spoken by the oversoul, or the higher self, or whatever it is that speaks through us in the hour before language returns. And I write down what I know to be my instinctual truth:
“I believe everything is connected and alive. That energies have true power threaded in reality — not as parts or concepts, but intricately woven into the fabric of existence. That these archetypes and entities, mythical beings and goddesses and many worlds cannot be cross-translated but only understood on their own ground. And if all this needs to fit inside a framework for you, then you are just like the colonizers and the patriarchy that oppress and try to kill off all the wild magic left on this earth. ”
[And then I hear the words: There’s your wildness right there.]
This is the dream in which my wildness showed up.
Within the dream, I had just taken mushrooms in my guide’s office. I told her I would not be lying down during this journey. I would need to sit up. I would need to use my normal, clear voice at full volume, the whole way through.
She propped me up on the couch. The medicine began to take hold.
The wild cats were already in the room.
At first they were small — she told me they were a domesticated breed, imported from somewhere far away, and we admired them together. I meant to say look how they’re striped like tigers, because they were, but what came out of my mouth was lions. Within minutes they were lions. Mountain lions. A mother and her baby, moving through the office like it was not an office. Like we had all been transported somewhere else — somewhere wild. Or maybe the wild had come to us.
MY WILDNESS HUNTS ME DOWN, DREAM, AUGUST 21, 2026
The mother sat with her back to me, guarding me. I began to pet the baby.
“Oh wow,” my guide said. “You are really something else.”
Then a warning, she said, “You’re going to have to scale it back now.”
I knew what she meant. My energy was matching the mountain lion’s. I was meeting her as an equal — or something in me had forgotten she could kill me. I tried to pull myself in, to make myself smaller than the wild animal.
But it was too late. The mother had begun to circle me. Stalking. She walked away from us. And then she turned, and she lunged at me.
I was on the floor with her. Her paws gripped in my hands, holding her claws away from my face. My knees on her chest, my full weight pressed into her throat. Her claws were digging into my palms and I could feel each one going in.
My guide was standing back, looking for something heavy. “Drop it on her head,” I told her — my voice still clear, at full volume.
The baby was coming for its mother.
“You’re going to have to kill the baby!” I heard myself call out, before I woke up.
I didn’t want to have to kill it, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to reason with it.
They keep hunting me down in dreams. These giant wild cats. They try to kill me, so I kill them first. We’ve been doing this dance for years.
The tiger is always my heart. The other giant cats are sometimes goddesses who have refined their feline powers into presence. Other times they are not goddesses at all — they are raw, instinctual nature that has never been tamed, and is ready to be walked into the world through my own embodiment.
It is a delicate thing, wielding these energies. Like wrangling an out-of-control fire hose. The human has to hold reverence for the animal part of them — the part that has never known such a thing as an unexpressed self, because it just is. And with that wildness comes the whole of the universe. The prima materia. The unmanifest, magical, ready-to-be-alive substance underneath everything the world tries to explain away.
That’s all this wildness really is: more aliveness for our bodies, our hearts, our souls. The human just has to step out of the way. Never try to reason with it. Always meet it in reverence. And when it comes back into the heart where it belongs, walk it into the world.