From this new lens of animal-experience, I can begin to explain more thoroughly a number of other things, such as my paradoxical experience at Teaching Drum. I can begin to understand why it was both an empowering and a disempowering experience, why it helped me grow up and traumatize me simultaneously.
It was empowering and positive for me to the extent that I followed my inner drive to break out of domestication in mainstream life, to enter a flow of being that was connected to the woods life around me, to be a human animal living in much closer contact with nature.
It was disempowering and negative to the extent that it crushed my fragile sense of joy and exploration in my newly-inhabited animal self, by employing forceful methods and psychological acrobatics and manipulations to maintain my position. Even a love of chocolate can be destroyed by oppression.
The basic fount that I need to drink from is a joy of being alive. It’s not, I think, the type of spiritual joy that the word usually connotes. It’s a raw, aggressive exuberance that has a hint of violence and rage and cruelty in it, but only insofar as those are part of life. “Respect for life” and “joy in life” are oft-used phrases that carry gentle undercurrents, but that gentleness cannot encompass the violence of hunting prey, the forcefulness of giving birth, the power of a lightning strike, all of which display the power of life as much as enjoying a sunny day by a gently flowing river.
Past experiences I have sought have been attempts by me to seek out that dark animal joy, in whole or in part. The conundrum is that any attempt to systematize that experience destroys it. To be animal is to be wild. To be wild is to be beyond true control. Inner wildness is not to be tamed, only to be partnered with.
