Owning up to being animal, a creature of the earth. Tuning our animal senses to the sensible terrain: blending our skin with the rain-rippled surface of rivers, mingling our ears with the thunder and the thrumming of frogs, and our eyes with the molten gray sky. Feeling the polyrhythmic pulse of this place — this huge windswept body of water and stone. This vexed being in whose flesh we’re entangled.
Becoming earth. Becoming animal. Becoming, in this manner, fully human.
— DAVID ABRAM
The South facet of the Self — what I call the Wild Indigenous One — is fully and passionately at home in the human body and in the natural world. The South Self has a sensuous, erotic, emotional, and enchanted relationship with what David Abram calls “this huge windswept body of water and stone” and with each living thing in it — and, from the perspective of the South, everything in our world is alive, each rock and river as much as every herb and animal. The Wild Indigenous One is our most instinctual dimension, every bit as natural and at home on Earth as any elk, elm, or alp.
Like a youth in midsummer (someone, that is, in the south season of life during the south season of the year), the Wild Indigenous One is that dimension of our innate wholeness deliriously in love with our enthralling, sacred, animate world. The South facet of the Self would have us dancing through sun-drenched meadows, paddling down wildly leaping rivers, rowdily celebrating the full rainbow range of emotions rollicking through the embodied psyche, and recklessly declaring devotion to lovers in the form of blossom, bison, canyon, woman, or man. When in the consciousness of our Wild Self, we’re sometimes so at home in our world, so in love with Earthly creation, so fully present to our moment and place that, in an ecstatic rapture, we lose awareness of all obligations. Canadian mountain poet Robert MacLean celebrates a liberation of this sort:
Tent tethered among jackpine and blue-
bells. Lacewings rise from rock
incubators. Wild geese flying north.
And I can’t remember who I’m supposed
to be….1
Thanks to our Wild Indigenous One, we possess an uncanny ability to emotionally empathize and somatically identify with other life-forms, and are sometimes even able to shape-shift into them. The capacity to merge our consciousness with that of other species and terrestrial forms is something we used to enjoy as a matter of course when we lived in nature-based clans. And even our own children still do this — without our ever suggesting it or showing them how. Probably even we did this in early childhood. We can remember to do so again, as did Hermann Hesse:
Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far-off farm,
I hold still and listen a long time.
My soul turns and goes back to the place
Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,
The bird and the blowing wind
Were like me, and were my brothers.
My soul turns into a tree,
and an animal, and a cloud bank.
Then changed and odd it comes home.
And asks me questions. What should I reply?2
Is everyone capable of such communions and ecstasies? You know your own psyche includes a wild, indigenous dimension if you’ve ever felt privileged to be embodied as a sensuous human animal; or if you’ve ever looked into the eyes of a wild mammal, or a companion dog, cat, or horse, and experienced an irrefutable kinship with a fellow Earthling. Without doubt, you’ve had direct, unmediated experiences of your Wild Indigenous One if you’ve ever enjoyed the thoroughly somatic experience of a powerful emotion — not just the visceral participation in fabulous feelings like joy, but also in grief, fear, and anger, too — or if you’ve ever made love with abandon, howled into a starlit night, or skied powder snow as instinctively as a dolphin dances in the ocean or a hawk rides the wind. Indeed, your Wild Indigenous One was in full play the last time you were in ecstasy as you simply chopped wood, carried water, prepared a sumptuous meal, or savored a long yoga posture.
The capabilities and sensibilities of the Wild One are especially vital for those of us born into Euro-American cultures, because our South facet has been a primary target of Western cultural suppression. It is our South that enables us to most fully experience our unconditional belonging in this world, our native kinship and interdependence with every other thing and place on Earth. And it is precisely this sense of belonging and kinship, if widely experienced, that would render impossible the Western and Westernized cultures we now live in, which, despite our aspirations to the contrary, are largely ecocidal, genocidal, dog-eat-dog, materialistic, unjust, defensive, imperialistic — in short, isolated and isolating, the obverse of affiliated and collaborative. By cultivating the Wild Indigenous One in ourselves and in our children, we’ll go a long way toward forging new cultures that are not only life sustaining but also life enhancing.
David Abram reminds us that to be fully human we must fully inhabit our sensuous animal bodies, our enfleshed forms inextricably embedded in an animate world. By rewilding ourselves in this way, we moderns will rewild our world as well. This reenchantment is nature’s windfall awaiting us once we learn again to access, embrace, and cultivate the South facet of our Selves. And although this might not be easy, it’s simple. As poet Mary Oliver advises, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”3
SOUTH LOVE: EMBODIED, PASSIONATE ATTRACTION
In the previous chapter, I suggested that while all four facets of the Self are anchored in love, each facet features its own way of loving. While the North is rooted in a nurturing and generative love, the South mode of love is sensuous, sexual, emotional, and playful, like that between uninhibited lovers.
The modern Greeks use the words philia and storge for the North variety of love, both words connoting affection between friends and family members, or the love of parents for their children. Eros, in contrast, is the Greek word for passionate love, which can be understood as a combination of romance and sexual attraction. Romance is the West facet’s mode of love (which we’ll explore in chapter 5), while the South mode of love is a carnal attraction, a form of allurement we usually think of as existing exclusively between human lovers, but which also occurs between nonhuman beings and between humans and other members of the Earth community. It helps to remember that healthy sexual attraction is a much more extensive realm than the mainstream Western fixation on genitals. Sexual-erotic allurement is full-bodied and multisensory; it engages the intellect, emotions, and imagination as much as the flesh. Healthy humans naturally experience this kind of somatic rapture with sunshine, flowers, ocean, trees, fragrance, breeze, and land shapes. More on this later.
NATIVE TO EARTH
From the perspective of the Wild Indigenous One, we are wild not in the sense of being out of control, deranged, or barbaric but in the sense that we are terrestrially natural,
