As you might expect, we see a lot of wild things. I mean wild in every sense! We see wild flowers, wild animals, wild people, wild encounters, wild weather, wild places, and just wild things in general. It’s hard to imagine, but I much prefer wild things to anything else.

Somewhere along the path we lost our fears of most wild things. We forgot about the scratches and the thorns. The dangers were just dangers. We became more in tune with what we were doing. We became in tune with each other. We became in tune with nature. We became wild things.

It wasn’t apparent just how wild we had become until I got laid off recently and was removed from the wild places for a while. Don’t go sniveling now about that – it’s a story for another day. I look back, even right now, and it’s hard to believe we had become that wild. It’s a little scary actually and a lot exciting. I can’t wait until the day I truly become wild….through and through.

We stopped thinking in terms of us in a wild place – instead the wild places were comforting. It was as if we couldn’t breathe, grow, think, or operate if we didn’t go into the wild for a while. We would mope in the office. Send emails about our next adventure. We would talk about only how we couldn’t wait to get out into the wilderness. It seemed only natural that we should want that.

What I didn’t realize was that the transformation was much more complete than I could even know. We had grown roots. That reached in the soil when we exited the truck. We touched plants as we walked and smelled things. We didn’t talk as much. We just were. We knew some of these wild places well. We started taking a lunch and exploring. Sometimes we would lay in the weeds under a tree and just listen and talk quietly.

We started talking about things we didn’t want to. We started sharing pain. We started letting out those things in us that needed space – wild space. We talked about life and death. We relived moments best forgotten. We let leaves stay in our hair as we cried and screamed out those things that hurt us or made us feel angry. We vented. We gave it all to the wild things….and they absorbed us and our hurt. They absorbed our sorrows and our tears fell on fertile, willing soils. We became freer, lighter and more eager to let things out.

Next came the joys. We laughed and sang more. We connected in our work. The work was better and so were we. We knew more, we lived here. We felt things that needed to be done. We realized how happy we were out in the wild. We loved the wild things. We wanted to stay here. Every day it became more difficult to drag our gear into the truck. I would touch one thing more before raking myself out of the grass. We became something amazing.

I can’t say when or where exactly. I only know that we became less of what most people are and more of what most wild things are. We were something new and old. We weren’t just working. It became personal and we became passionate about our work. It stopped being work. We stopped just working. We started feeling it, breathing it, and it coursed through us like the blood through our veins.

It would have been so easy to keep going. One day, just keep walking into the woods. Grab handfuls of grass and leaves and just lie down in the mud. Float downstream and laugh at the fish watching the wild girls float by. There are days I wish we would have kept going, kept floating, kept breathing…Kept going wild.