I drive with the Saab roof open, both windows down; the notebook almost flies out the window into the suction of other cars passing. If it’s a Saab going by, it can take my writing. But it’s not, and I reach over to hold onto my notebook, stuffing it under my purse on the passenger seat.
Wildness has credibility. The right kind. I’m not a party monkey, I don’t dive off cliffs, get drunk. But I don’t have many of the barriers that humans usually have"mental fences. I bend the wire, avoid the barbs, chainsaw the posts. There’s a lot of wilderness to the mind.
The virtue asserted itself physically when I was little. I was naive, lacking inhibitions, testing rules; I refused to wear shoes and I refused to play with Barbies. Dad and Mom found this behavior disturbing. Now the freedom is in my mind and people respect it. They never say it, but they secretly want it.
In love, wildness is the air you breathe--otherwise, you'll shut down. If new territory isn't being touched, the love wilts, becomes a stark growth of anger, a blaze doused within a moment. On the other hand, people sometimes push so hard for newness that it resists them. They wear out. The cure is learning how to open your mind without trying to truck in wildness in like a commodity.
Wild. The word denotes a loss of control, a loss of knowing the consequences or a refusal to abide by them. People have a choice to be wild. Do they? Or is it human nature to shoot boldly into the backwoods of behavior?