Wildness

Wildness

Transcript for Wildness (Full Episode)

Multiple Speakers: [00:00:00] Okay. What is, is wildness? What? Spontaneous wildness outside of your comfort zone? Spontaneous. That's outside comfort zone, lack of control that you can't necessarily, I guess it's the adrenaline rush of control. We endeavor to be, oh, I don't have to give much of a signal. I just have to, A lot of us, it's a stretch to get wild rain.

I can feel my eyes. The world's in such a hurry. You see people on the phones all leaning forward, hanging onto the main little wildness is freedom. Really letting them just fly terror. Part. Awe.

Andrew Forsthoefel: Uh, my name's Andrew Forsthoefel. I'm a radio producer, aspiring writer walker, wild man. Hopefully. There was one night, I think it was January, and I took a walk in this field off campus and it had snowed, so everything was kind of muted and every, the moonlight was shining on this white snow, and it was just serene.

It was everything I wanted. I was going to this little cluster of trees, pine trees that I would like to go to, and just as I am about to enter the entire canopy erupts. Just, you know, like I hit the ground, freaked out, let out one of those like, you know, and it was probably 30 or 40 Turkey vultures. They were like phantoms, you know, in this dark night.

And that was wildness. I wasn't in control. Of what I was feeling or even speaking, I wasn't thinking anything. I was just in all feeling and I was scared. After I realized what, you know, I wasn't gonna die. I was then just totally astonished. And maybe that's the follow up to wildness. Once you realize you're gonna be okay, there's kind of this like after high, just kind of like a.[00:02:00] 

Oh my God. Well, I'm not sure. You can be in a constant state of wildness maybe, but it's exhausting those moments and that's why they're moments. 'cause it's like it happens and then it's over and you can like recover for a second to sustain a constant state of inspiration and terror and awe, that's just, it's too much.

You gotta be bored sometimes.

Christy Hartman: From Little Red Riding Hood to Robinhood, people like to tell stories about the forbidden, dangerous woods where wolves and outlaws await. They're not always fables.

Mason Alfred: Perhaps you remember the story of Chris Dorner. In February, Dorner, a former cop, went on a deadly killing spree in retaliation for being fired from the LAPD. He issued a manifesto alleging incidents of police brutality and racism that led to his firing. He vowed revenge on officers and their families, but then there was this strange public reaction to Chris Dorner.

Some people saw him as a hero, like the mythic outlaw, who robs from the rich and gives to the poor. This view is prevalent enough that the New York Times ran an article titled, don't Mythologize Christopher Dorner. Stanford history professor and expert on the American West. Richard White has a theory about why some people saw Dorner as a hero for white.

Donner's story is deeply rooted in the romantic history of the Wild West.

Dr. Richard White: And that's the classic Western hero. It's the Gunfighter. The gunfighter is in these stories, somebody you need in your side, but the danger is they can turn against you and be extraordinarily dangerous. What happens when you go to a place where you are no longer fully in control, which is a wild place, and what happens when in fact you are no longer fully in control of yourself, which means you're a wild person and then you're a danger [00:04:00] both to yourself as they see it and to other people.

And that's where things get really ambiguous and really people have ambivalent feelings about it.

Mason Alfred: And now to be clear, there is nothing heroic about hunting and killing innocent people. And it's not Chris Donner's actions that are ambiguous. It's actually a relationship with wildness itself.

Christy Hartman: You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Christy Hartman, co-hosting with Joshua Hoyt.

Mason Alfred: Each week we pick a common human experience like listening or haunting, and bring you stories that explore and deepen that experience. This week we're exploring wildness. When is wildness on our side, and when does it have to be eliminated?

Christy Hartman: Today we will not be talking about wilderness, but wildness. These ideas once meant the same thing.

Mason Alfred: The way Richard White describes it, donor evoked both ideas, wilderness and wildness. He went into the woods as a wild man looking for refuge. Instead, he found a resort. With its own cleaning crew. Donner didn't make it very long as an outlaw. He was cornered near Big Bear Lake, a year-round resort destination that attracts as many as a hundred thousand people on peak weekends.

Christy Hartman: To understand how the idea of wildness became separated from wilderness, we're going to get a quick history lesson from Professor White.

Dr. Richard White: Christ goes out into the desert, into the wilderness. So the wilderness is a place of exile. The wilderness is a place of horror and terror and danger.

Christy Hartman: Jesus lives for 40 days and 40 nights in the desert and stares down the devil, and it's not the last time that wilderness scares the bejesus out of people.

Fast forward to 19th century America.

Dr. Richard White: Um, in the 19th century, Americans did not trust what they regarded as frontiersmen because in fact, they thought they were contaminated by wildness. They had become wild, they become untrustworthy.

Mason Alfred: But of course, [00:06:00] the west didn't stay wild. Technology changed, populations grew, the land was surveyed and mapped, and somewhere along the way we stopped demonizing wilderness and started conserving it.

Dr. Richard White: Wilderness begins to take on a new form, and it's usually the romantic era where wilderness now becomes the place where in fact, you can really see God. The concept that comes into play is the sublime.

What you really wanna believe is out there is something bigger than human beings untouched by human beings, which works according to a set of rules, which cannot be altered. And there is a set of meanings which are separate from us, which we can go out and discover.

Mason Alfred: And this change in our view of wilderness affected our view of wildness. If the wilderness is divine because it's wild, then maybe we wanna be wild and divine too.

Christy Hartman: And that's how we're going to launch our show today with this idea of wildness as both a place of terror and a place to find meaning. And as you'll hear later, we don't have to go into nature to find it.

In our first story, one Stanford student who grew up in Los Angeles discovers what the natural world can give us.

Mason Alfred: This is author, journalist, and lecturer at Stanford University, Andrew Todd Hunter, and he's taking his son on a journey.

Andrew Todd Hunter: I went to Death Valley over spring break with my family, the five of us and my son, who's 12, it's a really interesting, it's kind of a pivotal time in his life. He's discovering many things. We went out walking at night. We went into the, into the great dunes and we lay in the bowl of one of these great dunes and all we could see was the starlet sky and the darker field of the sand, you know, the big shoulder of the dunes around us.

And we lay there on our backs on the, on the, on the cold sand. And he looked up at the stars and he, you know, it was extraordinary to see him have, for what I believe to be the first time, for the first time in his life... to have this, what seemed to be kind of like a deep awakening [00:08:00] as a being in this universe, you know?

And, and he, he just thought, wow, this is amazing. These things that I'm, that I'm seeing, that I'm, you know, I feel so tiny, and yet, and at the same time, I feel, I feel, I feel huge. I feel like I might spin off this dune and like fall into the stars. These are the kinds of things, um, that, that wilderness gives.

Mason Alfred: Andrew believes students should be exposed to the wilderness.

Andrew Todd Hunter: When we get out, things start to awaken,

Mason Alfred: and this is Andrew's job. One of the courses Andrew teaches at Stanford is the rhetoric of wilderness. Last fall, I took Andrew's class, but writing about wilderness in a classroom isn't the same as being out in the thick of it. So Andrew leads a trip for students every march. Andrew takes a snow camping in Yosemite National Park to build igloos in the snow. According to Andrew, there are lots of interesting things that happen when you're learning something with your hands and your mind.

Andrew Todd Hunter: We got Cat Mandu Curry going over here.

Oh, that's a good one. I've had that one. This one's totally dead. You don't want that, right?

Mason Alfred: This is Andrew. On the first night, thought you guys were. I sit down next to him with my microphone.

Andrew Todd Hunter: Wildness. First thing I would say is that, uh, it's distinct from wilderness, right? I mean, there's wilderness and then there's wildness. And you can have wildness in the inner city in, in any instance, right? Human, human beings and domesticated animals. Um, weather, I mean anything. I mean, you know, wildness. Is a kind of a behavior. Right. I mean, you know, to what degree do we cultivate wildness? To what degree do we, to what degree? As a, as a culture and as individuals, do we, um, do we repress it?

Do we fear it? Dionysus Yeah. Right, as opposed to Apollo. It really, it goes back to that kind of the Dionysus- Apollo split.[00:10:00] 

Mason Alfred: According to Andrew, sometimes we need to go wild and sometimes we need to act with restraint. Wildness, he says, is about being Dionysian, like the Greek God, Dionysus, the one who was always drinking wine. The craving for  Dionysian ecstasy drives you out under the stars into Death Valley, into Yosemite.

But what happens when you bring someone to a wild place? Who has always said no to wild places? Someone who has always said no to going to parties, to hopping fences. No to hanging out, no to not worrying about anything. Someone who believed in sacrificing pleasure for some other reward. How does someone like Osvaldo Murro, Ozzy for short, end up in Yosemite snow camping in March?

Osvaldo Murro: In high school, I was very much that straight. A student that, you know, school, school, school, and nothing else mattered. You know, I felt like getting good grades and, you know, making all these sacrifices, you know, that was the keys to success.

As long as you, you know, stay true to the formula, every single door would be open to you. My name is Osvaldo Murro and I am from Los Angeles, California. Freshman year, first quarter is school what I'm supposed to be doing. I felt like, you know, all these classes were taught with a certain student in mind and I just wasn't that student.

Mason Alfred: What came to mind was a book he'd read in high school English, huckleberry Finn.

Osvaldo Murro: Huckleberry Finn, this boy that you know, did what he wanted and it was just this. This stark example. It was, it [00:12:00] was in direct contrast to everything that I had been doing in my life. Huck Fin book, the rules, and yeah, and then there's me.

Mason Alfred: Ozzy wanted more of that for himself.

Osvaldo Murro: You know, Andrew told us about this hiking trip to Yosemite and I just. The second I got that email, I RSVP'd and started making plans to join everyone else.

Mason Alfred: Growing up in Los Angeles, camping wasn't really a huge part of his childhood. Ozzy didn't, especially even like snow.

Osvaldo Murro: I just, I never had any good experiences in the snow. Like every time I, I went, it didn't matter what I was wearing. It was bone chilling.

Mason Alfred: When the time came to actually go to Yosemite, he was excited but nervous.

Osvaldo Murro: You know, I was just this worry that, you know what, if something doesn't go right.

Mason Alfred: We've driven east from Stanford, the highways are dead. We get to the park, leave the car, put on our backpacks and enter the forest.

Osvaldo Murro: We hiked and eventually we got to this point, this turning where we hopped off the trail, and from my perspective, it was as though we were hiking through the complete wilderness. Andrew threw off his bag and said, this is it.

Mason Alfred: It's late, so we're only setting up tents like we've planned.

Osvaldo Murro: Yeah. Went to bed in our tents. It was freezing. Uh, the tents were freezing. We woke up, had breakfast.

Mason Alfred: The first thing we did was carve a large table out of the snow.

Osvaldo Murro: I mean, we were super impressed with ourselves. We thought, oh wow. Like this is awesome. This is gonna be easy. Um. And then we started building the igloos, and that was a completely different story. Uh, there was five tent groups. And so the initial plan was, all right, five tent groups, five igloos.

Mason Alfred: We had these stations and we'd rotate. So at one station, someone sawing blocks of ice, someone else [00:14:00] is shuttling them over to the site of the igloo and someone else is actually putting it together, patting down the blocks.

Osvaldo Murro: And like, you know, an hour in less than that, 30 minutes in, we realized. Okay. We'll be lucky if we can finish one.

You know, the first few times that, you know, I rotated into, you know, working in the little ice quarry, um, you know, I just realized, gosh, this, this job sucks. You know, it's getting wet, you know, it's, it's cold. And you know, these things that are enor-- these blocks are enormous. And, you know, you cut out this enormous block of ice.

You spend so much time with it, and when you try picking it up, it snaps in half and you think, dammit, I just gotta, I gotta start another one.

Mason Alfred: At this point, people leave the quarry. They rotate to other jobs. Everyone except Ozzy.

Osvaldo Murro: You know, after alternating for a while, I don't know what it was. I just got into, you know, one of the quarries and started sawing out these blocks of ice. After doing that for a couple of minutes, I thought, you know what? I'm gonna keep on going. I got into this, this, this trance. All I cared about was getting the best, most perfect block I can get. Nothing else mattered. Next thing I knew it, it was getting dark and just slapped on a headlamp and I kept working.

I wasn't cold. You know, my back wasn't sore anymore.

And I just felt like I have to finish, and I spent about five hours in that quarry without alternating. I just got, I just, I, I have never experienced that before. I didn't stop until like the igloos were essentially done. You know, I stood up, [00:16:00] kinda took a deep breath, and I realized. Holy cow. I'm tired. And, and it, it, it, it, it was as if like everything just came swarming back.

Mason Alfred: If we hadn't finished the igloos, we wouldn't have died. We had tents as Ozzies carving these perfect blocks in the balance between safety and discomfort. He lets go and experiences ecstasy just like Andrew's son, protected by his father out on the dunes in Death Valley. Ozzy too loses himself in work. He feels huge and why shouldn't he? He just built a home out of water.

Osvaldo Murro: After building our day glues, we had a handful of candles and we just kind of went in and lit them up. Um, and they were absolutely gorgeous. I felt this excitement. That I hadn't felt in a very long time, and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Who gets to do that? Who builds an igloo and sleeps in that?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's hard work. It's, it takes a, it takes an afternoon.

Osvaldo Murro is a freshman at Stanford University. The story was told by Mason. Alfred, also a freshman Mason. Alfred, Mason. Alfred, at Stanford and produced by Christie Hartman.

Joshua Hoyt: In our next story, we'll introduce you to a Stanford graduate student who's very frustrated by what modern society considers normal behavior, an abnormal or wild behavior, and it has to do with something pretty simple.

Annalise Lockhart: This is Jordan.

Jordan: I'm a graduate student at Stanford University in a program called Learning Design and Technology. It's all about learning to design technologies for learning.

Annalise Lockhart: But this story starts long before graduate school. It [00:18:00] starts when Jordan hit adolescence. All of the happiness that he had felt as a kid.

Jordan: I was just really bubbly, really exuberant.

Annalise Lockhart: All of that vanished.

Jordan: There was just this huge switch from the world, being colorful to the world, being really drab and gray.

Annalise Lockhart: It got worse in high school. Jordan was already having a hard time and he couldn't deal with the focus on grades, the enormous pressure to claw his way into Harvard, Stanford, or another top tier school. The heaviness was so bad that he left. He finished in a community college and there he took a course that started him down a new path, one that would lead him to find the source of the dark feelings he had felt ever since middle school.

Jordan: I took a class called Sociology of Gender. The last optional assignment in that class was to go cross-dressing in a public space. Um, and only four people in the class did it. Um, and I was one of 'em. I just felt like I, I absolutely had to do this.

Annalise Lockhart: So Jordan and his four classmates decided to go to the most public space they knew of the center of the high school social world.

Jordan: Yeah. I borrowed my girlfriend at the Times' dress and uh, went to the mall. I got changed in some dressing room, you know, thinking like, okay, this is just, you know, for my sociology paper, of course. Went and met up with the three others.

First, that walk from the dressing room to to our meetup spot felt like the longest walk of my life. Um, you know, I was alone. one dad in particular like pulled his daughter away 'cause she was like staring at me. And I think he was one of the ones who was just like, oh, that's disgusting. And then once I met up with my friends, then, you know, we were like a pack at that point.

So it's like, okay, we're kinda safe, but. People that we encountered in the mall were, were really uncomfortable, would kinda laugh when they saw [00:20:00] us. So it would be like, Hey, this is like a joke, right? Um, and we would play along by saying, yeah, yeah, it's a joke. It's for a class. Or we would kind of hyper exaggerate the way we were acting.

You know, two of us were dressed as girls, we're like, ha ha ha, look at us, we're in dresses. And, um, we act like girls and you know, it's ponytails and eyeshadow. Um, and, uh. Yeah, that experience stuck really deeply.

Annalise Lockhart: Um, in what sense? Were they deeply like you were just like guess?

Jordan: Uh, no. I was more like, no, no. I mean, it was, it was very, uh, I don't know. I guess I didn't realize how traumatizing it was at the moment, or just how much the experience meant to me. Um, it just. Yeah, like all those comments were so painful that the only way I really had to file them away was like, well, good thing I'm just doing this for a sociology experiment, because otherwise this would really hurt.

And it's a good thing. And it doesn't hurt because it's an, it's like a sociology project, so it's fine. 'cause why would it hurt? 'cause it's just like, there's, wow, people are really interesting. I should write this in my paper, how hurtful people would potentially be if I cared about this, which I don't. So, um, you know, so it felt very much like that.

Annalise Lockhart: There were a couple of other episodes like this in undergrad at Berkeley. He went to a few weird theme parties where he could wear feminine things without feeling like he stuck out, and he slowly started to realize something.

Jordan: I'd been seeing a therapist for a while at that point, you know, because of those dark, heavy feelings. And so I sat down with him that session and I was like, listen, there's something that I need to say, but I have no idea what I wanna say or how to say it. But I just feel like there's something about my gender or my sexuality or something that's not really right. And yeah, and then that kind of changed everything. Like, you know, not immediately, but just at some point, a few sessions in, I kinda checked in and was like, [00:22:00] whoa. That dark feeling's gone.

Annalise Lockhart: What Jordan figured out is that he doesn't totally feel like a guy he can pass as a man, but inside he feels more feminine. This, according to Jordan, is called being transgendered. Now the term is always in flux and different people use it different ways, but saying you're transgendered doesn't necessarily mean that you are completely the opposite gender than you were born with. Or that you've had a sex change operation, it has nothing to do with your sexuality. Transgendered means that you don't conform to the gender identity or the gender roles that go with the sex organs that you were born with. In San Francisco, where he was living at the time, jordan found places where he could be more himself, even though he realized that he felt more like a girl.

Jordan: It still wasn't exactly obvious how to act like one. There's so many sprays and products and oh my God, there's like so much stuff. It is, I, there's so many hair types and so many different levels of, I mean, you know, in guy training, all that stuff is just like, shampoo and conditioner in one single generic, giant bottle.

Just put it in your short hair.

Annalise Lockhart: But Jordan got on okay. And a lot of that was due to living in San Francisco and Berkeley. If you're going to think of the mainstream American culture, the mall high school, the office as the village, well, SF and Berkeley are kind of like the woods, or at least the edge of the woods. And in the woods you can be a little bit wilder.

There's the Castro, there's the Haight, but in general, there's an air of permissiveness around dressing flamboyantly, or even not dressing at all. You can be someone who looks like a man and dresses like a woman relatively easily. But Jordan wanted to be able to be himself in places that were a little closer to the heart of the village.[00:24:00] 

And he had the opportunity, Jordan had realized his new identity as he was preparing to leave SF to go to grad school at Stanford in the South Bay, the success oriented, more conservative South Bay.

Jordan: And that for me was especially big because growing up down here, I just associated the South Bay with, you know, everything here is so scripted and everything is so by the book and contained and everything's about safety and, um, repression.

So I was determined to come to back to the South Bay and conquer that and say, okay, well I'm, I'm, yeah, maybe that's the dominant environment down here, but that doesn't mean it's the way I have to live my life.

Annalise Lockhart: He was excited.

Jordan: So excited to go back to school. You know, I was taking a class that was all about, um, you know, using laser cutters and 3D printers to fabricate and basically just creating toys for learning. And also thrilled that I could be in a space like that, that's what I could be doing every day.

Annalise Lockhart: But Stanford was more intimidating to Jordan than he had expected, and he felt himself losing that sense of color he had found elsewhere. Literally.

Jordan: I guess they wear, uh, usually some kind of colored jeans, you know, whether it's black or maybe an ever so slightly stylish gray. Um, sometimes a little khaki could even get corduroy.

Annalise Lockhart: Yeah, that doesn't sound like colored jeans.

Jordan: No, not at all. Uh, you know, safe.

Annalise Lockhart: And Jordan's classes were full of deadlines, expectations, and result oriented thinking. It reminded him of high school. The heaviness came back, the heaviness that had made him leave his high school.

It all came to a head at the end of fall quarter, Jordan was giving his second major presentation of the day. It was for a cell phone app.[00:26:00] 

Jordan: We had literally 30 seconds to get up in front of 500 people and just pitch this final project that we'd worked on all quarter. So we got up in front of this crowd of judges and other students and did our little skit, bite-sized learning just makes it so fast and easy, and it's just so intuitive and, and user-friendly.

And you know, now I love learning programming over my mobile phone, you know, bite-sized learning. I love it. And that was it. And that was, wow. So why did I lose so much sleep and work so hard and you know, stress so much and all that. Oh yeah, for this 30 seconds on the stage to, you know, show this mobile app product and this environment that's all about mobile app products and startups. And yeah, that was pretty indicative of especially how I was by the end of the fall quarter.

Annalise Lockhart: And then one day he took a walk.

Jordan: I suddenly singled out by someone who said, "Hey, you" and I turned around and said, yeah, said you look like you would really enjoy joining us for a ecstatic dance on Sunday mornings. And I was very taken aback. I had no idea what that meant in any way whatsoever, um, but you know, that day the sun was shining. Uh, I have, you know, my hair tied back in a ponytail. Maybe I looked like someone who was a little more free-spirited. So, so I said, uh, okay, well tell me more. What does that mean? She said, well, you just, uh, you come, it's Sunday mornings, 10 to 12, no shoes, no talking. Um, and we just put on tribal music and you dance.

And I thought, I guess that's something to keep in my back pocket.

Annalise Lockhart: And then a few weeks later.

Jordan: I threw on my comfy green flowy pants and just kind of a flowy t-shirt, and I rode my bike over to the community center and took off my shoes and stepped inside, and it was. Pretty much what you would expect for it to be, people dancing like crazy, [00:28:00] pumping tribal music and, and people, you know, silently, they're dancing by themselves or doing contact improv, um, kind of rolling off of each other. You know, at first I was a bit shy, um, and kind of went to the back and just meditated for a little bit and thought. You know, it seems like a nonjudgmental place.

I can kind of just sit back here and, um, you know, just close my eyes and just listen to the music and probably no one's gonna have a problem with that, so I'll just do that for a little while. And then gradually as the dance went on, you know, I just went through this whole journey of, you know, at first dancing a little bit and then dancing a little more, and then dancing a little more.

And, you know, at first not really wanting to dance with. Anyone just kinda wanting to dance in my little space and just kind of wanting to twirl around and hop around and just kind of move a little bit. And by the end I was really, you know, like contact improv with the rest of 'em.

Yeah. And felt very, very nonjudged.

Uh, I guess I got hooked. Um. There was a, a feeling that I had there of release that I think I was in need of, especially at Stanford.

Annalise Lockhart: And as it happened, that was part of the key.

Jordan: Yeah. So then, uh, the next week I came back, um, and this time I came in a dress, lovely purple dress that I love.

Annalise Lockhart: And Jordan kept coming back wearing a dress. This was the first place in the South Bay where he felt free to explore his identity, where he felt non judged.

Jordan: You know? Okay. So I come in, go over to the front of the room where there's usually a little bit of space, [00:30:00] and I close my eyes and I just, I dance in a really contained manner, just on my own 20, 30 minutes into it. Um. I'll just feel the need to kind of step away, uh, go over to the meditation section. Um, feel all the emotions that would come, uh, that would be, you know, sometimes terror. You know, like, what am I doing? Why am I wearing a dress? This is, uh, crazy. Uh, sometimes, um, just a lot of joy, empathy, like, you know, good, good for you for doing this. I'm really proud of you. Um, sometimes anger, just a lot of anger.

Annalise Lockhart: Anger might be the last emotion you'd expect someone in a dress at a crazy hippie dance party to feel. But Jordan says it makes sense because he doesn't want to have to take off the dress at the end.

Jordan: You know, usually when I'm there, there's this infuriating realization that, you know, I'd probably do this more often if I wasn't so terrified of how people would react. Um, you know, this is good, this is being true to myself, but if I were to go to a class like this, probably most people would be extremely uncomfortable, and that would make me extremely uncomfortable. Feeling like I need to confine myself to these kind of radical, outside of the normal world spaces to feel like I can sort of explore myself without feeling threatened.

I'd be happy not to like tear down the safe world so much to just expand it, to encompass so many more things. You know, like it's totally okay to go and let go and dance like crazy, like that's not. That's not some sort of wild transgressing thing. It's, it's just a, a normal, healthy thing to do. It's normal and healthy to sort of explore wearing different things and explore different kinds of ways that you wanna identify or think about yourself, um, that's not like wild and crazy. That's really a healthy and that, yeah, ideally people would embrace that.[00:32:00] 

Annalise Lockhart: Ecstatic dance is kind of a practice for that. It's a space to practice letting go of his anger and his self-consciousness. He sits until he's ready.

Jordan: And then I'm just dancing. You know, the more I twirl the, the nicer it feels, it feels really nice to let my hair down and just twirl in a dress That's really fun. Um, gosh, I feel more like a ballerina. Um, you know. I just like long, graceful movements. I like twirling a lot. I like to take up space. I like to sort of find open spaces and then be able to, you know, dance and twirl around. And I'm thinking of Billy Elliot right now and the very last scene in that movie where, or one of the last scenes where, you know, he's interviewing for this ballet school and ask him, um, you know, just one last question, Billy, before you go.

What does it feel like when you're dancing. You know, you kind stare off when he says, you know, it feels kind of stiff at first and then, you know, then it feels like I'm flying, you know, like a bird or like electricity, you know, it sort of feels like electricity. So, yeah, those aren't my words, but that's very much how it feels.

It's kind of, yeah, free.

Joshua Hoyt: Jordan, whose name we have changed is a graduate student at Stanford. The story was told by Annaa Lockhart and produced by Rachel Hanford.

Christy Hartman: Our next story is about the most quintessential wild behavior. Well, one of the most. It's somewhere up there with survival of the fittest and conquering that which is [00:34:00] trying to eat or destroy you.

Darlene Franklin: I got punched by a close childhood friend in high school. Okay, we were wearing oversized boxing gloves. But I know she wanted to make it hurt.

It was our school's day on the green junior year of high school. Kara and I were friends, but she'd been holding a grudge against me. She thought I'd taken her place in our circle of friends. All this was pent up for years until the day we wandered out of class, up onto the grass soccer field and got in the ring barely.

After I even got the gloves on, she came at me. I could feel her weight pressed on me, her pent up anger coming through those absurdly large gloves. As she wailed at me, I realized something. Inside of a ring wildness can just disrupt out of you. Fighting is a chance to go wild.

Maybe it's obvious why fighting is wild, but in case it's not. Here's why I think so. Fighting means encroaching on someone's being. It's the ultimate domination. Sometimes it means life or death. That's why I try to avoid it. What could motivate someone who spends all his time thinking about fighting?

Someone like Liam.

Liam Purvis: Um, my name's Liam Purvis. So if you turn on the TV in the United States and you see guys fighting in a cage or a ring, it's probably, um, it's called MMA Mixed Martial Arts, that's a sport. You don't gouge the eyes or go for the groin or pull the hair like you can't kick to the head of a grounded opponent.

And that's more or less it.

Darlene Franklin: Liam's been kicked, choked, elbowed, and hurt in just about every way imaginable, and he's done the same to other people. He had a match coming up in a few weeks [00:36:00] and I thought it would be a good time to interview him to figure out where his craving for wildness comes from.

Liam Purvis: I was like a barrel chested, really energetic kid always growing up. I felt like I had never had this outlet from this physicality that I wanted, you know.

Darlene Franklin: Liam's parents suggested he try football. He didn't know the rules, but that didn't matter.

Liam Purvis: I was like, what's happening coach? Like, don't worry, you're defensive line. I'm like, okay, I'll tackle the guy with the ball.

Darlene Franklin: But Liam decided football wasn't quite right either. Next, he tried wrestling. It seemed like a good option. It was physical and very combative, but a technical complication due to Liam being homeschooled, got in the way.

Liam Purvis: So I couldn't wrestle. I was just like, come on.

Darlene Franklin: But then some girls he knew asked if he would join their ballet troupe, which would later tour, or through Europe.

Liam Purvis: I said like, yes, totally. So actually for most of high school, I, I danced.

Darlene Franklin: Okay. So far. Liam wasn't the person I expected him to be. Not in a lot of ways.

Liam Purvis: Modern was kind of the base and they did a lot of like clogging or um, tap.

Darlene Franklin: He's poised. He's smart. He likes ballet.

Liam Purvis: Ballet is like by far the hardest thing I've ever done. Just pure difficulty.

Darlene Franklin: It was easy to forget that he's built his life around beating people to a pulp. I figured he had to have an underlying driving impulse that he can't ignore something within his nature, giving him an intense craving to fight. So I asked about what led him from ballet to fighting. I figured I'd see where the wildness took cold of him.

Liam Purvis: I moved to California and I had just turned 19 and I really wanted to try and [00:38:00] fight and do this thing. So I found this gritty Muay Hai gym in Oakland, you know.

Darlene Franklin: Muay Hai is the national sport of Thailand. It's a more than 500 year old sport based, as far as I can tell, on repeatedly kneeing your opponent in the face.

Liam Purvis: The teacher is like straight from Thailand with like crazy sacred geometry, Buddhist tattoos all over and like barely spoke English, you know.

Darlene Franklin: Liam had been searching for something that would give him that thrill of competitive physicality.

Liam Purvis: The MMA is kind of the epitome of that.

Darlene Franklin: For his whole life, liam only suspected he'd like fighting. He'd only ever been in one fight in grade school.

Liam Purvis: He, he kicked me and I like hit him. I hit him like, like three or four times and like stopped for a second. I remember thinking like, okay, then all I needed to do is defend myself, but I'm like, uh, this feels pretty good. And I hit him a few more times and then like it got broken up. That was the only time I can, I can ever remember getting into a fight like that.

Darlene Franklin: Liam knew it was a powerful feeling to win a fight, but to become a fighter. He also had to take a beating. Years after his only fight in grade school, he got that lesson at the Muay Hai gym in Oakland.

Liam Purvis: Sometimes I've literally, literally been like crying while I'm sparring just because like that's the only normal reaction to like this much punishment received to the hands of another human being. You know, you're just like, I really hope they think there's a sweat right now. 'cause I am crying.

Like you, you know, you want to give up so bad, but if, if, and if you do, then, maybe you're not cut out for fighting, because why would if, if you can't, like, they just wanna make sure that you'll push through in times like that.

Darlene Franklin: Liam took his licks at the gym in Oakland. Then a job transfer, brought him to another gym in the peninsula. He found he was pretty good at fighting. He had a sense that he was doing what he was meant to do, that he was becoming in tune with himself.

Liam Purvis: There is that deep curiosity of like, how good can I get? How can I, how will I do in these extremely stressful situations, you know?

Darlene Franklin: But Liam still didn't know if he was a [00:40:00] fighter. All he had was his intuition, so he did something wild. He went to Thailand to fight.

Liam Purvis: I traveled for 18 months between now when I moved to California and now and um, I, I was in Thailand for about three and a half months and I was there as able to focus entirely in Muay Thai. He went in the city of Chang Mai and found a coach. His name is Chun, and he was like 4' 10. This tiny tie guy who fought at like 95 pounds or something, I think probably the best coach I've ever had.

Darlene Franklin: And under Chun's tutelage, Liam won some fights. The bell rang and I, I was like, let's do this. And I, I knocked him out in the second round and I was like, alright, cool. Three and a half months passed. He won more fights. His reputation grew.

Liam Purvis: You have to like weed your way through like some like Lester opponents initially before you like bypass the bartenders and like taxi drivers, so you actually get like good opponents.

Darlene Franklin: Liam became convinced that his place in life was in a ring.

Liam Purvis: I'm doing what I love to do. This is like my dream to be doing this right now. I'm this most safe and comfortable space. I'm exactly where I need to be right now.

Darlene Franklin: At the time of his final match, Liam's goal in life had become very specific.

Liam Purvis: It's all about kicking in Muay Thai. And even though of my four fights previously in Thailand, I already knocked out two of the guys from like, with like head kicks. My coaches like still weren't satisfied with my kicks. They were like, nah, not quite there yet, Liam, you know, not quite there yet.

Darlene Franklin: But his opponent had other ideas.

Liam Purvis: This guy was really, um. It was really good. Like he would just like eat whatever. I had to come in and clinch me and then just like totally dominate me in the clinch. He'd [00:42:00] like throw me to the ground and my knees hit the ground, but I'd still be like kneeling in front of him and he'd like knee me right in the solar plexus as I was facing and I was like, oh.

Darlene Franklin: Liam ended up losing the fight. He was pretty beat up.

Liam Purvis: Like super bruised shin. I could like rip the leg hair out of my shin and feel no pain because it was so like trauma, like traumatized.

Darlene Franklin: But it was what happened after the fight that mattered most to him.

Liam Purvis: I remember like motor biking back to the, to the gym late at night with like my coaches and some of my teammates, you know, and it was like that day before I was like flying out of Thailand and um got some like fish and chicken, like, like soup going, and I, I bought everyone some beers. You know, I can't sit on the chicken and like, Ty's, like, Liam, your kicks were good tonight. And I was like, hell yeah. Like, yes.

Darlene Franklin: Sitting next to Liam in Palo Alto, I'm listening closely trying to hear something wild, but instead I hear something very different. I hear motivations that I can relate to: community, learning, relationships. It turns out what drives Liam is very unwind. He agrees.

Liam Purvis: That's really funny that you bring that up because um, I was like, it's cool they're doing this thing about wildness, but like actually being a fighter is like the least wild thing.

You're like totally restrictive diet. Training every day, like with the same people that you totally trust a lot of old school fighters like abstain for sex for like months beforehand. You, it's like, it's almost like, it's like the very opposite of what, what was we consider to be wild? You know? I think the only wild thing is like people wondering like, why would people do something like that?

Why am I getting in a cage and like in front of some cheering crowd of people and like [00:44:00] locking the cage door and like, I do not know why I would do that. It's a wild thing to be doing. Like that's, I, I feel that's, that's a, that's, that's, that's wild for me.

Darlene Franklin: A few weeks later, I'm at Liam's fight. It's his first sanctioned MMA match in the United States. I'm here because I understand why Liam fights, but I have a new question. Why am I so eager to watch him fight? It's your typical expo scene. Ring girls in booty shorts, groups of supporters in matching neon t-shirts, vendors selling muscle milk and hot dogs. Bright lights illuminate people in fold out chairs. The chairs circle a thick chain link cage the focal point of the event. The air smells fresh as if a ritual bath has taken place, like people came ready to partake in something sacred.

Liam's match is the first fight of the night. Liam and his crew make their way to the ring.

Liam's opponent rushes forward kicking and punching. Liam sees a window of opportunity between them. Gets hold of his opponent. Liam pulls him down, legs pinned to his opponent's side. Liam swing slow controlled punches at him. Like two steady swing pendulum, left fist, right fist a ground in pound till the ref calls it a knockout.

The whole fight is over In one minute, 51 seconds. Liam wins the match.

Liam seems to be radiating. [00:46:00] Friends and family, teammates and coaches, they all give Liam hugs and shouts of congratulations over the music. I get swept up In the excitement of Liam's win, I could feel the energy build up in my chest, but I felt like I had to keep myself in check

After Liam, the weight classes noticeably increase. I stay to watch these other fights. I don't even know these other guys. I didn't come invested in them, but I began to feel that the intensity might bring me to tears. I'm excited to see these fights play out, but part of me is worried what that says about me.

It's not basketball or football. In fighting, wanting your guy to do well means you want the other guy to go down and get knocked out. But then you're like, oh, well you don't actually want the other guy to get hurt. It's not like one team is scoring more technical points than the other. It's one guy down on the mat, getting punched in the face until the ref decides he's had enough.

Fight Announcer: Alright, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the case, julius!

Darlene Franklin: A guy is down and I see a man in the crowd who winced as hard. His friends stand on their chairs screaming his name.

Spectators: Go!

Darlene Franklin: A man directly behind me is yelling with focused intensity. I turn around to look and I see a young toddler bouncing on the shoulders of this man.

And in this moment I understand the appeal of fighting [00:48:00] family. Friends, everyone unites in intense anticipation, intense thrill, intense sympathy. All eyes are on the fighters and our hearts are compelled to follow. Then the fight ends, we're released.

When I think back to that day in high school, getting knocked down by my friend in that fake ring, I realized the rings we create sit on the edge of wildness.

Christy Hartman: Liam Purvis is a Muay Thai fighter currently living in Palo Alto. This story was told by Darlene Franklin and produced by Charlie Mintz.

Joshua Hoyt: Now we meet up with Dr. Martin Shaw, guest lecturer at Stanford,

Christy Hartman: who tells us what happens when we don't have elders.

Dr. Martin Shaw: There's a lot of energy for the word wild at the moment, which is, which is good news in a way. But you can bleed, you know, you can bleed a word dry very quick. You can drag the salt out of it. Wild is in great danger of that happening to it. I would only have to start putting wild more repeatedly into workshop titles or evening events, and it fills seats, it touches in on a longing that we all have that, you know, the media driven world that we're all being propelled through at hyper speed cannot touch.

We ache for a deeper life, and wild seems to be connected to that.

Molina Lopez: This is Martin Shaw.[00:50:00] 

Dr. Martin Shaw: My name is Martin Shaw, uh, and I come from Devon in the United Kingdom. On paper, uh, I am an author, a mythologist storyteller, and a wilderness rights of passage guide. But to be honest with you, the thing that I suppose I'm most interested in and aspire to is an old Gaelic word, uh, called a Seanchaí.

And a Seanchaí is really a cultural historian of a place. So in other words, they're the go-to woman or the go-to man for a small geographic region that they've spent a lot of time in, and they know the gossip of the place. They know something about the hedgerows, they know about the plants, they know about the big epic sagas that people have told about this place. They know the small, intricate, witty stories of their family's relationship to that place, but it, but they are a kind of a little cosmos. I always say grass does not bend under such a foot. You know, they're, they're magical people. And if ever we needed enchanters in the world, it is right now. Being in Northern California where we're doing this interview, I'm gonna make sure the stories of the redwoods that surround us in this particular patch, i'm gonna dig into this and I'm gonna know about this as, uh, one of the great Californian poets, Gary Snyder says, be famous for five miles.

When a story comes to me that I, I feel motivated to tell, it's normally when I, when I sense that smell or that taste has come into the story, like. All my life, I had not known this color or this taste, or this smell existed, and I go, oh, it's alive. I didn't know they brewed this anymore.

Molina Lopez: These smells, these tastes are significantly lacking, especially for youth.

Dr. Martin Shaw: Never in history have people of the same age initiated each other. It is [00:52:00] not appropriate for a 17-year-old girl to know what another 17-year-old girl needs in terms of an initiation. A woman knows what a 17-year-old girl needs, and that's the place to go. Uh, and when you take away the notion of elders, the desire for wildness doesn't go, but the possibility is that it grows savage.

Savage is not the same thing as wildness. Um. You know, it's the difference between having your brains knocked out in a mosh pit and the, the glorious aura of a flamenco dance. We can see there's passion in both, and actually I like both forms, but we can see in one that there is skill attached to it and steps and a certain kind of, uh embodied elegance.

So in other words, the last 20 years of my life, certain periods of it have been spent working with at-risk youth and kids on the streets and gangs. All of that behavior, gang behavior, the naming of a gang, the initiation rights to be in it, the marking out of territory is to have an experience of wild material.

If you don't create a situation like a vision quest fasting on a mountain, if you don't create an avenue out into the wild where that young person brushes up against the Lord and Lady of death, if you don't do that, they'll find a way of doing it themselves without anyone around to keep the thing boundaried and in what I would call to use an old fashioned word, a sacred context.

Molina Lopez: Martin knows that we have this problem in the U.S. We lack an authentic connection to our wildness. We lack a relationship with elders, but the wildness is in us. It's just a matter of turning to the land, tuning into our dreams of dipping our hands into ancient stories.

Dr. Martin Shaw: That's really, I think a crucial part of work for modern Americans is can they get [00:54:00] still enough, even if it's just a few hundred people a year, to go out into the deserts or the Black Hills of South Dakota or to the, the Great Forest of the Pacific Northwest and just sit and see what happens. 'Cause there's a conversation ready to be had and if it doesn't happen, you know, we all know where that's heading.

We are living in a place absolutely adrift with ghosts. We're adrift with ghosts and we do not have the psychic depth and the, uh, the broadness of spirit and the holding of community to know what to do with it. Uh, and that is a tremendously difficult and sad place to be and it is also a, place of great opportunity if you have the gumption to try and get into it.

Joshua Hoyt: Dr. Martin Shaw was a visiting professor at Stanford University during winter quarter of 2013. This story was told by Stanford University Senior Molina Lopez, and produced by Rachel Hamburg.

Christy Hartman: When we were first talking about doing a show on wildness, producer Joshua Hoyt remembered someone from his past who he thought might be able to shed some real light on wildness. She's kind of a mentor or maybe an elder like Dr. Martin Shaw talked about in our last story. Her name is Theresa Yamamoto or T, and she's about to school, I mean, mentor producer Joshua Hoyt in the ways of the world.

Joshua Hoyt: In 2006, I went along with a family friend to volunteer at a strange kind of magical place called Wolf Town. Wolf Town is on Vashon Island in Washington state. It's only about a 15 or 20 minute ferry ride from Seattle where I was living then, [00:56:00] even though it's geographically close to downtown Seattle, Vashon is sort of isolated, intentionally isolated.

You can only get there by ferry because residents have fought off numerous bridge proposals. Ash is the kind of place where you find those keep ash on weird bumper stickers, hon, is the kind of place that's famous on the internet for a tree with a bicycle grown into it, like fully grown into the trunk and eight feet off the ground. It's that kind of place.

That day as we drove into a wooded area off the main road, I found myself in a world that felt a lot further than an hour from downtown Seattle. Through the trees. I saw these enormous wolf fences. Fences that immediately announced the power of what they were keeping in. I remember my family friend warning me about not staring into the wolf's eyes, and the whole thing created this mix of fascination, fear, and admiration for the wolves.

I remember feeling something similar about T Yamamoto.

Did you have wildness in your life from the very beginning?

Theresa Yamamoto: Well, you have to define wildness because to me it isn't. It isn't wild. To me, it's just normal. T run's Wolf Town.

Joshua Hoyt: Wolf Town takes in all kinds of injured and orphaned animals, but it specializes in predators. Most of the animals they deal with are returned to the wild, but that's not always an option. The wolves that give Wolf town its name are now too used to, depending on humans, and will never be wild again. But as you'll hear later on for T's first wolf, that was not the case.

Theresa Yamamoto: What I did my, my college, I didn't go to school.

Joshua Hoyt: Mm-hmm.

Theresa Yamamoto: My college was following my grandfather and my father around and learning directly from them. And that was a very good way of learning something that we was normal. That was how people normally learn. They don't do that now.

Joshua Hoyt: She has always been around [00:58:00] animals. She grew up in a family of horse trainers and started working with horses at a very early age. Her work with wolves actually started by accident.

Theresa Yamamoto: I, uh, was asked to rescue a wolf pup. This was in the late eighties from a sanctuary that was closing down. And, uh, after talking to a couple of friends of mine that were biologists and naturalists, I decided to go out and hunt with her for a year and let her go. And that's what I did.

And of course, letting her go and letting her be free. She risked her life. So did I. But you know what's life for, huh?

Joshua Hoyt: Yeah.

Theresa Yamamoto: It's better to be free than captive, so.

Joshua Hoyt: T wrote about her experience in a book called The Wolf, the Woman, the Wilderness. But it's now been more than 20 years since the events in the book.

So you, um. You come upon this wolf and you're asked to, you're asked to adopt it, and then what do you like? What do you do with it to begin with?

Theresa Yamamoto: Well, I mean, it's just common sense, isn't it? You have to go out into the wilderness where there's prey that the animal can hunt, and where there are other wolves that she can interact with. And so that's what I did, but I had to take her to a place where there wasn't a lot of wolves around, because wolves are also very, very territorial. Do you know what that means?

Joshua Hoyt: Yeah.

Theresa Yamamoto: What does it mean?

Joshua Hoyt: They have their own territory staked out?

Theresa Yamamoto: Yes. What happens if you cross into their territory?

Joshua Hoyt: Um, they'll attack you?

Theresa Yamamoto: I'm sorry.

Joshua Hoyt: They'll attack you.

Theresa Yamamoto: They either drive you out or kill you. Yeah, they, wolves are an apex predator. And what, what does apex predator mean?

Joshua Hoyt: Does that mean they're sort of at the top?

Theresa Yamamoto: They're top of the food chain. Can you name another Apex Predator?

Joshua Hoyt: Humans.

Theresa Yamamoto: Yeah. They teach you that in school?

Joshua Hoyt: [01:00:00] Uh, maybe a little bit in biology, but not, not really.

Theresa Yamamoto: They should be.

Joshua Hoyt: I mean, how do, so were you teaching this wolf how to hunt?

Theresa Yamamoto: I could not teach her because obviously I was not a wolf.

Joshua Hoyt: How did you physically like deal with it? I mean, even how did you transport it? Where did you keep it?

Theresa Yamamoto: Well, I uh, of course I was living on the island for part of that time, and then when I was up in the mountains, she was loose when I was up in Canada. And I had taught her to jump into the Jeep, and when she was young, she would do it. As she experienced more and more freedom, she became more and more reluctant to get into the Jeep. And so this became a kind of a race to teach her how to do this before she finally said to hell with you.

You know what I'm saying?

Joshua Hoyt: Mm-hmm. And what about, were you, were you physically afraid?

Theresa Yamamoto: No.

Joshua Hoyt: Why not?

Theresa Yamamoto: Well, are you physically afraid of your siblings or your mother or your father?

Joshua Hoyt: Thankfully not.

Theresa Yamamoto: No, because she was acted like family. I had raised her, I trusted her. If when you fear something, you're much more likely to get, have problems.

Joshua Hoyt: So what, so what about like the first time you went hunting together or you took her to hunt? Uh, what happened?

Theresa Yamamoto: Well, I mean, it's, it's just common sense. You just, you have to know how to track a little bit. You have to know where the prey is gonna be. And so you have to decide, okay, what are we hunting? Is she gonna catch field mice? Is she gonna catch rabbits? You know, what size is she? What age is he? How quick is she? You know what's gonna happen?

Joshua Hoyt: You take her, she hops in the jeep, you drive into the mountains, you let her out. And then what you start, you sort of start looking around and she [01:02:00] follows you.

Theresa Yamamoto: Have you ever been to the mountains?

Joshua Hoyt: Um, a little bit.

Theresa Yamamoto: Okay. Well, uh, number one, I, I had to hunt with her during all seasons.

Joshua Hoyt: Mm-hmm.

Theresa Yamamoto: So you start thinking about that real carefully. 'cause mountains are dangerous. And I would have to take gear. I'd have to take my backpack and, uh, you know, supplies for myself because I was up there. I wasn't up there just overnight, you know what I'm saying? Uh, I was up there for a long time and, uh, we would have to go up into the mountains, uh, and look for, I would have to look for likely places when she was young. She did not follow me. She would range away from me and then come and check back. And as she started to go back, she would check back less and less often. Does that make sense?

Joshua Hoyt: Yeah. And did you see her, um, make kills up close?

Theresa Yamamoto: No. Mm-hmm. Uh, one time she brought a leg back for me, which is kind of touching the leg of a deer.

Joshua Hoyt: And, uh, were you proud of her?

Theresa Yamamoto: Well, I was happy that she was gonna go back. I think that was a better life for her.

Joshua Hoyt: Yeah.

Theresa Yamamoto: I suppose you could say I was proud of her. Yeah. Well, did you have to, to prompt her to hunt at all or the, it was just instinct? Hell no. Oh, no, no. Uhuh, she's a predator. She has it in her.

Joshua Hoyt: Maybe you can tell me. Um. When you knew that you, that you were ready or that she was ready to be let go?

Theresa Yamamoto: Well, she just chose, I mean, she just decided I'm done and left. When she got to be of an age, she was about a little over a year old and, uh, you know, she had to go and do her thing and I had to go and do [01:04:00] mine. And she said, well, this is where we're gonna park company. She was an adult and that was it. So she did.

T has worked with wolves 

Joshua Hoyt: since the late eighties. She's one of the only people that can go in the wolf enclosures at Wolf Town. Some of the wolves even let her touch them, and she's also very matter of fact about what wolves are.

They're predators. And T never forgets that.

Theresa Yamamoto: And we have to realize there's, we live in a world where life lives on death. That is the way it is. You have to just accept that we have a tendency not to teach people that and to hide them from that fact, but that is the truth.

Joshua Hoyt: Mm-hmm.

Theresa Yamamoto: Does that make sense?

Joshua Hoyt: Yeah. I guess what you said is, um, my definition of wildness that, you know, wildness is like that part of nature. That, um, is so closely associated with death and that that's why we're, that's why we're uncomfortable with it.

Theresa Yamamoto: That's because you're looking at it without seeing both sides. You know, when I was a kid, my granny said, you know, we had a lot of people die in my family when I was young.

My granny said, look at the grass, and I said, okay. So I'm looking at the grass. She goes, what, what does the grass do? So now I'm gonna ask you that. What does the grass do?

Joshua Hoyt: Grows?

Theresa Yamamoto: Yeah. When does it grow?

Joshua Hoyt: Uh, I don't know. All the time.

Theresa Yamamoto: Really? You think it grows all the time?

Joshua Hoyt: Uh, when things are good.

Theresa Yamamoto: Okay. I'll tell you how the graph, what graph story is. It's all right. I mean, someone had to tell me the grass. In the spring when there's warmth and sunlight and moist soil grows. That's when it grows. Then in the summer, as it starts to dry, it [01:06:00] heads, it forms seeds, okay? And then it turns brown. It seeds. The seeds are scattered into the ground, and the grass dies back. So then the life starts going into the roots of the, of the grass, and then in the fall and winter, the grass dies. The only part of the grass that's really alive is under the soil. You know, there's maybe a little green on top, but most of it, it's not growing then, it's dormant. And then in the spring it comes back. So my sheep and my cattle and the wild animals, the deer and the moose and the elk and all that, fertilize the grass, fertilize the trees, fertilize everything. That's that circle. And when they die, they do that too.

There's a huge system of life living on death, everywhere you look. And that happens not only on different ecosystems on earth, but probably on a planetary scale as well. Maybe on a solar system scale, on a universe scale, that should comfort you. That should make you feel okay. You should say, okay. It just gets recycled, including you. You don't have to be afraid of death, it just gets recycled.

Joshua Hoyt: Hmm. Yeah.

Theresa Yamamoto: This is an old thing. I mean, this is not something I just made up. This is very old thought process. Right. It's just that we've walked away from it and don't see it.

Joshua Hoyt: Yeah. It can be hard to remember.

Theresa Yamamoto: Yeah, remember it.

Christy Hartman: Theresa Yamamoto runs Wolf Town on Vash Island. This story was told by Joshua Hoyt and produced by Joshua Hoyt, Christy Hartman, and Charlie Mintz.