Where have the Wild Ones gone?

Happy smiling woman with curly hair lounging on couch.

From Beyond Rhetoric: Writings in the Tradition of Kahlil Gibran By Joel McKerrow

One brave young man plucks up his courage and steps out of the pack. Standing next to Samuel Rowland he stumbles for his words. Finally stammering, “Would you…I mean could you…can you tell us what has become of us, why we have become what it is we have become…Could you speak to us of Humanity?”

The prophet, still staring at the boy, pried his eyes away to look upon the flock before him.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he began to speak, “The Human Spirit”, he said, “the most powerful of forces, has been chained and bound. Domesticated and dumb. Sedated. Neutralized. She lives in a sick co-dependence with her captor. A captor that is not a foreign alien come to destroy her world. Her captor is herself. The chains that hold her down she tied around her own waist. Her captor is the lust for more, the shadow of desire for all that sings siren songs, her greed to be first, a step above the other, her addiction to affluence, her pursuit of the hyper-real. Like a wild beast tamed to domestication, is humanity in her addiction to simulation and safety. Somewhere deep in her heart lies a spark of the ferocity of what she once was. But she has long been sedated by a cookie-cut world where even love is bought for the right price. A wild beast indeed she was, but now, not much more than a shell. A shell and a flame, covered deep inside under layer upon layer of the dust of the stuff that was meant to satisfy. Yet, as the tamed horse still feels the call of her wild brothers and as the farmed goose flaps hopeful wings as his sisters fly overhead, so too, perhaps, the wild ones among us are our only hope in calling us back to our true nature. Wild ones who have not been turned to stone by the far-reaching grasp of the empire and its program of consumer sedation, the killing of imagination. Where, my friends, have the wild ones gone?

-From Beyond Rhetoric: Writings in the Tradition of Kahlil Gibran By Joel McKerrow

Aline Defiglia LCSW is a licensed, clinical psychotherapist, coach and hypnotherapist who works with individuals and teams for personal and professional transformation. She lives in Chattanooga, TN with her family and works with clients in Chicago, Illinois, Tennessee and Atlanta, Georgia.

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I am One with the Universe. And it Hurts.