ALL KINGS ARE WILD MEN What Good is the Fear of Not Fitting In?

ALL KINGS ARE WILD MEN - What Good is the Fear of Not Fitting In?

People go to school to get a job to make a living to pay their bills to keep the lights on until their light goes out. And most of the time, nobody questions it.

Nobody questions how we put kids and prisoners in the same kinds of containers with giant wheels and send them to buildings shaped the same way and that have the same sounding bells that ring and the same kinds of rules about going to the bathroom.

As long as we paint the buses different colors, that’s different enough.

Maybe it’s not that different though. In both cases, we want to keep the wild away from us.

There are costs to this though. The wild haunts the edges.

When you go to the outback in Australia, the signs warning you about the animals there aren’t just for the rare case. They’re for the regular. We were told not to look over the side of our boat. I leaned out a bit while taking a photo and my wife Kalpna didn’t like it. The next day, at the same park, a fisherman was taken from a boat while emptying a pail of water. They found him in the belly of three different crocodiles.

Maui is one of the world’s most popular vacation destinations. People dream their whole lives of coming here. When they do, much more often than you hear about, they drown while snorkeling or, even more surprisingly, they drown while hiking. A young father who lived across the street from us, not a tourist, but who came here from the mainland to live as we did, went for a hike on his own for some peace and quiet and the rain flooded the river and took his body miles out to sea. Kalpna and I had just gone hiking there the week prior. We have photos of us sitting on the rocks in that river.

Where the wild things are is an education as to the fragility of life. The cost of removing the wild is our desensitization to how close we live to the edge.

I’m not suggesting we would do better without modernity. It is the blind resistance to the wild that I’m not sold on.

When we make everything clean, we get sick. Everyone knows somebody now who’s been sicker than they ever remember being and not with Covid. The mask makes its own kind of pandemic.

So what do we do with a world worried about the wild? I don’t think complaining about it does any good. In fact, I don’t even think rallying for more wild ways is the answer. Why organize in service of disorder?

What I think we can do is choose to be wild ourselves. We can be the crocodile or the flooded river in our life, whatever that means for us.

The fear of not fitting in is good and useful in how it holds a group together. But what use is a fear like that when what we’re holding together is making us sick, weak, and hate each other?

In the heart of all is a wild one. The degree to which that wild is repressed is a perfect correlate to not only a gorgeous capacity for inappropriateness but also unexpressed power.

All Kings are wild men. They live not within the prisons made by other men, but in a world of their own making. It is not necessarily a wild world, but it is an expression of the wild for how they raise it from chaos.

Kingdoms need not be explicit or even visible. In the same way that a man’s house is the expanse of his presence and the field of his energy, his Kingdom can unfold around him through the ideas he seeds, the relationships he tends to, and the structures and systems he erects and supports.

The capacity for Being a King is founded in an existential casting off of not only the personal but the impersonal too. It is a total rejection of all epistemological narratives such that the right and just is forgotten. Like a child, before a pile of blocks that previously held together structures we knew, the King creates something anew. Something beautiful. Something that we could agree is greater than wild, but which comes from the wild.

He shall reign until the spaces he has made, through the gift and torture of the comforts they grant, have cut men so far off from their own wild nature that they revolt against their inner idleness, and stand up as Kings themselves, to make a new world. First, alone for their families and then, collectively, for the world at large.

If you’d like to join me on the journey of Being a King for yourself, your family, and the world at large, please reply to this article with the words “I AM WILD” and I will share more with you about the small group I am running for men only, beginning on 2nd November.

Loving you, JP