Lessons From Nature: Real Talk for Re-Wilding Game Changers

This is the Game Changers' way: to wake up to who we are, to go through the process of living it out to its fullest in this time. We the People who accomplish this will determine the Great Story of our time simply by returning to our true designs.

Lessons From Nature: Real Talk for Re-Wilding Game Changers
Lessons From Nature: Real Talk for Re-Wilding Game Changers

Cutting Through the Noise

The kids are on their way back to school. For most, summer is already over. In preparation for a new school year, my sister discussed her son's athletic future with my father in a conversation that stuck with me.

My sister has three teenage boys. She lovingly refers to the older sons as 'nerds'. They haven't played sports before but are starting a new school and my sister had high hopes that they would both pick a sport, enjoy it, and do well. While explaining her ideas and plans to my father, a lifelong athlete, she described the possibility that her middle child would become a baseball player.

My father quietly listened to her explain her well-thought-out plans and predictions for her son joining a new team and becoming a baseball player in high school. When she finished he responded very plainly with "Baseball is not right for him, he's not interested in playing baseball, and he will never be a baseball player".

While it sounds harsh at first, he continued to explain that her son knows who he is and what he wants, he encouraged her to celebrate that and to grow his skills and interests around who he already is, and that if he had any interest in baseball, he would have expressed it. He encouraged her in the end to move this child into physical activity that he's interested in while filling up his time with pursuits that match his natural gifting, and that there's nothing wrong with not being a baseball player.

Hearing the conversation, I was intrigued by how easily I saw my sister's perspective as a possibility, but when my dad spoke the simple, plain truth, it completely changed how I saw the whole situation. It was refreshing.

I appreciated the straightforward response; no BS, no games, no sugarcoating, just straight to the bottom line. I playfully practiced this the rest of the night anytime I thought someone was talking polite BS or speaking in naive fantasy.

For example, my husband was updating my parents about a friend who was having a hard time and he said "his mom said they are doing great, everything is fine". I waited a moment, followed up with the same plain response as my father, and said, 'They are not doing great, everything is not fine, and our nephew will never be a baseball player'.


We're Taking a Sharp Turn Now: Real Talk

In the spirit of 'No BS, straight to the point', here is the bottom line of this post:

We are at the end of many cycles.

We are at the end of an age.

We are watching the world struggle to decide how this age ends because the end of this age determines the direction of the age to come.

We are in a war.

The epitome of this war is for control of the mind, the soul, and the spirit. The war is being brought straight to your inner world.

This war is ultimately for control of the Story.

It's time to wake up, do the inner work, and take responsibility for your part in crafting the truest story.

"he who writes the story rules the world"
"If you knew who you really were, you would never be afraid again"

The Task At Hand for Game Changers

I'm naive and soft-hearted when it comes to nature.

I can watch 5 seconds of a nature documentary and regardless if it's an ant or an elephant being hunted, I project my sense of nurture and justice on the whole scene and immediately root for the underdog to survive. This is a wildly small view of nature and how the whole of the world works.

Artworks by Frank Stöckel

For instance, did you know that the herds of winter grazers in the far north are moved in almost perfect patterns by being chased and hunted by wolves and other predators? This act of survival keeps them moving to various pastures, which allows the snow to fall on even, well-manicured land, which then makes the snow sit like glass, reflecting the heat back into the atmosphere, and regulating weather systems across the globe.

Salmon's strange behavior of swimming upstream for hundreds of miles is not just to lay eggs. They die after this wild act that is built into their nature. The death of thousands of salmon in these regions sustains the habitat, even those that aren't eaten by animals that rely on them for food. The simple act of their rotting bodies replenishes the soil, which feeds the trees, the fungi, and the water which protects the balance of life in these regions.

"The man who lies to himself about who he is can be more easily offended than any other" Dostoyevsky, The Brother Karamazov

{Yeah, I've been watching lots of nature documentaries}

Anyway, the point is, in every inch of the natural world, there is a plethora of weird creatures just doing what they are here to do.

Nature is Weird: the Giraffe and the Kingfisher are my favorites

By just being what they were created to be, they set off chain reactions of healing, balance, and co-creation of their habitats and even affect habitats across the planet and across massive time periods. They are not setting out to save the world. They are following the instincts of their specific design. Even death has its perfect place in the cycle, feeding and nurturing all life around it. My wildly small view of seeing the hunted as the victim is broadened by this much more profound understanding of nature's relationship with itself.

I don't think the Hippo knows that simply by being huge and walking around to get to the best waterways, it's actually cutting out paths for smaller waterways to flow all over the plains and spread life in unreachable areas. It's just walking around being a hippo.

Jacana Bird and Hippo - Okavango Delta, Botswana

Likewise, you have a thing to do, a way to be. You cannot understand how your design affects so many other facets of life, across time, space, and habitats. When you play small, when you ignore your design, when you shut down the most natural, vulnerable parts of yourself and instead live by the rules and perceptions of 'whatever', you take away your incredibly important contribution in a very fragile time.

Do you know what they do when an ecosystem is about to collapse? They 're-wild' it. They slowly re-introduce wild animals that used to live there, like rescued leopards, and then they just hope that the leopards remember how to just be leopards. They do this again and again with different animals, and if the rescued animals from captivity can remember how to be what they already are, then the ecosystem is revived and flourishes.

"I tried to be normal once, and it almost killed me"

What I mean by 'Wake Up'

I mentioned earlier that 'it's time to wake up, do the inner work, and take responsibility for your part in crafting the truest story'.

This is what I mean:

Wake up to your true design. You don't have to save the world. You don't have to find a solution to all the problems that are blasted in our faces every day. Your responsibility is to unlearn all the BS that keeps you from getting down to the truest nature of who YOU are, and then summoning up the courage to be that design, every day and in every adaption needed to survive and thrive in your era. It's no mistake that you are here now, to guide the ending of an old age and to help establish the beginning of a new one.

It's time to 're-wild' yourself and hope you remember who tf you are. By doing so, we mimic nature and we defy corruption.

All Of Nature Is Super Weird; Lean Into Your Design

Re-Wild 101

We have serious work to do. The most basic elements of Inner World Development require the discipline to not poison ourselves unintentionally, every day.

Stop the 3 C's.

Social media and the constant influx of emotionally-charged information can be a catalyst that subconsciously triggers the 3 C's that are most poisonous to this great task.

Egyptian Bat - Tim Flach, Contemporary British Art

Release Comparison. The role of a fruit bat cannot be compared to the duties of a Jaguar. It's nonsense, let it go.

There is no complaining; a dung beetle is not concerned that its sacred design is connected to poo. They live out their design, and go figure, they are worshipped in some cultures.

And there is no time for criticism, a monkey cannot understand the intricate impulses of a moth, and both are too busy being fully and wonderfully consumed with their own life cycles to waste time criticizing things they do not understand.

The Atlas Moth, the Largest Moth in the World

This is the Game Changers' way: to wake up to who we are, to go through the process of living it out to its fullest in this time. We the People who accomplish this will determine the Great Story of our time simply by returning to our true designs.

Becoming you and living it out in its fullness in a world of noise is a sacred job, it's the task at hand. Tend to your garden and watch miracles flow in a time when hope is low.

"There are miracles in me waiting to happen. I am never giving up on myself" - Rupi Kaur.