For centuries, we’ve built walls—both literal and metaphorical—between ourselves and the “wild.”

We’ve built a world of comfort and control, and in doing so we’ve severed vital connections.

Framing nature as “other” alienates us from our planet, leading us to lose touch with our interdependent roots.

When we separate ourselves from the wild, we diminish our own wholeness, silencing howls that ache to be heard.

The wild isn’t just “out there,” it is our flesh and bones.

It’s about learning to speak the language of Earth where howling is not a threat but a song of belonging.

When we embrace our animal nature, we reclaim our wholeness, tear down walls, and truly come home.

Vanessa Chakour, Earthly Bodies

Identity and integrity have as much to do with our shadows and limits, our wounds and fears, as with our strengths and potentials.

By identity I mean an evolving nexus where all the forces that constitute my life converge in the mystery of self. Identity is a moving intersection of the inner and outer forces that make me who I am, converging in the irreducible mystery of being human.

By integrity I mean whatever wholeness I am able to find within that nexus as its vectors form and re-form the pattern of my life. Integrity requires that I discern what is integral to my selfhood—what fits and what does not—and that I choose life-giving ways of relating to the forces that converge within me.

Identity and integrity are not the granite from which fictional heroes are hewn. They are subtle dimensions of the complex, demanding, and lifelong process of self-discovery.

Identity lies in the intersection of the diverse forces that make up my life, and integrity lies in relating to those forces in ways that bring me wholeness and life rather than fragmentation and death.

When we forget who we are we do not merely drop some data. We dis-member ourselves, with unhappy consequences for our politics, our work, our hearts.

Re-membering involves putting ourselves back together, recovering identity and integrity, reclaiming the wholeness of our lives.

Parker Palmer, Courage To Teach

Now I become myself.

It’s taken time, many years and places.

I have been dissolved and shaken, worn other people’s faces . . .

May Sarton, Now I Become Myself

As important as methods may be, the most practical thing we can achieve in any kind of work is insight into what is happening inside us as we do it.

The more familiar we are with our inner terrain, the more surefooted our teaching—and living—becomes.

Parker Palmer, Courage To Teach

Man’s general way of thinking of the totality, his general world view, is crucial for overall order of the mind itself.

If he thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate.

But if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

David Bohm, Wholeness and Implicate Order