In French, there is a word, among others, that has no real translation into English. The word on my mind is apprivoiser. The closest gloss, to tame.
It means something slightly different from taming. To tame means to make not-wild, to make subservient, to make it that the object (of the verb, but mark my pun) becomes controllable. Apprivoiser isn’t so much about being wild or not. It’s not about melting resistance and making something bend to one’s will (although it also can be). It’s more about making something familiar or friendly to oneself. It’s very personal like that. Something, or someone, can become apprivoisé and friendly to you without losing its inherent wildness or sovereignty.
I researched the etymology of the word for insight into the hollow that the word was meant to fill when it started rolling off tongues. I thought maybe it had something to do with the word voisin, meaning neighbour. Like, to make neighbourly. This word voisin comes from the latin vicinus, with the root vicus, meaning village, street, area, place. Take the related English word vicinity.
I learned that apprivoiser has a different root, the latin word privus, meaning individual, personal or private. With the a- prefix, the meaning becomes to make personal.
So, with some poetic licence, I derive these translations: To bring into one’s realm; To open the doors of relating; To break down walls; To welcome into one’s intimate circle; To make someone familiar to oneself.
I changed the name of my column (newsletter? series? publication?) right after the last post, you might have noticed. It’s now called Wild Kin: Letters. The name, Wild Kin, is my best gloss for the French word apprivoiser. A more accurate translation.
Yes, the wild kin, those you make yours without also making docile. Wild kin are the two-legged, four-legged, winged, leafed or scaled among us, there for us to claim as family while leaving them their intimate throes and intertwinings with the eventful surface of the earth. Those you love and release back into the wilds, for your love is truer than any grasping. And their love for you is in they way they glance back as they slither towards their destiny. Their love for you is in the way they’ve let you move them: that head turn, that wink, your way.
The wild kin are also those in the ancestral past, who wore our same faces and hands, who knew nothing of the tameness and sameness of asphalt over soil, steel over taproot, Uber eats ordered from upon a throne of bedspring mattress. Exempt of flame-retardant curtains and insurance claims for broken wrists, they knew nothing of that and everything of risk. The risk of wind blowing over bluff. The risk of fire consuming all. The risk of water sweeping and swallowing whole those who were once babies full of milk. The risk of earth loosening and giving, or drying up and cracking, closing the fist on bounty. Oh yes those wild kin knew grief and their skin knew to recognize the fine line between the water’s caress of strong flow and its gush of danger. But not always. But enough for you to be born downriver. Those wild kin are yours too.
And then there’s the wild kin who are members of the high council of the self, those nafs inside of your gut and heart and head. The frothing soup of parts: desires, perceptions, preferences, and needs, whether in conflict or agreement with each other. They sit and hold council at the large table of you, eternally constructing an emergent self out of interminable debates amongst themselves, with perhaps the occasional arm wrestle to settle the stalemates. Sometimes the CEO of Rational Thinking wins the match and off you go making a responsible decision. Other times the Empress of Delight canters up to the table on horseback, wearing her swooshy riding cape and flashy smile, and charms everyone. On those days maybe you make a bold and irresistible proposition to a stranger, antagonizing to no end the Sergeant of Safety.
Then over there, on the far side of the table, sit the four most elemental of them, the aspects of self that are Wind, Fire, Water and Earth. Your interior, most basic, wild kin, have no titles like the others, they simply are and they are of a different ilk. I’d like to know, what’s the quality of their voices at the table, these wind, fire, water, earth? Are they loud and bold? Are they commanding? Are they seductive and irresistible? Do they enchant and lead? Or are they feeble, meagre? At odds? Undernourished? Or even crafty, manipulative and dark, vengeful and bitter? And what would they have you do? Oh they will have their way, those wild kin, as friends or as foes, at your risk and peril, and also your great joy.
Who are your wild kin? Who in your inner circle holds the hand of the bouncing breathing keeling spectacle, so steady and and constant until it’s not, proposing a wave here and a rocking there until you too are dancing? Who is yours to make familiar, while your face drops to the floor in astonishment for the grandeur of its intact wildness?
Thanks for reading. The name change from Missives to Wild Kin feels to me more open and free and already has triggered many new starts for future posts. The name originally came from a search and digging for a name for the emerging coaching/guiding practice I am starting. That’s the name that surfaced and is very aligned with the work I feel called to do in the world. Apprivoiser: to make personal, to open to relationship to the ever-creative folding of wildness upon wildness, and to enter under its wing, and it under yours.
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