Making Friends With Wildness

The other night I watched My Octopus Teacher, a new Netflix movie starring Craig Foster as a slightly romanticized version of himself. The film records a year he spent with a wild common octopus in the chilly waters off the tip of South Africa. Foster narrates the film as a love story that bridges, however tentatively, the divide between a human being and this small, strange and marvelous creature. Like all works of art, it’s not just what it purports to be, but its intention is admirable, the underwater photography is stunning and it does invite the viewer into a new relationship with ‘the wild’.

The wild is a central theme in the story we Americans tell about ourselves. The wild was the wilderness which the first European settlers fought against to carve out a place for God’s new kingdom on earth. The Pilgrims who landed on beaches not too distant from where I now write these words, left the land of their persecution with the intention of creating a new world order and awaiting the imminent return of Jesus. For them, the native civilizations already here were, at best, an inconvenient barrier and at worst, an incarnation of darkness and evil.

Likewise, the wildness and the fecundity of the land they encountered was something to be subdued. The forces of darkness were to be tamed and violence was necessary and even valorized in the subjugation of what seemed irredeemably other. The wisdom of native cultures’ deep appreciation of the reciprocal relationship with the land, plants and animals was mostly invisible—as was their humanity and right of residence. The physical landscape, the world the Pilgrims sailed to was merely the stage set for them to enact their holy and solipsistic drama.

The film records the year Foster spent free-diving every day in the kelp forests of the shore of South Africa. Over the time, coming back to the same small area again and again, he made ‘friends’ with one particular octopus and came to appreciate the vast wisdom and interconnected life of ‘the wild’. Foster, in his narration, makes a persuasive case for the time it takes to find our way into a world that does not play by human rules. Only over time, by showing up and looking and looking does he begin to make a new relationship with the wild and strange underwater world he encounters.

Watching the film will hopefully encourage many to work for the protection of wild places and promote the slow shifting of our delusional sense of human primacy over the natural world. We are not separate and in control. Since we are part of and totally dependent on the world around us, there is no possibility of subjugation or dominance. The catastrophic consequences of our limited and human-centric views are becoming impossible to ignore as fires rage and vast storms come at levels unknown in our brief human history.

In the ending parts of the film, Foster emphasizes that it was only by going back to the same small place over and over was he slowly, over time able to see what was really there. The richness and beauty that resides in every detail only revealed themselves to him over time.

While it is important to pay attention to the wondrous and wild world outside of us, I would suggest that an equally important and challenging wildness is to be found inside each one of us. Usually we are too busy to notice the functioning of our own perception and awareness. Most of us operate little awareness or appreciation of the mind’s central role in co-creating the world that appears so objectively separate from us.

How do you meet and get to know the strange and wondrous octopus that we call you ‘self’? While I may say that I am just ‘me’, this ‘me’ is actually a strange and elusive creature. If you try to find the one who is reading these words, you may be surprised how difficult it is. Our language ‘I am reading the words on my computer screen.’ hides a world of vast subtlety and interdependence. To begin to get a glimpse of this functioning that really is our life, take the same commitment and dedication that Foster demonstrated in the film.

Only by showing up to some daily practice of meditation, contemplation or prayer can we begin to get a glimmer of the wild and miraculous world that is who we are. We are not separate from the beauty and interdependence of all things, we have merely forgotten. Remembering requires diving daily in the cold and dangerous waters of the self. It’s hard work, but as Foster says, you come to crave the cold water and you can learn to love what you cannot fully understand.