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What does it mean to be educated? What is the purpose of education? When does it begin and are we ever done? We imagine that our children are being educating when we send them off to an institution where they learn (first and foremost) how to behave, where they are told what is important to know (and by this, what is not relevant or worthy). In this process they are not asked what they think about what is important to know or what it is they already know; what they came into the world knowing. Of course there is a need for a common language, common practices and shared wisdom which allow culture to be a container within which we are held accountable for the vitality of all life.

Being a teen age boy must be a whole lot like being the universe as it was creating itself, one galaxy, one beautiful planet, one scary, sucking, deep black hole, one brilliantly exploding super nova at a time. Cataclysmic implodings, neural rewiring, oceans of chemical-flooding, pulsing and ebbing, the somatic, non-verbal knowing that everything is possible, beyond imagination, within this one body. And of course, the natural assumption then, that the world is colluding with this process making everything outside the body possible as well; an hypothesis he is eager to (and must) test, over and over and over again. I am raising two young men - one 13 and one 15 - and I have watched as they discover, sometimes painfully, that the culture around them does not welcome the power coming online within them.

By Jim Wayne Miller

Writing you this, I can feel a dewclaw

pushing through the skin an inch above my thumb.

I’ll sign this letter with a muddy paw.

By Neil Gaiman Shedding my shirt, my book, my coat, my life Leaving them, empty husks and fallen leaves Going in search of food and for a spring Of sweet water.

The last 10 years of my almost 20-year journey as a therapist have found me slowly peeling away the jargon and rules, looking carefully at what serves the process of our human ReWilding and what most certainly does not. I've looked at who I am to be doing this work and how my unique vision necessitates that I claim an individual form and style. I've done this while prioritizing my clients' optimum health and wholeness, all while honoring what Jung called the Soul of The World, which remains my ultimate devotion.

It is 8 am and I've found my way to the place I sit with clients; a small carriage house nestled along an alley in downtown Boulder. The distant hum of traffic, delivery trucks, school buses and somber children walking along the sidewalk to their first day of school surf the thin cool morning air without obstruction. Everything is pristine today. Razor sharp.

When I was 14 I found this quote by fearless truth-teller Margaret Atwood. This quote, "I forgot what things were called and saw instead what they are" worked its disastrous mysterious magic for the next twenty-five years, popping up here and there, only enough to cause me to feel constantly unsettled, relentlessly restless, but never entirely disrupted.

I live five feet from the Bear Creek bike path - the one that takes people all the way from Louisville and Lafayette to the downtown Boulder area. It gets a high volume of traffic all day and night. Sitting out on my patio I hear the conversations of the people moving by. If I had to generalize I would say that typically, men discuss financial matters and women discuss relationship issues. And yet, sometimes, in between the lines of the perfunctory and  expected, something else entirely happens. Sometimes they're in tears. Sometimes they're angry. Sometimes they are lost in a sense of hopelessness or despair.

"Every time we make love fully to another human being we make love to everything that lives and breaths". (Terry Tempest Williams) It could be that the very nature of sex, of the energy that we've labeled 'sexual' - in addition to the miraculous necessity of procreation - is to reveal the unique wild language of our soul's discourse with the universe. How would your love making change if you allowed for this larger significance? Perhaps even more to the point, how would you define 'love making' if you were to accept this larger definition of what we have labeled 'sexuality'?

Listen to a wonderful conversation I had the honor of having with the three powerful founders of Own It Sister! Radio, titled 'Re-Wilding our Female Sexuality, as if our lives depended upon it.'