Wild Gnosis. Wild Gnosis can approximately be described as a direct, transforming experience left untamed and unconditioned by cultural and socioreligious beliefs; the state prior to the interpretation of the experience; unconfined by concepts and images. Awareness of Wild Gnosis arises in a quiet mind, in a dimension not touched by chronological time. We find it when we are fully in the present. Not before and not later, but here and now.

How does one live an authentic life? I ask myself this question a lot. I've noticed that I seem to like the word wild. This is curious to me. It comes up in my conversations. In what I write. More than I had really thought. Where the Wild Things Are is one of my favorite kids books. Into the wild blue wonder yonder a phrase of beauty. The word wild is kind of a favorite.

The story of one young man's attempt to find his authentic self and gain his freedom is chronicled in the film Into the Wild. I really enjoyed this scene (above) with the horses. Filmmakers seem to get the freedom of the horse archetype. (We recently saw the movie Michael Clayton with its unexpected horse scene and a moment of redemption. One blogger has this to say about the film, "So, if you dislike lawyers, corporations, money, family or Mercedes Benz's and like horses, strange fantasy role-play books and crazy people' then you might like Michael Clayton.")

It's interesting to me that whether we are horsewomen and horsemen, or not, we usually get the horse on a deep level, whether we can put it into words or we can't. The horse is part of our vast collective unconscious. A symbol of something wild. A momentary look into the depths of the eyes of freedom.

By the end of Into the Wild I was crying like there was no tomorrow. My husband Dennis had prepared for this, though, because he'd read the reviews, and whipped a large handkerchief out of his pocket as if on cue, for which I was very grateful. Funny how he knew I'd be needing that.

I was torn between cheering Christopher on and wanting to shake him for being so silly as to go up north to Alasaka with the intention of living off the land with only a .22 caliber rifle and a bag of rice. He seemed tragically ill-prepared in several ways.

And in the end, found himself trapped by the wild. Kind of like we all are, I'd say. I can saddle up my horse and ride the fence. But there it is, just the same.

I'm thankful to be able to see it.