Rewilding your creativity in the Wild West
Welcome to the final frontier, babyyyy
You’re tired of articles trying (in vain) to set you free from creative blocks you can’t even verify the existence of. You’re tired of dancing around the untamed creative life force that pulses at your center and ready to ride it bareback.
Welcome, I’m so glad you’ve arrived. ;)
So, what does it mean to rewild your creativity in the Wild West?
Well, let’s start with the concept of rewilding. This has been written about extensively in Sophie Strand’s epic work, The Flowering Wand. Strand sees rewilding as the process of returning to our roots—particularly, the roots of the myths we have imbibed through a dissociated colonial lens. In her book, she speaks on recovering the ‘sacred Masculine,’ our inner creative force. But I know that a binary gendered lens can be distracting and disorienting for folks—especially given how many of us are aware of our inner blend of these ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ forces. (Word up to my non-binary besties. I am one of your number, too.) So let’s consider this energy as the projective force of the universe, the organizing principle that structures the information absorbed by our inner receptive force.
This so-called ‘Masculine’ or projective force is one half of your creative energy. Your ‘Feminine’, receptive force magnetizes inspiration into your channel, leading with curiosity and orgasmic passion for anything that might stimulate it, while your projective force collects and protects what is found to be valuable through that process of absorption and cuts away all the noise—the bullshit that doesn’t resonate with you.
Your projective energy might like to create order, but it doesn’t want to be controlled, and capitalism has snuck in, misappropriated and contorted it, and mechanized it into oblivion. And while the projective force can be tamed, transfigured into something productive and pertinent to the invisible labor camp we all find ourselves in, the ‘Feminine’, or receptive force, cannot be bridled.
This part of us refuses to be chained to the mill, rejects our attempts to extract from it.
In short, your inner receptive force will not be manipulated. This is the part of you that wants to experience everything that excites it. This part of you has a big, sexy hard-on for that which can’t be extenuated and explicated and turned into something useful according to some colonial scheme of value and resource allocation.
Meanwhile, you keep taking this receptive energy and trying to direct it towards something other people will care about, some kind of algorithm-friendly art with just the right SEO terms to skyrocket you into the digital stratosphere—to make your shit go viral. You wonder why you’re blocked and the truth is that She’s just not having it.
This is where rewilding your ‘sacred Masculine’ becomes especially crucial.
Because your projective energy can be seduced. The other side of the toroid, the one that is constantly chugging to extrude the inspiration collected by your magnetism, is rife for exploitation. In order to protect that receptive energy—the part that sucks in all the juice of life and spits out whatever passes through—you have to untame the inner constructive, expressive energy. You have to set that force free.
This is where most people get tripped up. Think of yourself like a vacuum with a big rock in its mouth. You’ve got this sucking, fucking, open and amenable energy trying to devour whatever is sent to it—totally indifferent to the results—and on the other end, facing right toward your internal reservoir, your creative chamber, is this blowing, spitting action, processing everything that gets sucked through the tube and expelling it in whatever form it sees fit.
But because you’ve decided art and creativity can only look a certain way, that no one will accept you if you express whatever draws itself into your creative channel, you’re blocked.
You feel stuck and lost and abandoned by society.
The algorithms move on without you.
Your poetry stays locked up inside.
Rewilding your creativity is about removing the stone that’s wedged in between the two archetypal forces of your channel—restoring the sacred toroid. You stop judging what feels alive and exciting to you and start feeling into it. And if you’ve completely lost contact with that Erotic energy, you simply start looking around for whatever turns you on a little—anything that lights you up with that pulse of ‘mhmmm’ deliciousness.
Welcome to the digital Wild West
Right now, the possibilities are endless; we’re living in the digital Wild West. Maybe not as much as we were before corporations marked up and bought out all the virtual real estate (the turn of the 2010s is a time we can never have back), but it’s still quite an ‘anything goes’ environment.
As much as some people like to pretend they’ve got the algorithms pegged and there’s only one right way to find an audience for your art, there are always exceptions to this rule—flashing their outlaw status right in the face of those old fogeys. As much as certain self-professed marketing experts want us to believe that the people want junk food content—easily digestible, nutritionally bankrupt—there are lots of people out there who are craving something actually nourishing.
Slow art is on the rise.
There’s no telling what kind of hairbrained strategy could work for you. There’s no way of predicting it. How exciting is that?? You could dream up something that’s never been done before, a whole new style of content-creation (or art, if you prefer), and take the internet by storm.
But in order to do that, you have to quiet the noise of what everyone else is doing and what you think people expect from you and what you think people are ready for and look deep inside yourself. You have to travel out into your inner wilds, meet the archetypes drawn to your subconscious, and find what excites you. Dare I say it (and baby, all I do is dare), you might have to become an astral cowboy just like yours truly.
Enter: my astral cowboy era
I’ve talked a little bit about my astral adventures on this blog, though not nearly enough because I stopped prioritizing them. I fell into the content pit and forgot to bask in the glow of my own imagination. Rookie mistake. One I’ll probably make again!
I used to call these experiments ‘active imagination,’ a term coined by Carl Jung to describe the activity of rolling up to your unconscious and seeing what images materialize. But sometime last year, I decided to call them what they really are: journeys through the astral plane. When I close my eyes and sink deeper into my body, I enter a state of consciousness that allows me to access all kinds of higher and lower dimensional beings. Sometimes I’m given glimpses of past lives, sometimes I’m shown lesser known corners of the collective unconscious, sometimes I’m visited by gods and entities I don’t even have a name for.
I mean, what’s more Wild West than that?
There’s nothing more wild than your untamed, unfiltered imaginative engine. Astral travel is a sort of channeling practice—you tap into an energy, entity, archetype and just start seeing shit.
It’s really freakin’ cool.
And also takes a ton of patience and practice.
What, did you think this process of rewilding was going to be easy?
In order to truly rewild your creativity, you have to cultivate a more robust attention span. You have to develop an appreciation for slowness and emptiness of all sorts. You have to learn how to freakin’ meditate, fam.
Because how do you intend to create something new if you’re constantly stuffing your earholes and eyeballs with the same old shit everyone else is gorging themselves on? No, no, no, you have to start creating your own entertainment. If you really want to unlock your creative Genius and make shit no one has seen before, it will require you to do things that no one else is doing. See things that no one else is capable of seeing—because they’re not riding in your particular vehicle, inhabiting your specific creative channel, soaking in your individual energy.
And in order to really reap the fruits of this process, you have to lean out of your heavily colonized inner projective/constructive force that wants to take all the goodies of the receptive/experiential and fashion them into something other people can appreciate or something your ego can be proud of.
You have to put your inner Masculine back in service of your inner Feminine. You have to get that constructive force working in favor of the experiential force, creating things that please Her and honor Her experience first and foremost. Which means you have to stop judging your astral adventures as boring and pointless and utterly lacking in application opportunities and start getting curious about them. You have to root more deeply into your first person POV.
Just stop thinking for one minute, “but how am I going to make this into something ‘good’? how do I make this a YouTube video or a Substack article or a TikTok? Where is the Instagram reel of it all?”
Have patience, deeply engage with the fruits of your imagination—your far-out astral travels—and give it time to percolate. You’ll be creating innovative shit in no time.
Check out this reel about my hypersigil if you want to get back to your wild Self
Special thanks to Adriana Michelle for supporting this publication. <333
