My mother used to say she didn’t know how she’d birthed me.

I’m not sure if she meant it as a complaint or a compliment — this strange, feral, overly-sensitive boy who kept disappearing into the woods behind the dilapidated trailer, who couldn’t seem to stay clothed if no one was watching, who wept at sunsets and wanted to sleep outside and had entirely too many forbidden feelings for a Church of God household in Appalachian Tennessee. My family was modest to a fault. We kids never saw my father without his shirt. And here was her son, given the first opportunity, stripping naked and running into the trees like something that had escaped captivity.

She was more right than she knew. Something in me had always been wild. Pre-wild, even — as though I’d arrived in this world already carrying a self that civilization would spend decades trying to domesticate, and never quite manage.

I have a theory about that self. Jung called it the shadow — not the dark side exactly, but everything that gets exiled from the personality in order to survive the world you’re born into. For a highly sensitive, complex, deeply sensual boy born into Appalachian Pentecostalism, the exile was nearly total. The body — its hungers, its pleasures, its instinct to press itself against the living earth — got locked away early and hard. What remained was the performing version: the good boy, the minister, the man who gave thirty years to institutions that needed him civilized, contained, and thoroughly indoors.

But the wilderness self doesn’t die. It waits.

I know exactly when it first spoke loudly enough to hear. I was seventeen, on the Appalachian Trail with a young man named Tall Tom — six-foot-five, warm blue eyes, sandy hair, slow southern drawl, a man who guided skiers in Colorado in the winter and whitewater rafters in North Carolina in the summer and never once submitted his life to the institutional timeline. He would not marry until nearly fifty. His wanderings were guided by the seasons, rivers, and mountain ranges. He was, I now understand, my first shadow carrier*** — a person living freely in the exact territory where I was imprisoned — and I loved him on contact, the way the earth loves rain.

I rushed past him on our second hike, certain I was impressing him with my natural prowess. That evening, around the campfire, he asked me quietly in that southern drawl of his: What was your hurry? Did you see the stand of virgin hemlock three miles back? The rattlesnake curled beside the trail?

I had seen neither. I confessed it, burning with shame.

He nodded gently. No lecture. Just the implication, warm and patient as firelight: Slow down. Look. You are moving through a living world, and you are missing it entirely.

That question changed something in me. It has never stopped echoing.

The wilderness self found other shadow carriers over the years, each one arriving at a moment of desperate need. My first lover — faded jeans, flannel shirt, smelling of white cotton on a spring day — who pulled on her hiking boots and walked me down a wooded trail at her farm, and stopped at a creek bank and turned with a half-smile that looked directly into me. My head swirled. I could not catch my breath. She heard me that afternoon the way no one had heard me in thirty years of ministry, with a listening so complete it felt god-like. She showed me the reflection of my own soul, and the reflection was wild and thirsty and gloriously alive.

And then Gina — earthy? I’ll say! A champion equestrian who loved animals and flowers and who unhesitatingly went with me into the wilderness when I finally claimed it as mine. Five years building Kalien from raw Appalachian earth, living in a decrepit RV and then a one-room cabin with no bathroom, working the land with our hands, running naked at dawn through our own Garden of Eden. She was the shadow carrier who became something rarer: the soul companion strong enough in herself that I didn’t need to project my wildness onto her. I could simply be it, beside her. She is the long, slow rain that soaked so deep I can’t remember being dry and barren.

Because Kalien was my wilderness self made manifest. Fifty-four acres of the oldest mountains on earth, given to me, and I gave myself back to them. I remember a meditation walk on a trail lined with thousands of tiny purple wildflowers, moving so slowly that my dog Remy kept looking back at me in bafflement. I had been reading about a Sufi master who said that whenever he walks, he imagines making love to the earth. I looked down at the dark soil of that Tennessee hollow and felt it — the impulse to wrap my arms around the ground, to press my manhood into it, to give and receive. It smells and feels like home, I wrote in my journal. I am one with the earth.

That impulse is not a metaphor. It is the oldest truth I carry.

High on a precarious cliff edge once, overlooking a wilderness canyon so vast and so beautiful that my sensuality soared — I gave myself to it. Completely. Ripped my clothes off and spilled my seed onto the rock face and felt no shame, only rightness, only the ancient satisfaction of a man returning something of himself to the earth that made him. The attraction, release, and joy ran clean, all the way through. No script of shame intervened. No church, no wife, no internalized authority. Just the canyon and the body and the understanding, bone-deep, that this was holy. Not in the religious sense. Holy in the only honest sense of the word — supremely good.

I think about Honeymoon Island — just a few miles from where my mother and father conceived the boy she didn’t know how she’d birthed — where I would strip off my clothes and splay myself out nude on white sugar sand so fine and soft it was almost liquid. The Gulf roaring in my ears. Wind on every inch of skin. The smell of salt and sea oat, and the feeling of saltwater sand blasting my flesh. Lying there, all five senses firing simultaneously, I understood something that no theology had managed to teach me: my naked body pressed against the earth is not a shameful thing. It is a homecoming.

My mother didn’t know how she’d birthed me. I’ve come to believe she birthed me exactly right — with the wilderness already inside, pressing against the civilized container, looking for its way out.

Sometimes I miss the natural world the way I’d miss a piece of my soul.

Here in Barcelona — this magnificent, sensual, ancient city that has done more for my liberation than any church “truth” ever managed — I feel the call of the wild most acutely on the days I cannot get out. So I escape to Montserrat, those extraordinary serrated peaks an hour north, and hike until my lungs burn and the city falls away and something in my being unclenches. Or I climb to the wooded trails of Collserola, the forested ridge that wraps the city’s shoulder, and run the ancient paths overlooking the whole sprawling Mediterranean coastline below, and my wilderness self breathes and drinks in the natural life. Or I go to the nude beach — I must go, it’s not optional, it’s not recreational — and lie stripped bare in the Barcelona sun and feel the continent’s oldest air on my skin and remember who I actually am beneath all the roles I’ve ever played.

I am the boy running naked and free in the Appalachian woods. Still. At sixty-seven, still.

My mother gave me life. The wilderness and my shadow carriers gave me back to myself. And at sixty-seven, finally naked and unashamed on a Barcelona beach, I understand — those were never two different things.

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***Shadow Carrier--When we meet someone who is living freely in the territory of our own exile — someone whose very being embodies what we were forced to lock away — the effect is electric and often bewildering. Jung would say we’re projecting our own shadow onto them, but that’s only the beginning of the story. What’s also happening is recognition. Your nervous system registers, at a pre-cognitive level: that person is free in exactly the place where I am imprisoned. The attraction isn’t merely sexual, though it almost always has a sexual charge. It’s ontological. It’s the self reaching desperately toward its own missing pieces through the body of another person.