walking away while weaving it in

I don’t remember the details of what happened, but I remember feeling awful. I was five, and my brother was nine. My emergently-abled brother was being bullied on the school bus. I couldn’t speak up about what really mattered to me back then but I could speak up about this. That was good. And a deeper vow rooted itself quietly beneath it…

“I will never leave anyone behind. Ever. No matter what it costs me.”

And it did.
It has.

Invisible vows like that don’t stay abstract. The “no matter” materializes. They take shape in our bodies, our choices, our patterns, especially when they stood in for what we needed and never got.

The good news is that we can learn to walk away and weave it in.

Not to sever the thread but to include the girl on the bus, who witnessed what was. So she isn’t left behind either. Maybe her devotion can be honored without obeying the vow. Maybe she can rest.

Maybe we can walk away in a way that weaves everyone in, leaving in a way that includes all parties, even as we go. Not to sever the thread, but to acknowledge it. To let everyone have their place, even in the parting.

If you’ve had a tendency to keep everyone:
Even the ones who flatten you.
Even the ones who don’t see you.
Don’t feel you.
Even when staying meant disappearing yourself.

If you’ve said,

“I am good if I include. Bad if I exclude.”

Consider:

Sometimes life moves through you as a “no,”
not because you are judging, or unforgiving,
but because life is moving in a fresh, new direction.

Sometimes staying in relationship creates impasse and conflict,
for you, and inevitably for them, too.

Staying in guilt isn’t respectful.
It doesn’t honor them.
It doesn’t honor the dignity of your interdependent sovereign places.

Staying where we are weakened thwarts our emergent movement.
It keeps us entangled with what’s not ours to carry.

Of course, leaving has its costs too. Which take time, space and other interstitial forces to reconcile.

Before turning away, turn toward.

Look with your whole soul at their whole soul.

Acknowledge what is.

Feel the tension.

See what’s yours, too.

Until the tension gives way to presence. To mutual strength. To the dignity of a completed agreement.

“I see your place, while I stay in mine.

You are entitled to your life.

I am entitled to mine.

I leave in order to live.

I carry only what is mine.”

rerooted rebelles

I learned early on to lean away from myself in order to belong. To soften my edges and tuck away my grief. To hold it in, keep the peace, tend to the invisible wounds in the room, and carry unnamed burdens.

To belong is to survive.

It happened in the small, quiet betrayals — saying “yes” when my body said “no,” suppressing my tears so others wouldn’t have to feel theirs, turning my wildness into wildly useful so I could keep a seat at the table.

It’s OK, I don’t need anything.

The visceral realizations of this self-abandonment has come in iterative waves. Soft and hard cellular moments. Sometimes sabotaging emergent movement, sometimes actually disrupting the pattern of self-betrayal.

When I stayed with my body during the instability of moving five times in two months, a deep disruption of self-betrayal occurred. A rerooting happened. The rootlets, radicles, root hairs, and other little mycelial tendrils of the deepest entanglements and loyalties softened.

The old root rot fully fermented, loosened and fizzled up and out. For the root of me. The “I am.” To take over.

To be a rebelle is to give up your position and claim your place in the larger living field, with tender humility and fierce truth.

To know: I got enough. I am enough. I’m doing it differently. I have agency in what I carry.

Family Constellations and other deep listening containers let us step into a third place, into a field of human and more-than-human resources ready to hold the truth of the exclusion, unsaid, grief, rage, and other marginalizations and culturally disavowed states.

In Rerooted Rebelles, we won’t yank anything out by force. We will warm and coax and court the soil. We will compost the inherited scripts and renew our agreements with life.

In our 90-day circuit, we’ll build momentum for those renewed images to take deeper hold, in the body. With witnesses.

REROOTED REBELLES
A 90-Day Constellation Journey for Self-Regeneration

Begins Tuesday, July 8th, 2025 | Live on Zoom

✮ 10 sessions over 3 months
✮ Family & Systemic Constellations
✮ Writing & Art Prompts
✮ Somatic Holding Practices

Themes We’ll Move Through

July: Acknowledgement & Accompaniment
We make room for all that’s been unfelt — grief, rupture, frozen instincts. We say: “Me too.”

August: Balance, Order, Weight & Size
We take up our right size. We practice leaving others with what is theirs. We say: “I take what is mine and leave you with yours.”

September: Belonging & Individuation
We root into the freedom to belong to ourselves — and to life. We say: “I belong to myself and still to the world.”

Who It’s For

Field-based guides, therapists, artists, parents, activists, healers — those ready to release self-betrayal and be accountable to self-regeneration. For those carrying grief that hasn’t been properly witnessed.

Structure & Flow

• 10 Live Zoom Sessions on Tuesdays, 7–8:30pm EST

• Dates: July 8, 15, 22 | August 5, 12, 19 | September 2, 9, 16 | Final Session: September 30

• Google Classroom for sharing art and questions

• Sliding Scale: $150–$350/month (no questions asked)
  Total range: $450–$950. Median: $700

• Add-on private sessions at student rate

Part Requiem.

Part Amphitheater.

Part Campfire.

90 days of rerooting and dancing toward place, dignity, and enoughness.

It’s not about staying endlessly strong.
It’s about rooting in strength so that we can keep rising.

To join, email mattie@thelostwildness.com or book a vibe check call here.

first love, first everything

One day during the summer before college, I left your house. Driving down your white gravel driveway, I felt a punch to the gut.

I didn’t want to be away from you.

You liked me. I liked you. You liked me, liked me. I just wanted to be friends. At least until then.

I didn’t know how to begin. I was paralyzed by how exposed I felt.

We were riding in the back seat together returning home from the Great Escape. There was a weighted hush in the air, like before a summer storm. I knew then that I needed to write you a letter.

You read it and asked with a grin, “And now what?”

“I’ll come over tomorrow before work.”

My hair was…disheveled and my mascara was all over my face when your mom came home unexpectedly.

I’m turning red and covering my eyes writing this…not from shame, but from bashful delight.

Your parents were the chill ones. 

You were the chill one. 

Mine and me were a little…crazed. 

We loved one another so damn much. We got one another through some real intense stuff. It was codependent as hell but whatever, it was still love.

I can hear us now reassuring one another, sorting it all out together. You held my grief. I held your rage. Your nuance. My clarity. When we got it right, we’d meet in the tender middle.

I was there when you… You were there when I… A lot of our relationship was a big hot mess. And it was also. Revelatory.

After more good than bad times, we broke up, and went different ways. We’d touch base once every couple years and chuckle about how I became more like you and you more like me. More than once one of us would say, “God, I was awful, I’m so sorry.” And the other would reply, “What? No! It was me. I was nuts!” Then we’d wish one another well and go on our separate ways again.

You always had a melancholy. I know now that I didn’t know the scale and magnitude. I guess none of us ever truly heard or understood.

Four and a half years ago you died by suicide. 

It’s been so hard.

I spent a little time on the mountain

Spent a little time on the hill

Things went down, we don't understand

But I think in time we will

Though it’s grown me up quite a lot, this grief’s got a shape so big and amorphous, I can’t get my arms all the way around it. Maybe it’s something like the despair you were trying to live with.

Now, I don't know, but I been told

If the horse don't pull you got to carry the load

I don't know whose back's that strong

Maybe find out before too long

Thinking about how I was among what added to the impossible pain in your life has brought me to my knees many times. 

I wish I had held you more gently more often. I still feel the weight of all that passed between us, soul to soul, the things you trusted me to hold.

And I hold close the moments I did get it right. When you felt able to tell me everything.

I write this under the same summer solstice sun, on the same line of earth that welcomed you. And still does.

With quiet awe, I met your wife and your son—your love moving forward through them.

You really wanted me to like the Grateful Dead but I really only ever liked Jerry’s New Speedway Boogie which is one of my favorite songs. I get it all more now.

Thank you, Sam.

Now, I don't know but I was told

In the heat of the sun a man died of cold

Keep on coming or stand and wait

With the sun so dark and the hour so late

I spent a little time on the mountain

I spent a little time on the hill

I saw things getting out of hand

I guess they always will

One way or another

One way or another

One way or another

This darkness got to give

erratic, not exiled

Grace for the ones who don’t match and stay anyway.

I am learning to belong the way an erratic does:

A stranger in the landscape.

Erratics don’t match and that’s how you know they’ve journeyed.

An erratic is a boulder out of place.
A remnant stone carried by glacier and
set down somewhere else.

Erratic, from the Latin errare: to wander, to stray, to make a mistake.

Perhaps, to bear its weight.

To stay standing through the movements -
A testimony of time. A carrier of endurance. A memory of movement made visible.

To feel erratic might be to feel like an erratic: A body of self that has survived great movement, deposited in a new psychic or geographical landscape, unfamiliar yet undeniably present.

Maybe an erratic is created in the after party of departure from the codependent cults in family, country, institution, normative identity, conventionality, relationship.

After the demands of obedience, silence and other costs of its faux-security are resisted.

After too many questions are asked.

After you refuse to be subject or object.

After the golden light turns cold.

After being unhooked and unhomed.

Maybe to celebrate oneself as an erratic is where the cult’s golden-child-turned-scapegoat finds warmth again, by staying in place and not position.

And on a collective scale,

through supremacy, war and displacement,

settler colonialism creates erratics.

Peoples dislodged from culture, land, story, ritual, center.

Memory.

Erratics without memory become erasers.

Erratics who remember become markers.

We hold back our own freedom and others’ when we cannot name what and who have come before us.

Sometimes, to belong to yourself

you have to become erratic:
unmoored, unclaimed, and misread.

You have to let the original root rot
so that something deeper, more honest, more mature, can break through.

You feel the clean guilty pain of growth towards the future and away from the growth-thwarting system.
You break from the national myth.

Not to wander forever but to make room for your full size within a different kind of belonging.

Maybe we can reroot right where we are. In the same landscape yet shapeshifted and demagnetized towards old cult dynamics.

This is the work of the ReRooted Rebelles -
those who say no to false belonging and want support tolerating growing past it. Ready to tap into resource older than capitalism and empire. Placement deeper than approval.

The boulder does not apologize for being there. It does not smooth its edges to match the local stone. It does not try to roll away, or make itself light.

It rests in its weight.

Calling all erratics ready to reroot and rise.

love: the original movement

Love that pulses—
irresistible, irrepressible—
through poems, drumbeats, sweat, and tears.
Through calm presence and quiet glances.
Through mutual gazes remembered forever.
Through shared laughter,
cackles that crack spells.

These reorder and rebalance.
They move the current.
They shift what’s stuck and stagnant.

A love that commands,
“Tuck me in really, really tight, Daddy.”

A love that surrenders,
“Fine! I’ll be home by midnight!”

A love that asks,
“Can you listen to me vent for twenty minutes?”

A love that remembers,
“You smell and taste just like last time.”

Love, a systemic wash—
rinsing shame, loosening fear,
dissolving distortion in the line.

Love makes room.
Makes space for disillusion.
Completes interruptions.
Opens space for true exchange.
Charges the body electric.

Love, the lighting of a candle.
Love, the letter unsent.
Love, a world beyond empire.
Love, a message whispered to the dead.
Love, dancing in the home-field of what’s emergent.

The love that speaks before language.
The love that arrives as raw instinct
and makes sense of everything.
The love that rethreads the wild.

Oh Love!
restorer of the field.

Love, the original movement, resumed!

Lineage of the Unfelt

“I had to face more about them than they could know about me.”
— James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

Beyond the waterproof center,
in the formless fields,
the unfelt coils beneath.

To the ones who carry what others cannot face.

When you're out from the center,
you can see it.
You hear its cracks.
Feel its irrepressible ache.

Cisgendered —
Honor the trans makers of gender fluidity and freedom.

Whiteness —
Honor culture and realness.

Straightness —
Honor loving in wide and pluriversal ways.

Marriage —
Honor ceremony, blessing, and the many ways life is woven.

Parenthood —
Honor planetary accompaniment and care that buffers and betters.

Employment —
Honor those laboring beyond systemic convention.

Higher education —
Honor uncertified compassion and wisdom.

Capitalism —
Honor ritual and reciprocity.

Citizenship —
Honor stewardship of the directions and land.

Orderly mind and balanced body —
Honor prescient chaos and those who walk nonlinearly.

Housing —
Honor the makers of home in exile.

Language —
Honor those dreaming in non-western tongues.

Wealth —
Honor unseen riches and abundance not counted.

Honor the residents of the margins, emergent.

Honor the weight.
Honor the cost.

Honor the keys without locks.

Honor the forgotten sorrows of the system.

Honor the weep of tears eternal.

love, respect and the fallow

There is a natural flow in relationships—toward and away—just as there is in nature. When that natural movement is interrupted, whether by force, guilt, or interference, it can disrupt a deeper balance that is trying to unfold. Love includes movements of toward and away.

Connection grows from understanding the delicate balance between distance and closeness, silence and conversation, independence and togetherness. Just as nature thrives in cycles, so too do we, in our interactions, our bonds, and our intimacies.

Sometimes, the natural rhythm of a relationship brings us closer to someone, weaving our lives together in ways we never anticipated. At other times, it pulls us apart.

When we honor the space between to receive fully the gift of what’s been, we often return to each other with a deeper understanding. We learn where self meets other in iterations.

We can come to understand that the strength of a relationship is not measured by its intensity in any given moment, but by its capacity to endure over time and space. Like a river that carves its path through the landscape, a relationship that follows its natural course will find its way, through obstacles, shaping both individuals in the process. Or like a field that lies fallow—not because it is useless, but because it needs rest to regain its strength and allow the soil to renew.

Family Constellations shows us that the natural flow of relationships extends beyond the immediate bonds between individuals. It reveals that our connections are shaped by deeper, often unseen forces rooted in our family systems. In every family, there are unspoken patterns, loyalties, exclusions and entanglements that influence the way we relate to one another. These invisible threads can either support the natural flows of life and love or interrupt it.

When we step into our family constellation, we begin to understand that we are part of a much larger web of relationships that stretch across generations. These ancestral patterns can manifest in subtle ways: inherited fears, interrupted movements, or unacknowledged grief that influence the way we navigate the world, including our relationships. We are also part of a larger web of resourcing than we might normally remember and perceive.

Just as nature has its cycles, so too do family systems. There are periods of harmony and times of tension, moments of closeness and moments of distance. The movements of toward and away are part of the larger dance of healing and belonging.

giving up to keep going

I give up

so I can keep going.

Obligated to live

to change

to engage

to regenerate

I surrender -

I’m good at this

I’m not good at that

I give up

So I can keep going.

They’re like this.

I’m like that.

That’s just the way we were

That’s just the way it is

I release them so I can accept me

continually

When I say let go, already

I mean to hold the stillness that is me, essentially

I give up

So I can keep going.

Choice

Fate

Destiny

I make contact

So I can keep going.

Lost it all

I give up

So I can keep going.

It’s all my fault

It’s not my fault

I give up

So I can keep going.

Gave it all up

I give up

So I can keep going.

Something new comes in

And just like that, irresistible

I’m pulled in

Faith

Trust

Dignity

I’m pulled in

I give up

So I can keep going.