The Gods of Wild Things: A Memoir

To listen to the wild is to open ourselves not only to the language of nature but also to the depth of our animality for it is there we find hope and healing.  The Gods of Wild Things is memoir-in-flash, a collection of seventy-three individual flash essays about how I learned to listen to wild things and horses and in turn overcome depression and drug addiction.
 
My journey listening to wildness began at a young age when horses and the hollows of Appalachia were my safety nets from the chaos of the world. As I got older, I succumbed to depression and drug addiction, prevalent in Appalachia. In an attempt to get clean and find a life, I fled to California to work as a horse trainer. There, with the help of horses and nature, I found myself and my sobriety. Doing so did not come without struggles, however. There were times when breaking colts required me to break parts of myself. Eventually the business of training horses ate at my soul, so I quit. For twelve years, I didn’t get on a horse, but at the age of forty I returned to horses and the hollows of Appalachia. In that return, I found myself again.
 
This book is about coming to terms with myself through the healing medicine of horses.  It complicates what it means to be wild by finding wildness not just in alpine meadows and dark jungles but if we learn to listen, in the everyday, the mundane, and deep within ourselves just beneath the programming.

To read more about it, check it out here: www.thegodsofwildthings.com/