What it Means to be Wild at Heart

One of the best things about doing this adventure is the sharing.

People read what I put out there and they send things back. Books. Podcasts. Articles. Movies. Over a very short time, the list of recommendations went from 10 to 20 to, all of a sudden, hundreds of unique things that people have shared with me over the past seven months.

I so respect the time and effort people take to engage with this work. And I love that they want to be part of it by pointing me toward things that have pushed their own thinking. That generosity is a big part of what makes this adventure feel like a community, not just a project.

But I’ve also fallen behind. Way behind.

My reading list alone has grown to well over 100 books. Some of them are 400 or 500 pages. I’m looking at thousands of pages of deep text. And I started to feel a quiet anxiety about it. Like I was letting people down if I didn’t get to their recommendation.

So, I started using a tool. I have mixed feelings about AI. I’ve written about how dangerous it can become when it gives people a false sense of relationship and connection. I’ve written about how the AI business model matters more than we might think. At the same time, I use it. It helps me do research that would take months on my own.

More recently, I’ve been using NotebookLM, a Google product, to create audio summaries of books. It’s a great tool. You feed it material and it generates a 20-minute podcast-style overview. Two hosts walking through the key ideas, debating them, pulling out the tensions. From there, I can decide whether a book is something I want to dive into deeper.

For example, I listened to the audio summary of The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist. That one made the must-read list. And I just finished it. Highly recommend! I also listened to one called Wild at Heart by John Eldredge. Not sure I will dive deeper into that one.

So let me be upfront. I am sharing thoughts of a book I did not read. I listened to a 20-minute AI-generated audio summary. That’s what I’m responding to. If I had actually picked up the book, I might have put it down, because I think I would have been instantly turned off by the author’s perspective. But because of the summary, I got the gist of it all. And while I disagree with most of it, there are some things in there that I agree with. Although probably not for the same reasons as the author.

The audio summary opened with a metaphor. A magnificent 500-pound African lion pacing a concrete cage at the zoo. Fed through a sliding metal door. No longer even believing he’s a lion. The author, Eldredge, argues that this lion is the modern man. Society has domesticated men. Stripped the wildness out of them. Replaced adventure and risk with cubicles, committee meetings, and the aspiration to be a “nice guy.”

His framework is built on three desires he says are hardwired into every man: a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. He contrasts these with three feminine desires and argues that these energies are fundamentally different and cannot interact. He traces the suppression of male wildness through religion, corporate culture, and what he calls the father wound, a universal psychological injury that leaves men feeling like imposters.

The sources he draws from are a reframing of the Bible and pop-cultural representations of men. He essentially reads God not as the gentle, all-knowing figure most religious institutions describe, but as a wild, risk-taking warrior. I think you can read the Bible, or really anything, and make it whatever story you want to make it. The fact that this argument was built largely on cherry-picked scripture and Hollywood archetypes is alarming to me.

But here’s the thing. There is some truth in here.

The idea that society puts people in cages? 100% Yes! Religion can put people in boxes. Capitalism puts us in boxes. Healthcare puts us in boxes. Education puts us in boxes that prevent us from being our true creative geniuses. I agree with all of that.

Where I break with the book is that it argues for letting men out of one cage by putting them into another one. A very traditional view of masculinity. A different cage, but still a cage.

The question the audio summary left me with is: what becomes of a society of highly domesticated men? I think that’s way too narrow. The real question is: what becomes of a society when all of us, men and women, are not able to live as our whole selves? When we are all living in cages of our own and cultural makings?

One of the things he does throughout the book is operate in extremes. Very binary thinking. He acknowledges masculine and feminine energy but essentially says these energies cannot interact. This goes completely against what I’ve come to learn and believe through this adventure.

If you look at our DNA, 99.9% of us are the same. Men and women. People of different races. For me, the issue isn’t about how you embrace your God-given masculine energy or your God-given feminine energy in isolation. It’s about how we each embrace our unique mix of energies so we can live as our whole selves.

Two days after listening to the Wild at Heart summary, I listened to another one. A book called Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin.

It covers remarkably similar ground. People are trapped. Society rewards us for playing what Plotkin calls the standard game of security building. Get the degree, pay the mortgage, maintain your social standing, and mistake that checklist for a complete life. He argues that true adulthood requires something more. A disruptive, often painful initiation into your unique soul purpose.

Sounds a bit like Wild at Heart, right? Both books say we’re caged. Both say we need to break free. But here’s where they split apart completely. And it comes down to why. It comes down to what’s underneath.

Wild at Heart starts with a rigid framework. Three masculine desires. Three feminine desires. A wound that can only be healed by older men. A God who is fierce and dangerous, not gentle and loving. It’s prescriptive. It tells you what your wildness should look like based on your gender.

Soulcraft starts with a caterpillar.

Deep inside a caterpillar are clusters of cells called imaginal buds. They hold the blueprint for the butterfly. But when those cells first activate, the caterpillar’s own immune system doesn’t recognize them. It treats them as alien invaders. Its immune system tries to kill them off.

Plotkin uses this as a metaphor for what happens when our deeper purpose tries to emerge. The ego, the part of us that built a safe and predictable life, treats that emergence as a threat. It mounts an immune response. Anxiety. Imposter syndrome. Self-sabotage. Not because we’re weak, but because our internal defense systems are doing their job too well.

One of the most powerful ideas in the book is what Plotkin calls the loyal soldier. After World War II, there were Japanese soldiers stranded on remote Pacific islands who kept fighting for decades because they didn’t know the war was over. Plotkin argues our childhood psyche does the same thing. When we’re young, we develop a sub-personality whose job is to suppress our wild, authentic self to keep us safe from rejection or punishment. It keeps us alive through middle school. It helps us survive. But then we grow up. The environment changes. And that loyal soldier is still in the jungle of our mind, shooting at anything that looks risky or authentically us.

The book’s answer isn’t to fight the loyal soldier. You can’t win that war. Instead, you approach it with compassion. You thank it. You acknowledge that it kept you alive when you needed it. And then, gently, you tell it the war is over.

This connected with me so much deeper than Wild at Heart. Because this version is rooted in love, not fear. Wild at Heart says: here is what a real man looks like, now go be that. Soulcraft says: your wholeness is already inside you, unique to you, and it will emerge when you stop fighting it.

Wild at Heart gives you a new cage. Soulcraft asks you to dissolve the cage entirely.

Plotkin also makes a distinction I really like. He says we all have a survival dance and a sacred dance. The survival dance is how you pay the bills. It’s necessary. You can’t skip it. But the sacred dance is the unique work you were born to do. And the ultimate goal is for those two dances to become the same thing. That idea hits close to home right now.

Soulcraft is 100% a book I’m going to read deeply. Wild at Heart is likely not. Same general territory. Completely different roots.

Which brings me to something I did recently that I’d never done before. I put purple nail polish on some of my fingers.

Not all of them. Three on my left hand. Two on my right. Strategic. My right hand is my index and middle fingers, so when I flash the peace sign, which I often do, people see the purple. My left hand is my thumb, middle, and pinky. The thumb and pinky for the Pura Vida hang loose, which I picked up from surf culture. And the middle finger? Not to say “f’ you.” But rather it’s a way some buddies and I say, “I love you” to each other. I know, weird, but that’s what we do.

I do want to be clear about something. This is not about questioning my sexual identity or my gender identity. And it’s not about transitioning. It’s not a statement about any of that. This is about embracing the weird person that I am.

I’ve always struggled with fitting in boxes. I said something to Becca years ago that still feels true.

“So many people go through life just trying to fit in. I’ve spent my whole life just trying to fit out.”

I want to find the purest expression of who I am, live my wholeness, and let that wholeness guide me through life.

And here’s what I’ve noticed since I put the polish on. I’ve grown to love it. Every time I look down at my hands, I feel more me. Not less. More. I’m leaning into the wholeness of who I am, not living by societal definitions of what it means to be a man or what it means to be a woman. I’m more focused on what it means to be human.

And this is exactly where Wild at Heart falls apart for me. I consider myself a wild guy. I run adventures and retreats called WILD. And much like Eldridge advocates for, I like to do hard shit. I have run several marathons. For my 50^th birthday, I am going to celebrate by doing a 50-mile mountain bike race. I took up skiing later in life. When I did, I gravitated to telemark. Why? Because why take a chairlift to the top, when you can skin up.

And as I have written about a lot recently. Surfing has captured me.

I love to push my limits for the size of waves that I surf. I surf overhead waves. Six-foot faces. And when I’m paddling into those waves, I look down and there’s purple nail polish on my fingers. That’s not a contradiction. I thing that’s wholeness. That’s strength and love in the same body, in the same moment. That is Heart-Strong.

If Plotkin is right, maybe that loyal soldier who spent years telling me to fit in, to stay in the box, is finally standing down. Maybe the imaginal buds are doing their thing. Maybe the purple on my fingers is just a small, visible sign that the butterfly blueprint was in there all along.

Eldridge says the wild heart and the tender heart are separate things. That masculine and feminine energy can’t interact. I’m out in the ocean proving they do.

I’ve been thinking about why this whole concept of Heart-Strong feels so meaningful to me. Why I feel so completely oriented toward my purpose. And I think it’s because the words themselves, heart and strong, capture exactly how I naturally move through the world. Not one or the other. Both. Fused together.

I’m glad I listened to something that pushed my thinking. Even when my first reaction was, “this is a bunch of f’ing patriarchal manosphere bullshit.” And some of it probably is, at least by my standards. But one of the hardest things to do on an adventure like this is to make sure you’re not just exploring things that support your current beliefs. There was learning in Wild at Heart. I agree about boxes. I agree about systems that cage people. I just disagree that the solution is a different cage.

And I’m grateful that two days later, a different audio summary showed me what it looks like when the same territory is explored through love instead of fear. Same diagnosis. Different medicine.

Let people live outside their boxes. Let people live as their whole selves. Let them find the right balance of their energies, whatever that looks like for them. Because history and culture have shown us that when people step into their wholeness, they do remarkable things. That’s not a gendered claim. That’s a human one.

Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org.