Wildness Is Not the Opposite of Belonging | Witch in Progress
One of the stupidest lies people tell about love is that to belong, you must become less wild.
As if devotion requires diminishment. As if being at home means becoming easier to manage. As if instinct and tenderness are enemies. Luna makes nonsense of all of that simply by existing.
The claim here is that wildness is not the opposite of belonging. Erasure is.
Luna likes freedom. Her instincts are old, sharp, and not particularly interested in modern human fantasies of total control. She is loving and kind, but she does not feel manufactured. She feels intact. There is still weather in her. Still alertness. Still an internal compass not fully subordinated to ours. And yet she belongs here so clearly that the whole house knows it.
This is what I mean by wild belonging. Not feral chaos. Not ownership disguised as affection. A relationship in which nature is not erased in order for intimacy to be possible.
That matters because many people have been taught the opposite about themselves. They have been taught that being lovable means being less intense, less perceptive, less instinctive, less internally governed. Less voice. Less edge. Less appetite for freedom. Softer in all the ways that make them more manageable. But a living creature can be both deeply bonded and fully itself. Luna proves it every day.
Behavioral research on dogs and human-animal attachment consistently points to complexity rather than caricature. Dogs are not simple obedience machines, and successful bonds are not produced only by control. They are shaped by attachment, communication, environment, history, and mutual adaptation (Payne et al., 2015). In other words: relationship works better when the actual animal is allowed to exist.
Ancient cultures generally understood domestication differently than modern convenience culture does. Domestication did not mean the elimination of instinct. It meant relationship, role, shared space, mutual dependence, a way of living alongside a being whose nature remained partly other. That otherness was not failure. It was reality.
That is one reason Luna feels so symbolic to me without becoming a symbol I flatten. She is not a metaphor in fur. She is a real dog. But through her I am remembering something I do not want smoothed out in myself either. The old instincts. The protective edge. The preference for truth over niceness. The need for freedom inside belonging rather than outside it.
There is no real home in which everything alive has been subdued into perfect compliance. That is not home. That is suppression with curtains.
Real home has movement in it. Voice. Thresholds. Study. Difference. A little mud. The occasional foyer disaster. Love that does not require the death of instinct.
Luna belongs here not because she has stopped being what she is, but because what she is can now exist inside a field of recognition.
And perhaps that is the deeper prayer for all of us. Not merely to be loved. To be loved without having to become less alive first.
✨ Ritual Invitation
Take a walk without correcting your pace to look civilized. Let your natural rhythm return for ten minutes. Notice what your body does when it is not being rehearsed for approval.
💬 Your Turn
Name one instinct in yourself that was never the problem, only inconvenient to other people.
Finish this sentence: “Belonging feels trustworthy when I do not have to amputate __________.”
References
Fine, A. H., & Beck, A. M. (2015). Understanding our kinship with animals: Input for health care professionals interested in the human-animal bond. In A. H. Fine (Ed.), Handbook on animal-assisted therapy (4th ed., pp. 3–10). Academic Press.
Payne, E., Bennett, P. C., & McGreevy, P. D. (2015). Current perspectives on attachment and bonding in the dog-human dyad. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 8, 71–79. https://doi.org/10.2147/PRBM.S74972
Wood, W., & Rünger, D. (2016). Psychology of habit. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 289–314. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033417