Rewilding the Word

What Pan taught me about archetypes, sobriety, and the courage to speak

Before Pan appeared, before I ever spoke of mythopoetic fields or archetypal visitations, there was something else: a childhood spent immersed in story.

My father was a brilliant storyteller. Charismatic, funny, deeply knowledgeable. He had this way of layering history with personalities that seemed larger than life, always with a touch of embellishment that made everything sparkle. He could captivate a room, and he often did. I was transfixed. Through him, I came to understand that story wasn't just entertainment. It was a portal.

Our home was filled with books, thousands of them. I read anything I could get my hands on. The classics, the philosophy, the fiction. I didn’t always understand them, but I felt their weight. I entered their worlds as if I lived there. And often, more than merely reading, I was inhabiting the worlds described.

Writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Laura Esquivel gave me something I hadn’t understood before: the blurred line between magic and the everyday. Their worlds pulsed with a kind of aliveness that felt more present than realism. Through magical realism, I felt closer to something true, something that eludes plain sight. It’s why I named it “Beyond the Visible.”

Even in the years when I wore the corporate mask, part of me remained devoted to that question: what else is here? What lives beneath the surface of things? I stayed loyal to the mythic, even if I buried it under strategy decks, business meetings, bullet points, and deadlines.

It’s only recently that I’ve started writing openly about this deeper layer of reality. This has felt both exhilarating and vulnerable. Mythopoetic language doesn’t always land cleanly in a world that values precision, efficiency, and proof. But I trust that some of you reading this feel it too. The strange resonance. The sense that reality is more textured, more enchanted, more alive than we’re taught to believe.

So as I share this story of Pan, and the way an archetype reshaped my life, I want to offer this first. This isn’t a new turn. It’s a remembering. And if this feels unusual or abstract, I welcome your questions, reflections, or challenges. I share this because I want to connect. To know how you perceive reality. And whether, perhaps, you’ve also heard a whisper from the wild.

The muse left a message under the pine needles. Photo by Connor McManus

Pan arrived when the world stopped.

The world’s forests were on fire. From the Amazon to Siberia, the lungs of the planet were burning. Then Covid tore a hole in the sky. The rhythm of normal life fell away. In that rupture, something wild entered. It didn’t just touch the world. It moved through me. I hadn’t summoned him consciously. Still, Pan stepped through the crack. Half-wild. Half-divine. Completely unexpected.

I know that for some, the image of Pan may evoke discomfort. His horns, hooves, and untamed energy have at times been misunderstood, even demonized, especially in cultures shaped by Christian iconography, where the wild was often equated with the wicked. But Pan is not a devil. He is a god of nature, instinct, vitality, and music. He represents the unfiltered pulse of life, not its corruption. To meet him is not to descend into darkness, but to remember a part of the self that has been long exiledthe earthy, erotic, playful, and embodied part that knows how to belong to the world.

I had spent years locked in the architecture of success. Corporate ladders. Strategic meetings. External validation. It looked good on paper. Sometimes it even felt exhilarating. But beneath the performance lived a quiet ache. It crept in late at night when the inbox was empty and the mirror grew honest.

Pan didn’t arrive through language. He came as a presence. He showed up in precise synchronicities. In the sensation of being observed by something older than the world I knew. In the return of music. In images and dreams. In the way nature began to whisper a familiar, long-forgotten language.

At first, I struggled to understand. Then, the messages began to emerge. They didn’t come through reason. They arrived like a slow unfolding.

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He asked me to care for my body. "Look, I’m strong and fit. Why aren’t you?" he seemed to say, half-mocking, half-loving. He pointed to the trees, the sky, the wind and said, without words, that nature is not separate. It is friend. It is mirror. He danced in the space between masculine and feminine without tension, and asked if I could do the same. Grounded strength walked hand in hand with wild intuition. He played music and let it move through his hips, through his breath, and asked, "Are you connected too?" Eros wasn’t about hunger. It was presence. A pulse to join, not a thing to consume. Bacchus had once led me toward excess. But with Pan came a different intoxication. Clarity. Rhythm. Breath. I became sober five years ago, not by force, but by listening. He teased, "Bacchus visits me now and then, but I don't need him. Do you?" That’s when I began to hear the drum again. The messages pulled me back into the body. Into movement. Into drumming. Into discipline. Into a more vital, erotic, rooted engagement with life. And then he pointed inward. Not toward what I had done. But to who I had forgotten. Who I am. Beneath identity. Beneath achievement. Close to essence.

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These weren’t ideas I could hold in my mind alone. They reshaped the way I lived. How I moved. What I ate. Where I spent time. What I listened to. How I breathed. These weren’t just insights. They became lived rhythms.

Pan is an archetype. But he doesn’t belong locked up in museums or books. He exists in the mythopoetic field. Outdoors, in nature. He appears when something in the soul becomes ready. His arrival doesn’t follow polite forms. The ground begins to tremble, the leaves rustle, the water stirs. And you feel him.

Receiving something from an archetype requires a certain posture. You don’t collapse into it, and you don’t claim it as your identity. Doing so risks egoic inflation. That path can lead to disorientation, fragmentation, illusion—even delusion. We don’t cross the mythopoetic threshold, because we are not the archetype that visits us. But when we meet it with symbolic awareness and gentle regard, something transformative begins to move through.

The mythopoetic field speaks in symbols, breathes through image, and transmits meaning by resonance. It works with intuition. It cannot be dissected. It must be felt. Pan arrived in that kind of space. I had to meet him there.

When archetypes arrive and go unanswered, their energies often reroute. You might encounter them later in illness, in burnout, or in longing that haunts the edges of your day. But when you turn toward them, when you pay attention, they begin to speak. They offer something vital.

Pan offered a return to life, and to agency. He stirred the part of me that refused to be domesticated.

There’s something else I’ve come to realize, something that crystallized only after years of walking with these archetypal visitors. To write like this and to bring the mythic into prose, to let the imaginal speak, is itself a kind of freedom. Carl Jung knew this when he created The Red Book, a work that defied the conventions of scientific psychology and dared to let the unconscious take visible form. In a society shaped by materialism, consensus reality, and the primacy of scientific proof, expressing the magical becomes an act of rebellion. A reclamation. For me, publishing these thoughts, especially when they stray from the conventional, feels vulnerable and exposing. But each time I do, something in me strengthens. Self-expression becomes self-regulation. And after a lifetime of meeting others’ expectations, staying within acceptable scripts, and keeping quiet about what felt most alive, the act of publishing becomes a kind of rewilding. A return to the wildness of the self. And perhaps this too was one of Pan’s gifts. A quieter one, arriving years after he first appeared, after he had visited long enough to change me, and then slipped gently back into the woods. He didn’t promise salvation. He offered remembrance.

There’s a rhythm inside your life that waits to be played. Some part of you already knows the beat. Sometimes it takes a wild god to bring you the drum.

The beat is different now. And it’s mine.