WILD and Traveling the Path toward a more Enlightened You

by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 27, 2014

“Make no mistake about it – enlightenment is a destructive process.  It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier.  Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth.  It’s seeing through the façade of pretense.  It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.” 

- Adyashanti

“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.” 

- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra

There are some Spoilers ahead.

Wild is a beautiful, brutally honest film, based on a book written by Cheryl Strayed, about a troubled woman who takes a long hike to essentially find her way back home within herself.  It’s about struggle and realization, it’s about death, loss, and life, failing and growing.  The film starts out in the Mojave desert, a perfect location for a pilgrimage toward a form of enlightenment to begin, which provides the young woman with knowledge about herself in order to live her life while moving toward the middle way, a way where a person can live with themselves.

The film follows Cheryl Strayed as she embarks on a journey to find the girl her mother raised.  After her mother’s death, Cheryl takes a destructive path as she grieves her passing, because as Cheryl later says; her mother was the love of her life.  Cheryl, unable to emotionally handle the overwhelming sense of loss, begins to take heroin and destroys her marriage as she sleeps with pretty well every guy she meets.  In a rash decision, Cheryl, desperately searching for change, sets out for a long hike on the Pacific Crest Trail with no experience and no company.

“I’d finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.” 

- Cheryl Strayed

The film has a series of flashbacks, part of her subconscious and conscious mind, that tell her story as she walks for over a thousand miles in the scorching heat, the snowy foothills of the Rockies, and the thick rain of an Oregon forest, on her journey toward self-discovery.  While she combats weather, she suffers from head to blistering toe as she carries a massive bag that weighs almost as heavy as she does, this bag becomes the symbolic mental weight she has been carrying around since her mother died.  The poor girl’s feet probably suffers the most with toenails ripping off and blood soaking through her socks.

Along the way, she runs into a variety of people, ranging from the most polite and helpful to the potentially dangerous, from the disgusting to the adorably sweet.  Cheryl’s main obstacle is herself, which is where the heart of the film lies.  She needs to learn to accept herself for who she is and at the same time, she needs detoxification.  In order for her to straighten her life up, she realizes that the heroin and alcohol must go.  This pilgrimage is just the right cleansing she needs.  This level of solitude is important to rid yourself of the poison of modern-day society.  A society that is sick with alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs, a society bored of itself, and desiring any form of manufactured escape that is made available. 

Emilio Estevez directed a transcendent film in 2010 called The Way, about a father who travels to Europe to recover the body of his estranged son.  While there the father, played by Estevez’s real father Martin Sheen, decides the travel the El Camino de Santiago.  This pilgrimage is where his son died so it becomes important for him to travel it.  Here he was able to experience why his son made his own lifestyle change to a more healthy body and mind.  Like Cheryl, the father learns here that he needs to let go of the structure and restraints of society in order to be free within himself.

“No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.” 

- Freud

Wild is a thoughtful, cathartic, refreshingly genuine portrayal of one woman’s path at finding a form of inner peace.  She pares down her heavy bag of stuff to the bare essentials physically while mentally shedding away her undesirable former self.  She ends her journey with no man in her life, no job to go back to, no money in her pocket and no prospects for the future.  But in the end we see that she’s just fine because she broke her destructive-self down and rebuilt a young woman, who wants to live because she has come to terms with herself, she finally understands what her mother was singing about in their kitchen so many years ago.

Cheryl was able to recognize a disturbance within herself before she decided to travel the Pacific Crest Trail.  Through spontaneity and pretty well no help from anyone in her life, with the exception of her ex-husband who still misses her, she did it.  She finally was able to see that her environment was a toxic one.  Where people drink too much, watch too much TV, shop too much for stuff that doesn’t actually define anything.  She could see the zombies and finally decided that she didn’t want any part of it, she had to be alone so she would no longer feel lonely.  That is the journey we all must face if we desire a healthy mind in a toxic world.  We must break through all the rituals, all the beliefs, and all the other bullshit that's expected of us, and that defines most societies.  We need to do this so we can live with ourselves as we travel a better path toward a meaningful future.

“What if I forgave myself?  I thought.  What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have?  What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do?  What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done?  What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men?  What if heroin taught me something?  What if yes was the right answer instead of no?  What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed?  What if I already was?” 

- Cheryl Strayed