I Spent Years Chasing “More.” Here’s What I Found Instead
They rose slowly, like bubbles drifting up from a deep well—words I didn’t know were trapped, finding their way to the surface: “I no longer want more. I want to be wild.”
I knew instantly this wasn’t about refusing anything good in my life; it was about returning to something ancient inside me. In a split second, I saw my fingernails curl into the moss of a hazel forest in the West of Ireland. It was visceral, like stepping into a different lifetime. I was there—lying on the moss, beneath the trees, pressed into the clay—held by the blessings and prayers braided into the forest floor.
The distinction felt stark. I had spent years believing that the path to a meaningful life required “more”, more visibility, more money, more expansion, more becoming and unbecoming. But have I ever truly tasted what it is to inhabit my own depth? I no longer wanted to keep chasing the glittering lie of “more.” I wanted the tendrils of my soul to touch real earth. To move not outward but inward, like a wild blackberry bramble on the edge of a manicured yard, whose canes refuse taming in the fullness of summer.
Even within a full, vibrant life, there can remain a longing for the part of us beneath our roles and choices—the wild part that wants to tend the ancestral soil and the unexplored chambers of the heart.
Maybe these words landed so powerfully because of what’s unfolding in the world, or because this moment in my life is asking different things of me. I’m no longer interested in what I can accumulate, accomplish, or accelerate. I’m interested in what can hold me. And beneath it all came the quiet question: Why now? Why this call toward wildness?
When I say “wild,” I don’t mean unruly or untethered. I’m not speaking of upheaval or abandoning the life I’ve built. The wildness I’m coming to understand isn’t resistance, it’s belonging. It is the part of us that is fully embodied, fully integrated, and in living conversation with the natural world that cradles us.
This wildness is not “more.” It’s not another ladder, another stretch, another version of self-betterment. It’s remembered. It’s a movement toward what remembers you: ancestry, instinct, soul, native language, the wisdom carried quietly in your bones.
Wildness doesn’t ask for performance or destruction. It invites you deeper, beneath the polished edges and the well-rehearsed roles, into the place where your truest nature lives. It asks you to let yourself be held by the places your soul recognizes. It is the feeling of being met by a landscape and knowing, in some wordless way, that you are not separate from it.
This wildness won’t ask you to break into more pieces. It gathers you home.
Not long after this realization surfaced, the words of Irish poet and philosopher John Moriarty arrived as if providing the question: “Who am I in the hazel wood?”
It was the question he carried when he decided to leave Canada after a decade and return home to Ireland. His words opened a doorway I hadn’t dared to cross. In Irish mythology, the hazel tree is the tree of wisdom—a threshold to heaven, a place of remembering.
His question nudged me toward the threshold I had been circling for years. It wasn’t about striving or reinventing. It was about returning. To the wild places within me. To what had been buried. To a truth I had always known. It wasn’t discovery, but recovery.
For most of my life, “more” was the north star. An expanding horizon I kept moving toward. More opportunity. More possibility. More becoming. To a girl who, at thirteen, felt her island of Ireland was too small to hold her dreams, “more” felt like a lifeline.
And it has given me a beautiful life; one I could never have imagined as a child in Dublin city. But inside all that expansion, something deeper kept calling. Not dissatisfaction, but longing. A whisper reminding me that beneath every pursuit and every stretch toward the next thing, there were still roads I hadn’t walked. Not out in the world, but within the sanctuary of my own heart, deep in the bones of me.
After the pandemic I began to slowly run out of the will to keep stretching toward the horizon of “more” and instead found myself brought to my knees in 2023, finally ready to inhabit the life I already had. This was the turning point, a quiet but revolutionary reorientation from seeking expansion to seeking belonging.
The illusion of “more” opened the door. Wildness has invited me to cross the threshold into something real.
On an ordinary July day, while walking the Burren, something extraordinary happened. My mother was just behind me on a narrow path through the hazel trees, and my children were scattered across the limestone like the Morrígan’s ravens; wild and fully themselves.
Out of nowhere, my eldest began to sob; deep, shaking tears. “It’s hard to have an autistic brother sometimes,” he said, naming a truth he had carried quietly for years.
In that moment, he touched a place within himself that had never had language. He grieved not the brother he loved, but the ease he wished he sometimes had. He let go of what he thought he should feel so he could finally be with what is, the love, the ache, the devotion.
His tears fell freely on land he had never stood on before, yet he somehow knew. He spoke to his brother under the hazel trees, telling him he loved him, saying the words he hadn’t been able to say until then. He went to the wild places within himself and was held, not by me, but by the land that remembered him before he remembered the truth of himself.
In that moment, something became immediately clear to me, something that I was circling for years: wildness isn’t found in expansion or striving, it emerges when we let out hearts be known, to the land and what’s always been waiting for us.
Wildness, as I understand it, is a place where we feel truly held—where we can surrender the need to hold on and hold everything together. It’s the realm beneath performing and the never-ending leaning in. It is the soft, moss-covered ancient ground within us that offers itself as a gift for our surrender. Finding this inner wildness is less a journey and more a remembrance.
There is nothing you must “do.” It asks nothing of you but the truth of who you are. It will never demand that you do more, chase, be brighter, or be better. Wildness asks only that you turn inward and align with what has always been true.
Wildness is the ultimate homecoming. It’s the heartbeat beneath the noise, the steady, ancient ground under the never-ending expectation to keep becoming. It invites us to stay soft in the face of intimidation and the urge to strive. Wildness soothes the mind so the heart can speak.
It is knowing that who we are isn’t found in endless expansion, but in this exact moment, right now and choosing to fully inhabit our lives from the inside out.
Maybe you’ve been feeling this too—the bramble canes beginning to grow wild beneath the surface. A sense that “more” is not the path it once was. Maybe you no longer want to broaden, but to curl your fingernails into the clay of your own wild depths. To root deeply.
So, I offer you these gentle questions:
Where in your life do you feel the call inward toward something deeper?What landscape—inner or outer—helps you remember who you are beneath your roles and titles?What might wildness mean for you, not as rebellion, but as return?
Let these questions move around your heart slowly. Give them space to breathe you and then, may you feel the truth of your own wildness rise up to meet you. May it steady you when the world around you quakes. May you find the singular pathway within—the one that leads you back to the places that never asked you to strive.
And when the world asks you to chase, when it tells you that “more” is the answer, may you remember there is another way.A way to root deeply.A way to belong to yourself.A way to listen for the answers buried in the clay of your own heart.
May you come to know yourself in all the wild places, and may they guide you home.
Emma Tynan is a modern Irish mystic, spiritual teacher, and writer living in the Pacific Northwest. She is currently writing her first book and facilitating international luxury retreats in devotion to Mary Magdalene.
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