The Wild Within: Turning Grief into Growth

Some grief arrives like a storm—loud and disorienting. Other times, it drifts in quietly, carried on the scent of changing seasons. In the March 24 episode of Dear Grandchildren: A Tracker’s Tale, titled The Wild Within: Turning Grief into Growth, Michael Douglas invites us into the sacred space between sorrow and renewal.

He begins with a personal reckoning—childhood memories of being labeled and medicated for ADHD, the confusion of being told something inside him was broken. But that same “wildness” he once tried to suppress became the very force that led him into a life of tracking, teaching, and storytelling.

This episode reminds us that grief, too, has a wild nature. It doesn’t arrive with a tidy lesson—it shakes us, unroots us, and leaves behind questions we don’t always want to answer. But as Michael shares, grief also brings messages. Through a sacred story passed down from the Mohawk Nation, we’re reminded that the first ripple of death came not from violence, but from a lack of thankfulness. That when we stop seeing each element of our world—each acorn, each tick, even our own discomfort—as part of a sacred balance, we begin to fall out of rhythm.

Using grief as a tracking skill may seem foreign, but it’s deeply ancestral. In this episode, emotional imbalance is treated with the same curiosity and care we might bring to tracking an animal: observe the signs, understand the pattern, and let the forest show you how to move through.

This isn’t about fixing grief. It’s about respecting it—about seeing it as a path toward self-reliance, awareness, and growth. Even amidst pain, we can practice wilderness skills of the soul—finding the tracks of our former selves, following them not back into the past, but forward into becoming.

Listen to the full episode and begin the craft of turning your own sorrow into something steady and sacred.