A Wild Keen series on curiosity, discernment, spirituality, and occasionally discovering that the rabbit hole goes much deeper than expected.
A preface from Wild Keen on how this series came to be.
It began, as all good things do in my experience, on a rainy Saturday morning after a doom scroll.
There I was, minding everybody else’s business, when the algorithm presented me with an unusual combination of words that led to a question I could never have dreamed I would utter; with a furrowed brow, and a deeply sincere curiosity:
“What the actual fuckity fuck is an Andromedan Starseed?”
I didn’t know (I’m fairly certain I still don’t, even after a deep dive).
Not I didn’t know and therefore it‘s nonsense.
I genuinely didn’t know.
So I went looking.
And, well…
Here we are.
Because one advert led to starseeds. Starseeds led to modern spirituality. Modern spirituality wandered into ancient practices, astrology, tarot, witchcraft, crystals, sacred traditions, social media, algorithms, capitalism, cultural context, and the peculiar human habit of taking something enormously complicated and turning it into a three-slide carousel.
And somewhere down that rabbit hole, another question emerged:
How do we tell the difference between something we simply don’t understand and something that genuinely deserves a Whiskey.Tango.Foxtrot?
That question is much more interesting.
Because unfamiliar does not mean ridiculous.
New does not mean inauthentic.
Popular does not mean shallow.
Old does not automatically mean wise.
Beautiful does not mean meaningless.
And something being sold or exchanged does not make it profane. Goddesses know, I own enough books, cards, candles, and assorted paraphernalia to make that argument rather inconvenient.
The interesting bit lives in the why.
The context.
The history.
The intention.
The claims being made.
The things we’ve inherited, the things we’ve revived, the things we’ve reinvented and, occasionally, the things somebody appears to have pulled directly from their arse before attaching an £11.11 price tag.
And so That Ain’t Sacred, Babe was born.
Not as a catalogue of things Wild Keen has deemed sufficiently sacred.
Fuck, no.
We are spectacularly unqualified for that job.
This is a collection of musings born from curiosity.
A place to encounter something unfamiliar and ask:
What is this?
Where did it come from?
What does it mean to the people who practise it?
Has that meaning changed?
Is there history here that deserves understanding?
Is somebody making a claim that holds up to scrutiny?
Is something sacred being respectfully shared, naturally evolving, harmlessly enjoyed, commercially sold… or cynically exploited and/ or appropriated?
And sometimes, after all of that:
“Okay, but what the fuckadoodle doo is this shit?”
Because curiosity and discernment are not opposites.
Curiosity keeps us from dismissing what we don’t understand.
Discernment means curiosity doesn’t require us to believe everything we find.
And I rather like the space between the two.
There is room here for wonder.
There is room for scepticism.
There is room to discover that something you once dismissed has roots stretching back centuries.
There is room to discover that something presented as ancient wisdom was invented on Tuesday.
There is room to change your mind.
There is most definitely room to decide that something isn’t for you without needing to declare it wrong for anybody else.
Because knowledge becoming more accessible is a beautiful and powerful gift. People are finding language, practices, histories, and paths they may never have encountered a generation ago.
I think that’s extraordinary.
But greater visibility also creates greater opportunity for things to be stripped of context, repackaged, algorithmically amplified, and sold back to us with a discount code and a countdown timer.
BUT! Commerce isn’t the enemy. Unscrupulous fuckery is
Buying a beautifully made rune set isn’t inherently less sacred than carving your own. Paying an artist for an oracle deck isn’t spiritual failure. Buying a book is literally paying for knowledge.
Artists deserve paying. Makers deserve paying. Authors deserve paying. Teachers deserve paying. And sometimes the thing somebody else has poured their skill, knowledge, time, and heart into becomes a treasured part of our own practice.
There is nothing inherently more sacred about making something yourself, nor inherently less sacred about exchanging money for something another person has made with care.
The rot begins when vulnerability, misinformation, false authority, stolen traditions, or invented claims are used to extract money.
That’s the distinction.
NOT sacred versus commercial.
Exchange versus exploitation.
And that is absolutely something we’re going to poke with a stick around here.
So this isn’t a sermon.
It isn’t a rulebook.
It isn’t gatekeeping.
And it certainly isn’t Wild Keen standing at the entrance to the woods with a clipboard deciding whose spirituality is legitimate.
It’s a conversation.
A rabbit hole.
A cheeky side-eye.
A willingness to say “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”
And, occasionally, a willingness to emerge several hours later, covered in metaphorical cobwebs, and announce:
“Nah, bruh.”
We’ll wander through it one subject at a time.
There will be history. There will be context. There will be opinions. There will be questions we cannot answer. There will probably (definitely!) be things I get wrong and later reconsider.
Good. That’s what curiosity is for.
And yes, there will be swearing. Quite a fucking lot of it. So if you’re uncomfortable with language from a soul well-versed in the fine art of cussing, this may not be your particular corner of the woods. No hard feelings.
But if you have a curious mind, a beautifully sceptical heart, and absolutely no objection to occasionally asking “what the fuck?” in the pursuit of knowledge…
Pull up a chair.
Let’s go looking.
Because perhaps the most sacred thing we can protect here isn’t certainty at all, but rather our willingness to remain curious.
This ain’t sacred, babe. But your discernment is.
In Salt & Ink,
Wild Keen
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