The Soulful Child: 12 Years In The Wilderness, A Review

Marcie Mtz
Aug 24, 2017 · 8 min read

When I was a little girl growing up in Chimayo, New Mexico, seven miles east of Española, we spent much of our summers taking a break from the heat in the valley to visit a primitive house at the foot of several acres of property in the small mountain village of Peñasco — twenty-five miles from home. My dad purchased the property in the ’70s. We would drive up, deep into the mountains through the mountain village, and along the way I would see houses of various interesting shapes. I remember my father saying “hippies” lived in those houses. I had no idea what hippies were and wasn’t sure why they were there but they were always a curiosity to me. I had some inkling that these people were trying to get away from something; what, I didn’t know. My seven-year-old self had barely seen anything outside of my own little community.

Being raised in the small town of Chimayo, where even though people think there are few inhabitants but in fact there are many homes spread out into the hills, some of which are practically on top of each other, I always knew it was considered “rural life”. My father raised and butchered animals to feed his family, had a cellar in the house to store jellies and canned fruit from our trees, and taught me the history of our ancestors, the people who came from Spain through Mexico to settle and work the land. I thought I was as small town rural as small town rural could get.

Little did I know that, at the same time I was wondering about the mountain people, the gringo hippies as I knew them, there was a precocious little girl living wild among the beauty of the forest and the animals of nature, less than a hundred miles away, and not too far from the place I used to go camping with my cousins and grandpa. Little would I realize, until now, how much more advanced I was than this little girl in the “ways of the world” and yet how I knew nothing of surviving the “real” world and how painfully deprived I was of the experience of truly understanding, appreciating, and being one with nature.

I remember the first time I saw Chloe at my high school. I had already known her brother Nye, on whom I immediately developed a crush and who probably most of the girls had been crushing on. Chloe was every bit as beautiful as her brother was handsome. She had wild, strawberry blondish hair and the softest, kindest demeanor. Chloe, Nye, and their brother Carey, who I also knew of when I first started high school, were always a mystery to me. I heard they were in foster care because they had lived off the grid and hadn’t been in school but that was about all I knew. Though I always liked them I never got to know either Nye or Chloe much and now I realize what I was missing by failing to befriend them as more than just acquaintances; unfortunate for me.

But fast forward almost thirty years and, thanks to social media where I reconnected with these beautiful, but somewhat mysterious, people and now to read the story of their lives, the mystery is finally unlocked. It’s not like I wondered all of these years but once we reconnected the memories came flooding back.

When I found out Chloe was writing her story and is a writing coach, combined with the fact that my own passion has always been writing and my journey for the past five years has been toward that passion despite choosing a completely different path, it seemed like kismet to me. Then to connect with Nye and observe his views of the world from a holistic perspective, to see that he is aware of many esoteric things I have researched over the past several years about our world as well as the importance of the mind-body connection and natural healing, has caused me to ponder. I have struggled to find many people who think the way I do or remotely understand my way of thinking, as these ideas and beliefs are somewhat rare though gaining traction. It all makes me wonder when that connection began, on what plane of existence, or by what destiny.

The Soulful Child: Twelve Years in the Wilderness by Chloe Rachel Gallaway is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. She paints a picture of her life in the wild with the most vivid of colors, emotions, and sounds and from a place where you can almost smell and even taste the experience. Her descriptions penetrate the very core of your heart and soul making you wonder if she was sent here from another planet to convey a message of hope in a chaotic world. Perhaps she is an angel sent to paint a picture of two separate worlds desperately attempting to coexist so that we, the readers, will find solace in understanding those deep-seated feelings we all have while questioning our very existence and what it all means.

“She was the worker on the riverbanks you never took notice of, the quiet person in the rice fields of China, the Tibetan monk on the mountainside, never stirred by the cold. She knew her purpose and walked with it daily. She would bring healing to the collapsed souls, to the feet that needed to be scrubbed, and she would get right in there and do it herself.” It is passages such as this that leave you wishing the story would never end or that you could savor this morsel of her experience for just a minute longer.

Chloe has a way of awakening the senses such that the hardships she faced growing up in the wild and her manner of coping with this way of life makes you wonder if you have been wandering the earth half dead or barely living. As I read of her longing to leave the wilderness to explore the world I couldn’t help but wonder why. She paints a picture of a freedom and connection to the animals and the wild that makes you question your own path and how, despite having everything you needed and becoming successful in your own right, there are some experiences you would never, and could never, have. And these experiences might have been so rich and fulfilling that nothing could possibly compare. There were moments in reading about her upbringing where, despite the hardship and struggle, it was nearly envious.

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Yet equally as riveting was her description of the way she yearned to experience life as a child of the world and you couldn’t help but root for her in realizing that dream. The lengths to which she went to escape the dark side of her upbringing were inspirational. Even more inspirational was the way she was able to love and forgive her father for who he was despite the chains she felt from his very existence. Those chains tugging at her soul toward freedom and toward love.

This book will leave you wondering who was the lucky one. Was it the child who was never taken from her parents, who always had the comforts of the world, and never had to work very hard for her sustenance? The person who was raised eating processed foods and being conditioned to live in the world of commerce? Or was it the soulful child, for making the connection with herself, her spirit, the earth, and nature at such a young age? Was it she for being raised on truly clean food, no poisons in the form of vaccinations, medications or the toxins of fuel exhaust and electromagnetic pollution now plaguing many large cities?

The Soulful Child is a story of bondage in a place of ultimate freedom, and freedom in a place of ultimate bondage. It is a story of two very different worlds; two separate and very distinct types of prisons yet when viewed from the eyes of a beautiful, strong, high-spirited, kind, and loving human being you see that life is what we make of it and freedom is in the heart of the beholder.

This book will leave you contemplating your own journey and hoping that you are able to connect with yourself and find solace even amidst the chaos of the frenetic lives most of us lead. Even more, you will hope you realize the need for seeking this solace and taking a moment to contemplate, and just be. The book has the potential to impact not just on an individual level but also on society as a whole, because if enough people are able to feel the lesson of connecting with their own inner soulful child, we can change the world.

This book is for anyone who needs to understand their own journey, for anyone who constantly wishes for different circumstances, for anyone who needs to step outside themselves to feel another person’s experience, for anyone who needs to escape from their own reality, for anyone who wonders what it would be like to truly live in nature, and for anyone who just needs to feel.

Chloe captures the essence and beauty of Northern New Mexico, the mountains and the beautiful Española valley, her people, the problems and the victories like no other. It makes me proud to be from the area despite its reputation and it reminds me of how much I need to go up into those mountains for the connection one can only receive from being among the forest trees, catching the occasional glimpse of wildlife and the visceral experience from the sense of beauty and the scents of beauty.

Among the clashing of two extreme worlds, one wherein longing for human connection and global knowledge that can only come from corporeal experiences is palpable, and the other a desperate grasp for escape from the pandemonium of that world, we realize we have choices. We can choose to see the beauty in each experience and run with it, literally, or we can choose to allow it to enslave us. We can choose to create our own freedom wherever we are, or we can choose to constantly lament the walls that may or may not be closing in on us. Chloe chose the former and came out a hero in the end. Well, she is a hero in my eyes.

The next question is not if or even when this book will become a movie but whether there is a filmmaker out there with the heart, soul, passion, and depth to convey the underlying message of the book. I anxiously await the discovery of such a person if it is possible and she too will become my hero.

© Marcie Martinez, B.S. Ch.E., M.S. M.Sc., NaturesPresence.net, All Rights Reserved

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