Nicki

This episode is part one of two with author and principal John Marsden. In part one, we'll be chatting to John about schools. We'll be chatting about his educational philosophies, his schools Candlebark and Alice Miller, and what to look for as a parent when you're going to look for a school for your child.

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to Raising Wildlings, a podcast about parenting, alternative education, stepping into the wilderness, however that looks, with your family.

Nicki

Each week we'll be interviewing experts that truly inspire us to answer your parenting and education questions. We'll also be sharing stories from some incredible families that took the leap and are taking the road less travelled.

SPEAKER_00

We're your hosts Vicki and Nikki from Wildlings Forest School. Pop in your headphones, settle in, and join us on this next adventure.

Nicki

This episode of the Raising Wildlings Podcast is sponsored by our friends at the Fun Fables Podcast. Fun Fables is a great little podcast for kids with stories like The Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk, and the Gingerbread Man retold in a fun and entertaining way. Just search for Fun Fables, stories for kids on your favourite podcast app, or you can click the link in the show description. So over the past two months, we have had the most amazing feedback on the impact that our little show is having on your family and getting them outside in nature. And we just wanted to remind you that we have some little downloadable gifts for you on the website to help change the way that we speak to children and to help us spend more time outdoors. Our latest offering is a guide on what to say instead of be careful when your children are engaged in risky play. So to grab your copy, just head to wildlingsforestschool.com forward slash free dash downloadables. Today we're chatting with author and principal John Marsden. John has written more than 40 books, including the Tomorrow When the War Began series, So Much to Tell You, and his most recent work, which we'll be chatting about today, The Art of Growing Up. He has sold over five million books worldwide and has won every major award in Australia for young people's fiction. John's passionate interest in education led him to start two schools, Candle Bark and Alice Miller, on forested properties in the Macedon Ranges in Victoria. The two schools enrol around about 400 students in 2020. Now, if you're around our vintage, it's likely you grew up reading John's books through your teenage years. And if you're an English teacher like me, it's likely you've taught his work to your own students. John's most recent work, The Art of Growing Up, is not aimed at teenagers, but rather is aimed at parents. In this astonishing, insightful, and ambitious manifesto, John pulls together all that he's learned from over 40 years' experience working with and writing for young people. He shares his insights into everything, from the role of schools and the importance of education, to problem parents and problem children, and the conundrum of what it means to grow up and be quote unquote happy in the 21st century. And we're lucky enough to have John joining us now. Hi John. I'm one of the generation that inhaled your novels, as I'm sure just about everyone that interviews you now is. And I and I've loved teaching your fiction as an English teacher, but your newest work, The Art of Growing Up, it's a different beast, and I loved it. It felt a bit like activism to me, it felt urgent. Can you tell us a little bit about why you think uh Australian parents need to hear some of what you've got to say?

SPEAKER_02

Well, it comes from, I don't know, 40 years of teaching, and in that time you do have a lot of experiences and a lot of interactions, and you soon work out what's effective and what isn't effective, and what's working and what isn't working, and basically what's what's good and what's bad, to use old-fashioned words. And it did baffle me as to how schools could not notice that the same practices year after year after year resulted in alienation, in disappointment, in anger, and in despair sometimes. And there seemed to be a lack of any real creative strategic attempts to change things that weren't working, to fix things that were wrong. And as I went around schools later as a writer in residence, and I went to somewhere around 3,000 schools, close to 3,000 schools, mostly in Australia, but overseas as well. And it was a lot. That's a lot. I think six weeks was quite a common long period in a school. And in all that time, out of nearly 3,000 schools, I'd say that I saw, gosh, a dozen that were wonderful, brilliant, stunningly successful. Perhaps three to six hundred that were awful, that were grim, dismal, dreadful places. And the rest, I'd say, were mediocre. They were kind of, you know, not too bad. They were tolerable, but there was not much there that was really inspiring and invigorating and energizing and engaging. And I just got more and more mystified by how it was that this these numbers broke down the way they did.

Nicki

Because I figured they're not very good stats, are they?

SPEAKER_02

But the uh it seemed to me that if you took all the things that you thought worked and put them into one school and you didn't use any of the things that didn't work in that school, you might have a pretty good school. And so that's what I set out to do ultimately. I I um put my money where my mouth was. I was actually writing an article for the age newspaper in Melbourne. It's called The Perfect School or something. They want a long article and they're paying a dollar a word.

Nicki

And patting it out.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, yeah, I got about two-thirds of the way through and thought, gee, what am I going to say next? And I wrote a sentence which was next year I'm starting my own school. And I looked at it and thought, you know, am I going to let this go through or not? Because sure I'm going to earn six or eight dollars from that sentence. But I'm going to condemn myself to a pretty tough uh period of time ahead. And if it doesn't come off, then I'll look stupid. So I sat there for quite a while and I was aware that I was aging, and uh that we all are, and I thought if I don't do it now, I'll never do it. And I'll get to 65, 70, and I'll really regret that I didn't do it. I'll look back with great um disappointment. And I thought, I grew it, I've got to do it. And so I let the sentence stand and I continued the article describing what kind of school I wanted to launch. And then I was committed. Once that was in print, then uh I was locked in.

Nicki

So how long did it take from publishing that article to having Candle Bark up and running?

SPEAKER_02

About a year, roughly, though not that long.

Nicki

Because what No, that's not long in starting a school. The people I know in Queensland that are in the thick of it right now, they're a year two and they are still a long way to go.

SPEAKER_02

But one of the things that influenced me strongly was a writing conference or a a writers' um festival organized by Agnes Neuenhausen, who was a well-known Melbourne reviewer. And I went to her during the conference, which ran for like three days, and she had writers from overseas who'd been flown in for this. And I said to her, Who was on your committee? And she looked at me with some uh contempt and said, I don't do committees. And I said, What do you mean? And she said, I did it myself. And I was just completely gobstucked. But she said, you know, if you do it yourself, uh you do it faster, and you do it just as efficiently or inefficiently as a committee. So why bother with committees? And that was very much in my mind when I set out to start the school because I'd seen people trying groups to start schools, and it often would bog down and end in acrimony because they were not arguing about whether they should be wearing purple socks or yellow socks. Yeah, yeah, they'd argue about whether they should be teaching Spanish or Indonesian or whether they should have sport on Tuesdays or Thursdays or not at all. And they would just end up going nowhere. And I think one of the things I've learned in life is that committees generally come up with mediocrity because they try to achieve consensus, and to do that they compromise, and so ultimately they end up with something which is mediocre because any really uh flamboyant or uh outlandish or outstanding or passionate idea just gets lost in the uh debate and discussion and uh and arguments. And the fact is that most parent-run schools don't last, they survive for two or three years and then they implode because of the power struggles and fights between the parents who are running it. There's press in Melbourne, which has survived for, I don't know, 40, 50 years as a parent-run school, but that's a rare exception and they've had some real struggles at times. But I figured that as an individual, yes, I would make mistakes, but who's to say at the end of the process whether I would have made more mistakes than a committee? I would have whether I've made more mistakes than a committee would have, or whether I've made fewer mistakes or about the same number. Who knows? We can't really demonstrate that we have to judge schools by other criteria.

Nicki

Yeah, unfortunately and unfortunately. So tell us a little bit now. You've got Candle Bark and you've got Alice Miller. Candlebark set on, correct me if I'm wrong here, 850 acres?

SPEAKER_02

Oh, more than that, no. More than that. Oh it's about 1200 acres here.

Nicki

1200. Oh, that's incredible. And it's in the Macedon Rangers. Tell us about the importance of the setting in regards to your educational philosophies and how Candlebark and Alice Miller are different to traditional schools.

SPEAKER_02

Well, the setting is great, yeah. It's beautiful. It's a native forest, it's uh never been logged or farmed, so it's the original indigenous vegetation, for want of a better phrase. And that's terrific. But that's not the only, like, it doesn't mean you have to have that to start a school. You can start a school in a city, you can start a great school anywhere. You can do it in a barn or a garage or a shed, although the government might have something to say about that. But um, as long as you give children the opportunity to engage with the natural world, it won't always be under optimal circumstances. So it might be that you're in a park down the road every day for a couple of hours or an hour or so. It might be that you're going to camp on a farm out of the city area from time to time. But um, yeah, it certainly is nice for us to have this daily interaction with the environment. And I suppose one of the things that it does that you do notice when you drive into the school is the kids roam quite widely and they are adventurous and they are creative and they are playful. And wisely, as it said, the play is children's work because they do take it very seriously and they engage with it with absolute commitment. And that may include quarrels from time to time, sure. But so much of it is flexibility, creativity, imagination, and improvising to match the circumstances and the conditions. So if someone is um, I don't know, scared of spiders, then they'll move the whole site of the area where they're playing to somewhere else. Or if someone is um feeling cold, then they'll stop the game for five minutes while that person races off and gets a jumper. So they have this kind of um adaptability, and as soon as an adult comes into the picture and starts regulating the play and controlling it and laying down the rules and the conditions and the limits, then all of that is lost. You have a very artificial and um I think a very unhelpful situation.

Nicki

Uh we yeah, we see it all the time with the it's stick play. So we allow stick play in our programs, but as soon as an adult steps into stick play, no good.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Kids get occasional grazers on the knuckles or a poke in the shoulder or something, but they all survive it. We've never had any serious injury in 15 years.

Nicki

Which I think we call them learning experiences, learning endurances.

SPEAKER_02

And uh scarred and there's a story behind it, and people will be interested to know the story, to hear the story. But it's um there's a cart, there was a cart to an article, sorry, in a London newspaper years ago, and I wish I could remember the details, but it was a bomb site in Liverpool, I think, where children have been playing happily for some years in among the ruins of the buildings and the craters and hillocks. And the council decided that because the kids loved it so much, they would turn it into a playground. And the story in the paper was of some kids who were watching the activity through a hole in the fence where they could see the bulldozers and the graders hard at work. And one kid said to another, you know, what are they doing? And the other one said, and this is where I'm going to wreck the story because I can't remember what the other kids did, but it was something very poetic and very poignant to the effect that they are destroying our treasure island in order to give us a playground which was going to be concrete and plastic. I thought that's very typical of the way bureaucrats operate, that they think that everything, even playgrounds have to be regulated, controlled, and very strictly governed.

Nicki

Our local council here chops off the limb, the low-lying limbs so children can't climb on them.

SPEAKER_02

That's yeah, I think every Tasmanian school is compulsory to chop off all lower limbs now on trees so that no child in Tasmania can climb a tree in the school grounds.

Nicki

The statistic here, I think it was Planet Arc, so I don't know where they got their info from, but it was one in four Australian children haven't climbed a tree.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

Nicki

In Australia, you think, yeah, well, you know, we're not a you know, we're not a hugely metropolitan country. So what's going on? It's this whole thing, and this is going back to your school. Your school motto is, you know, part of it is take risks. Can you expand on that a little bit for us?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that pretty much is the school motto. I added take care as a token gesture, but that was after some years, I thought, oh, I better throw that in occasionally.

Nicki

So it is, hang on, let me clarify, take risks, take care. Yeah. That's a that's pretty good balance.

SPEAKER_02

Don't have to tell people to take care because they do it instinctively anyway. It's like they do. It's like when a kid's halfway up a tree and you yell at don't fall. You go, oh, I was just about to. Thank you so much.

Nicki

Oh phew. Thanks for made. I hadn't been thinking about that at all.

SPEAKER_02

Oh gosh. So what it means is to be adventurous, really. It doesn't mean be reckless, it doesn't mean be negligent, it doesn't mean show no consideration for yourself or anyone else. It means to have adventures and to get out there and go for it. Because the one of the building blocks of our lives, one of the foundation stones for our lives is first hand experiences. And if you have a childhood and adolescence which is lacking in first hand experiences, you might as well say that your call choose a concrete metaphor, concrete similarly, you might as well say your life's built on tissue paper. Just happen to be there. But um that's the foundations of your life are really weak, really flimsy. And so when you hit crises, as you will from time to time, and when obstacles come along and when difficulties occur, then there's every chance that everything will collapse underneath you and you'll be helpless, you'll be despairing, you may be depressed, you may be panic stricken, you may be anxious and fearful, because you don't have the resilience, the inner strength that comes only from having first hand experiences. And so we practice that gospel as much as we preach it, and that's a big statement because we preach it long. Yeah. So how so? Well, the average child here would have, I guess, uh maybe 30 nights a year, either on a camp or at school at a sleepover. And that starts in prep. So in the first term of prep, we take the kids away for four days and we go about two hours to different places, but most commonly to Bright, which is north of here. I love Bright. Yeah, it's a beautiful, beautiful.

Nicki

Especially this time of year. Magic.

SPEAKER_02

The snow is starting to fall and it gets very but um so we put up tents, we go to a camping ground, and we stay there for four nights, uh, sorry, three nights and four days. And yeah, occasionally a kid gets homesick, but it's just as likely to be a grade six child as a prep child. Take all the primary school kids to that particular camp. The people who get most stressed about it at a parent's I was just gonna say, how do the parents go with that? They get anxious. Some of them, not all of them by any means.

Nicki

Some of them love it, some of them are absolutely clapping the bus as it goes.

SPEAKER_02

Not unknown for them to book themselves into a spa or something for a couple of nights and uh take full advantage.

Nicki

Thanks, John. Here's your tip for taking my kids for the week.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you'd think I'd get a box of chocolates or a bottle of wine occasionally.

Nicki

Surely.

SPEAKER_02

But they do I do feel worried when parents say to me at the interview before we enroll their children, they say things like, Our child has never spent a night away from us. And I say, Well, but you mean they haven't stayed with their grandparents or their aunt and uncle or their friend from childcare or kindergarten? And they say no, they've we've never had a night apart. And I think, gee, for five years you've lived like that. I think are the parents recognizing that they must have a life of their own, that that is vital in the whole family dynamic. And parents who don't do that are actually having a there's a counterproductive um impact from that, which is not helpful to the child's development. Not helpful.

Nicki

I find that as mothers that that martyrdom that you know that we sacrifice everything sometimes for the good of we think it's the good of the children, but in fact we're teaching them to be martyrs themselves, and no one can be a martyr, no one can live up to that standard. So we're setting them up to fail already.

SPEAKER_02

But it's quite a new phenomenon, and I think it's come about partly because of the so-called nuclear family where people are having smaller numbers of children, and the extended family is likely to be physically more distant. So it may be that the grandmother lives in Perth and the grandfather lives in Brisbane and the uncle lives in Alice Springs. So there's a there's that physical problem right away. And so people often live in a house in a street or in a flat in a block of floats where they don't even know the names of the neighbors. And they'll come home perhaps with the child after school, drive into the garage, the door shuts probably automatically. Yes. They disappear into the house, they're not seen again until eight o'clock the next morning when they drive out again.

Nicki

That's just that hurry to the mailbox with the heads heads down so they can't make eye contact with anybody. You feel like they want to put a bella clover on too. So it's you know don't don't make me talk to you.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and it's very much like that. So the sense of community, the idea of living in a village, which doesn't have to be a village physically, a culture can be a village, just a suburban street can be a village. Any community can be a village, it doesn't matter what the physical kind of tangible uh style of living is, but you do need an extended community to be involved in the child's life and to be involved in looking after the child and educating the child in different ways, as happened in many societies, but that's disappeared very rapidly in our society in the last generation or so. And I think that's one of the factors in this new idea of the parent being the martyr who gives up everything and uh sweating their own lifestyle, their own lives and their own mental health too.

Nicki

I would I would add to that seeing what I've seen now as a mother and and amongst friends and people that I know. We um speaking of that community, we um try to host a neighborhood party here in our street, we're on a dirt road and a cul-de-sac, so there's not a lot of us, but the questions I've got, why would you do that? Why would you put yourself at risk like that? Risk of what? It's you know, you only get the people that are really sociable and and able to mingle in social circles anyway, realistically.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and one of the toxic things that's happened in the last generation is this idea of the monster who's stalking the streets, the depraved beast who's going to snatch any child who's who they can see. Where the stats tell us that that's a highly unlikely event. It does happen occasionally and it's a tragedy when it does happen. There's no question about that. But it's so rare that it's not something we can sensibly protect against. No, recognize that it's rarer than lightning strikes and other unusual phenomena. So we can't let it govern our lives and control us.

Nicki

And no, we're afraid of the big white van when we should really be afraid of uh what's in our house in in regards to sexual assaults and whatnot.

SPEAKER_02

Absolutely, that's what the stats tell us time and time again. We live on a in a country town in a pretty quiet street, and with six boys in the house, we go out and play cricket in the street quite often, and a couple of neighbours' kids drift in, and uh we end up with maybe 10 or 12 kids playing cricket. And what does interest me is the responsive drivers as they come down the street. I'd say about one in three, or maybe one in four on a good day, will either abuse us or frown at us. And look very angry. And when I say abuse, I'm using the word loosely because they might say, Yeah, you know, you shouldn't be on the road, it's dangerous. So that's not abuse, but it's still a very negative and completely ridiculous stuff.

Nicki

Yeah. How old are your boys?

SPEAKER_02

Oh, they rank well, we've been doing this for a long time. So we started when they're I suppose the youngest one would have been five or six, the oldest one sixteen. But it's you can see cars coming for like 400 metres away. So we always say, Ah, car coming, and everyone gets off the road, and we use the wheelie bins for wickets, so they get off the roads and the car goes through. We have one lady who abused us regularly, and I noticed one day as she drove on, she chucked a cigarette butt out the window, and I thought, well, very well for her to take the righteous position of abusing us for playing cricket in the street. But gee, I'd rather play cricket in the street than chuck cigarette butts around. But anyway, back to what we were saying. Sorry, as well as the um camps, we have sleepovers at school all the time, which might be for the whole of the grade three or the whole of the year tens. It might be for kids who want to have a night of reading, so that's open to anyone, and we might get 30 kids who bring their favorite book in and uh just lie around and sit around reading until we finally insist that the lights have to go out. Um, and we have other ones which are like for a bushwalk, or it might be where they play Murder in the Dark or uh Spotlight and or a game that we invented called Bunkhouse Breakout. And they're just crazy games where people scream and chase each other and tag each other and so on. Just for fun. So sometimes they're educational. We might have a one for a year 12 um philosophy class where they catch up with some work they've missed or they do a bit of extra learning. So they can be quite serious, but they can be anything and everything. And we actually pay the staff quite a generous amount of money to have overnight stays. So they get 200 bucks a night for any overnight uh thing that they have at the school.

Nicki

Can I just say thank you as a teacher for actually valuing teachers' time outside of school hours?

SPEAKER_02

Well, we didn't do it for some years, and then um it just struck me one day that gee, we ought to recognize that people are giving up a lots of other activities to do these things. And it didn't mean that we got more people doing them, but it just was a way of acknowledging that they do them. So um, yeah, and we have bike camps, we have hikes, we have uh ski trips, we have canoe trips, and we organize them all ourselves so it's not expensive. We're thrifty in the way we we do them. We don't hire a travel agency or anything like that. And we do use tents a lot, and if we go skiing, it's more likely to be cross-country skiing, which is much cheaper than downhill skiing. Not a lot of either in Queensland, of course. But water skiing, it's all part of that strong belief that first-hand experiences are essential, that they will build up resilience and inner strength and strength of character by doing those things. And we sure noticed a difference when we opened the secondary campus and we took in kids from other schools as well as from our own school. We noticed a profound difference between the kids who'd been through this program in primary school and the kids who hadn't. And the kids who hadn't were quite likely to lock themselves in the toilet and call their mother on their mobile phones if they'd lost their textbook. Whereas the kids who've been through Candle Bark would just go and say to someone, anyone seen my science book? Or I'd ask a teacher, you know, can I just uh have a look in the classroom, see if I've left my book there? And they just coped, they managed.

Nicki

So interesting. What what would you say if you could change, and you know, I'm sure you've got a list of about a thousand things, if you could change one thing, let's give you three, what would you change about the traditional school system?

SPEAKER_02

I'd hire teachers who had not gone straight from school to university and back to school, because I think that's very unhelpful for a really um for the role of adult in the community of children and adults. You need people with life experience, you need people who've got a sense of perspective and a sense of proportion, you need people who don't crumble too easily, and you need people who have a range of interests and preferably passionate interests in something, I don't care what it is. It could be the Colourwood Football Club, God help us. It could be in um hiking, it could be in stamp collecting, it could be in operas. I don't mind as long as they have interests in life that are beyond these school walls. So that's one thing I'd do. The second thing would be to provide space for young people, because I think of all the countries in the world, there is one which has no excuse for not giving people space, and that is the one we're in right now. Yeah.

Nicki

The early childcare centres here, I think there's um one one to seven square meters per child. I'm like, what are they? Free-range chickens? Well, look how much space we've got.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you walk into them, and even the smell is kind of overpowering because everything's so cloistered and so uh claustrophobic. And it seems unforgivable to me that we have these golf courses, which are perhaps 60 or 80 acres, on extensive suburban and urban land where a dozen old white blokes like me are kind of waddling around playing golf, using their buggies, of course, because they couldn't walk. And uh down the road there might be 600 kids squashed into a space the size of a couple of basketball courts, and that's all they've got for their recreation.

Nicki

And interestingly, those schools have more injuries than we do by a huge margin because kids crash into each other and they get Oh, they're and they're bored, they're pushing themselves, they're looking for things to do.

SPEAKER_02

But now schools try to counter that by introducing rules like no climbing trees, no touching, no picking up sticks. If you pick up a twig, you're in big trouble, no running. All of these are common rules now in Australian schools, and to me, that's our shame as a country that we have rules like that in schools because it just shows that we've got an unworkable setting, an unworkable situation, and we need to do something creative about it rather than bringing these bureaucratic restrictions. There's at least one new school in England which has no recess or lunchtime. The day finishes early, so they start at 9 a.m. or whatever and finish at 2:30 or something, because they argue that rather than have them have their break at school, they can have that later when they go home. So they just arrive at school, they're in the classroom for the full five or six hours, whatever it is, and then they're released again. And I think again, that's an incredibly negative solution to a problem. It's not a solution to a problem, it's an incredibly negative way of dealing with a problem rather than coming up with creative and solutions, and not just creative solutions, but solutions that are helpful, solutions that actually aid the healthy growth of young people. Because what I care about is, for example, the fact that our jails are so full of damaged people. And I know from doing workshops in lots of prisons that no matter what horrific crimes people commit, and no matter how much they need to be kept in a secure place where they can't repeat those crimes, those places can still be places that are caring and which uh which show some real determination to help people who have been damaged through no fault of their own in their childhood and adolescence because healthy, well-balanced, emotionally well people do not commit serious crimes. They don't commit too many crimes at all. They might talk on the phone as they're driving, that's which is not good, but it's um they don't commit armed robberies or rapes.

Nicki

That's that old saying, hurt people, hurt people, isn't it? And and this really resonated with me in The Art of Growing Up was the whole, you know, it's it comes down to parenting. You've picked it a good topic to ruffle feathers, and I mean that in the best way, and thank you for your work in doing this because we tiptoe around parents. But really, you know, we're parents are the people that raise the children, so who else who else is to blame?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, there's an attitude in Western society which is similar to the attitude that men have held towards women in so many cultures for so many thousands of years, which is that women are the possession of the men. Yes, they are owned by the men. And we are working on that and we're making some progress, but we still have that attitude towards children, that we own the children. They're our property, and we can mold them and shape them in any way we want. So if we want to have them believe in some peculiar religion, which, I don't know, worships uh avocados or something, and um, we feel that that's the right of the parents, that they can do that. Not only that, we feel that the children can be kept in ignorance if the parents insist on it. So if people want to run a course in cyber education, the use of computers and technology, or if they run a want to run a course in sex education or drug education or in suicide prevention, and if parents object, then parents are generally given the right to withdraw their children from, which means the children are kept in ignorance because the parents believing that they own the children and have the right to determine what goes into their heads, is uh we feel that that right is paramount. But it's not. The children have rights too, and they have the right to be made aware and to be educated and to be taught and to acquire knowledge and even understanding and insight.

Nicki

So we're going to end the first part of this conversation with John here and bring you the second instalment next week, where we focus on children and how our society idealises and sexualizes children and how this damages them. We will be covering how we set teenagers up to fail when we make adulthood seem so hard and unappealing. And we'll be talking about the concept of teenagers having to metaphorically kill their parents in order to grow up. It is definitely an interesting conversation. If you've loved this episode, make sure you subscribe to the Raising Wildlings Podcast on your podcast platform of choice and share your aha moments with us on social media. I could have talked with John for hours, weeks, months. So tune in next week as we continue the conversation. As always, we love doing this adventure with you. So until next week, stay wild.