The Fabric (pun intended)
We’ve eaten off the buffet of religion and spirituality. Thirty-five years ago, we walked into our first meditation sessions and yoga classes. Since then, self-cultivation has been our primary focus, meandering through traditions, accumulating knowledge, making mistakes, occasionally finding clarity, and even unveiling wisdom. As the practice matures, the playfulness emerges and the judgment wanes. As the collected knowledge blurs, wisdom takes its place.
We call it self-cultivation rather than self-improvement because improvement implies something is currently wrong. Cultivation is essential for all gardens, even the most pristine, and doesn’t suggest we’re broken and need fixing. We marvel in the way it naturally gives rise to kindness and community. The kind of community that forms organically around the inherent value of all living beings. We’ve been among those seeking happiness in all the wrong places: achievement, accumulation, external validation, and even the ones that check all the spiritual boxes. While we set our compass to the root of happiness these days, we're still works in progress.
And this journey toward the root of happiness, rather than its fleeting manifestations, has been our greatest adventure. Along the way, we've discovered that it's far more enlivening to dissolve the beliefs that separate us than to judge each other through them. Wisdom seems to emerge in those spaces where limiting beliefs once lived
Nuggets From the Nature of Wisdom
These are reminders of what we’ve glimpsed along the path thus far. Not as drawn-out teachings or discourse, but as fellow travelers sharing field notes from the journey. These designs, and their nuggets of wisdom, are distillations of a lifetime of study, contemplation, and meditation, offered as bite-sized invitations to wonder, rather than definitive statements to invest in as doctrine.
We're enthusiasts of untamed nature, both within and around us. We've found that the wild outdoors profoundly impacts the inner landscape, and vice versa. There's something about standing in a forest or on a mountain that cuts through pretense and returns us to something essential. This journey pays homage to the wisdom of nature. But the real adventure is the exploration into the nature of wisdom. An up-close look at where wildness meets wisdom, where irreverence meets reverence, where becoming nobody allows us to truly be somebody.
The Mission
Our mission is simple: bring wellbeing and wisdom into modern context to inspire an authentic adventure toward the root of happiness. Each design is meant to start a conversation, not end it. Paired with our blog posts, they become intentional gestures, gifts of thoughtfulness, small reminders that beneath the noise of our frantic striving lies something simpler, uniting, and infinitely more satisfying.
Who has the gall to put wisdom on a t-shirt? Maybe those foolish enough to think wisdom belongs everywhere, especially in the ordinary places. Perhaps those who've learned that wisdom often arrives with a smile rather than a sermon. Possibly those who want to build something not around becoming more important, but becoming more connected.
The Beginning
Hello, I'm Jason Gordon, the founder of Wild + Wise. I'm also an acupuncturist, herbalist, entrepreneur, educator, author and life-long student of self-cultivation. Dating back to the early 90's, my business partner Orion Nevel and I have wandered the landscape of spirituality and philosophy. All the while meditating, studying, questioning, and learning to laugh at our own seriousness along the way. Time has softened our practices into a steadier, quieter exploration of what it means to live wisely, opening a door for W+W.
Wild + Wise was born during the stillness of the 2020 global lockdowns. With the world on pause, I found myself with unexpected time to simply be. In my meditations, on my runs, in the surf, during quiet contemplations, I was graced with distilled nuggets of wisdom, phrases that captured something essential about the decades long adventure of inquiry and embracing paradox. Initially, I wanted to print these quotes on shirts just for myself, an art project of sorts, a way to be my own billboard and wear these reminders close.
When friends discovered what I was doing, their enthusiasm surprised me. They encouraged me to share these designs with the world. Many of my students and clients had long asked me to share more of what I'd gathered along the journey thus far, but the right medium hadn't presented itself until Wild + Wise emerged. What started as a personal project became a way to share wisdom in a form that's both accessible and wearable, both profound and playful. I sincerely hope you enjoy the ongoing exploration of these designs as much as I do.
