re·wild /rēˈwīld/:
A conservation effort aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and wilderness areas. To restore (an area of land) to its natural uncultivated state.
This concept is one that we can also apply to ourselves. “Human Rewilding” is to reinstate and recover our natural or untamed state of being. It is the process of unlearning much of modern conditioning and remembering who and what we really are.
It is the accidental journey I have found myself on, and intend to share with you as I continue to discover it.
Do you have a sense that something is missing? That something has been lost?
It's no secret that much of America (and the modern world at large) is struggling right now. We have the technology that has made our lives more convenient and connected than ever, and yet we are more anxious, burned out, overworked, spiritually starved, and lonely than ever.
We spend our days just moving from bed to work to the gym to the couch, all the while addicted to our newsfeeds and searching for meaning in all the wrong places -- our screens, our bodies, our job titles, our identities, our social roles -- and popular wellness tropes tell us that all we need to do to feel happy and fulfilled is heal, cut out the toxic people, meditate, and journal. And while maybe that advice isn't entirely wrong, it's missing some critical perspective.
In all our intellect and efforts to optimize and "improve" ourselves, we forget that we are, at our most basic level, animals made of stardust, and intimately connected to everything on the planet, and beyond. We chronically offer ourselves so few opportunities to look beyond our calendars and concerns, to step out from under the florescent bulbs and into the sunlight, to just sit down, and look up or look within. How often we remain totally blind to the fact that nature isn’t just out there, a place we go visit on the weekends, but that it’s also in here — we are nature.
To rewild ourselves is to return to and revere our nature, is to remember that we are made of the wind and the soil and the pines, that we are the improbable, animated manifestations of a universe that is quite literally shimmering all around us at every moment, a mystery that is living through us, even in the dark or mundane moments.
To rewild ourselves is to shake off the countless layers of distraction and stories of separateness, individuality, independence, and it’s to recognize how fundamentally we are connected to and shaped by and hopelessly reliant on each other and every aspect of the various environments in which we inhabit.
To rewild ourselves is to make room for play, for wonder, for creative expression, for silence. It’s to think with our bodies more than our minds, to feel into and embody our own ancient ways of knowing and sensing.
I believe we all have an intuited sense that the way we are living these days isn’t working. And I believe that the source of so much of our disfunction and dissatisfaction is disconnection.
My mission is to help us reestablish this sense of connection in as many ways as possible, but primarily: connection to our own bodies (instead of living in our thinking minds), connection to our energetic and creative expression (instead of continuing to mainline other people’s opinions and thoughts online), connection to other humans and IRL community (instead of using texts, screens, and comment threads as proxy), connection to the natural world and the ecological place we inhabit, and connection to the greater mystery that is living through us right now that we all too easily forget about entirely.