On March 20th, 2023, I completed the year of rewilding. Several months have passed since my last post. As the seasons returned the external world back to the womb of Earth, so too my rewilding journey arched inward. As rewilding co-researchers went to sleep, internal and external phenomena forced me inward to reconcile the residues of a lifetime. That journey was and continues to be deeply personal, and I won’t share it here. Instead, I will focus on the lessons learned and integrating wildness into my life as I return to the realities of the Chthulucene world.
As I look back now at my pre-wilding self, I am amazed at the wide-eyed innocence of that Kathleen as she embarked in the Spring of 2022 on what she believed would be a largely intellectual process. She sought solutions to perceived problems that would fit nicely into a narrative of how to fix the world, but the overwhelm of invasive species, Land tortured by years of settler abuses, global ecocide, and the ravages of climate change soon began to take its toll. There was very little that one woman could do to change the course of the runaway Anthropocene. Then an ancient Black Cherry (believed to be Black Locust initially before it leafed out) shared the wisdom that the world is not broken and therefore does not require fixing. Above all, the world does not need western humans to “fix” what isn’t broken (which is how we ended up in this mess in the first place), instead, it is the human relationship with the world that requires repair. We have a lot of work to do on ourselves, and every human is responsible for their relationship with Earth, just as we are responsible for all our relationships.
As Summer approached and came into fullness, the imperative to work outside, growing food and recharging Land with Pollinator-friendly native species overwhelmed all other responsibilities. Yet, I was learning a practice of patient watchfulness. I did not immediately resort to removing and killing so-called Alien Invasive Species but instead observed their interactions with the other residents of the Land, discovering that despite their non-native status (such as my own), some were providing fodder for Birds and Pollinators, while others were providing me with useful materials for textiles (Kudzu), tanning solution (Tree of Heaven), medicine (Multiflora Rose), and Chicken food (several “weedy” species). During a basket weaving workshop, Cherokee elder Nancy Basket advised that “there are no bad plants. If some are growing in profusion, put them to work,” so I did.
But, I was still intellectualizing the rewilding process, reveling in the knowledge I was unearthing with each more-than-human interaction until Bumblebee and a dream about Cindy Crawford in a diaper brought me literally back down to Earth. Rather than being grounded in and truly belonging within the Land and surrounding communities, I was still disconnected from community at my core, vulnerable to cultural programming and pressures due to my inherent disconnectedness. As Summer morphed into Autumn, I realized that in order to fully actualize within community, I would have to deconstruct all the defense mechanisms I had built up over a lifetime to protect myself from the realities of life, which include joy and suffering, love and loss. And the fates, as if conspiring with the more-than-human world, determined that I would experience them all.