This past week marked five months of rewilding. Almost half the year has slipped into the deep time of history at timescales raging from the flap of a Hummingbird’s wings to the lethargic flow of a sludgy River. Generally, these past five months seem fleeting, not long enough to do everything I think I should be doing and achieving. Linear time within the confines of one year seems too short now to allow for a thorough transformation of self and Land.
14th August, 2022: I dream that I am wandering around the tip of Patagonia. Gazing northward, I can see the entirety of South and North America, as if from a bird’s eye view. A road runs the entire length of the continental Landmasses, from the southernmost tip of land, where it meets the Drake Passage, to the North Slope of Alaska merging into the Arctic Ocean. I know I must travel this route in its entirety on my bicycle, and I worry about the condition of the road and if it will be passable.
Having migrated from East (direction of Spring and new beginnings), I now find myself fully entrenched in the South – domain of Summer, heat, wildness, physicality, and action – summoned, as if by an invisible force to the physical embodiment of being and doing with the Land. Bill Plotkin (2013) refers to the Summer-aligned South facet of the soul as “the Wild Indigenous One,” the part of our being that longs for the integration of our carnal bodies within their natural home. But the programming of generations of western lifetimes, culminating in my own, resists falling away. The entangled, capitalist, “civilized” axiology that equates productivity to a person’s self-worth hijacks the gray matter of my subconscious where the wild one is trying to claw her way through the slippery shadows back to the surface. Freya Mathews (2021) notes:
…attitudes to the body inform the whole structure of values which shape present-day society; they are reflected in the distribution of social value and reward over occupations: the highest rewards in both material and prestige terms accrue to the ‘white collar’ occupations and the professions, the lowest to the ‘blue collar’ and ‘manual’ occupations… We ignore the impulse of our body towards fulfilment and well-being, substituting cognitive ends (ego goals) for bodily ones (pp. 32–33).
As Summer hearkens to my Wild Indigenous One, she revolts against the tyranny of desk, computer, and chair. Dirt calls my hands, and I revel in digging, tending and planting, as my sweat and energy seem to merge with the wellspring of enthusiastic bursting forth. The Land’s genius crafts Meadow where former Lawn once subdued diverse abundance, and new members join the community – Queen Anne’s Lace Daucus carota, Goldenrod Solidago spp., Asters Aster spp., Evening Primrose Oenothera biennis, Wild Rose