What is rewilding?
Rewilding is the concept that the ‘un-tamed’ natural world flourishes in biodiversity and balanced cycles of life and death. We come from this wild earth. Our bones and blood formed from the same minerals; our system run with the water that flows over our planet. Our breath, inversely shared with the trees. Acknowledgement of our innate connection to ‘nature’, as we are in fact a part of nature, allows us to gain insight into how this ‘all sustaining’ resource can teach us, hold us and heal us. By reflecting our own personal, unique, and diverse inner nature back at us, our wild world allows us to flourish in our own life cycles.
Rewilding also pertains to our senses; akin to our outer nature, we are a sensory being and much of our natural instinct is informed by our senses. Rewilding places trust in our senses, allowing our body intelligence to guide us. As a result of keeping ourselves in somewhat ‘safe’, ‘predictable’, ‘stable’, ‘numb’ physical and emotional states means our senses have become idle, but we are still deeply wired to sense. Danger, safety, love and connection being come of the more obvious, we also sense fine details and changes that give us the ‘gut instinct’ of a parent who just knows, and a midwife who just knows.
The nature around us exists in its fullest expression. It is a constant embodiment of its most true self. The tree being the tree, the stone being the stone, all the while in slow, deep, earth-time transformation. Growing and transforming. Does the caterpillar even know it will soon take flight?! It can be difficult at times to bare witness and acknowledgement to its gruesome and cruel beauty. The majestic cheetah so gracefully running across the plains, to prey on a baby gazelle, to take to its young, to practice killing with agonisingly slow, fumbling, learning lashes. The baby gazelle, also a beauty-creature, cowering in pain and fear, looking so deeply afraid in its final gestures before death. It is harrowing. The wild world is raw, not smoothed over. It is honest and true, not feigning, or fake. It is not polite or apologetic, but rather truly loving and affectionate.
Our inner nature has been ‘tamed,’ our expressions dampened to ‘fit in’. Our bodies a reflection of the barriers used for holding in and pushing out all which doesn’t fit in with who we want or appear to be. This is not to be rejected or frowned upon, for it is the gift of our consciousness, but its limitations need acknowledgement. We have left our primal expressions in infanthood, where we can collect them and use them to inform a healthy mature adult and elderhood, one of healthy expression and full-hearted love. One where we can truly love ourselves as earth, enough to feel the grief of losing it.
Our health in the broader context is intrinsically linked to the health of our earth…. which we can all acknowledge is not heading into, but already lunging forth into unknown catastrophe. Pregnancy, Labour, Birth and Parenting strips us of many of our ‘masks’. The primal parts of our brain begin to awaken more deeply, and this gives us a profound opportunity to transform into who we truly are. Journeying this rite of passage into your deepest self brings belonging, self-love and hope for our future.
