The Power of the “Re”

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What I laid out in my own proprietary process of Elemental Rewilding was five pillars – focuses – I saw like coals we throw in the cauldron of our life, stoking the effervescent elixir of more embodiment, more vitality, more truth. Participation in rich, analog communities; stewardship of the natural world; tapping into the ancient, organismic intelligence of our own bodies; passionate creative outlets and self-expression; and sharing our stories without filtration – these are the tickets I saw and still see to more wholeness.

What I distilled and allowed to come through me was from lived experience as well as research, but the real rub is years later I went through a fresh, more shadowy cycle of torment, and the wisdom I had fomented all but seemed to vanish. I felt like a woman in a well, tugging on the rope and yelling for my familiar world and support to discover me. I was injured and perhaps too inured to struggling to yell loud enough, but I despaired for my five pillars, for my five senses to elevate me.

As my life has felt quite shattered over the years from errant illnesses, like a wild garden of mottled, tangled, indecipherable plants, I have tried to apply my imagination to this scene, to be able to rewild once again. Overran gardens used to beckon to me as a young girl and young woman, and what if this image, this lifelong relationship to cascading plant life and stewarding it back to vitality, was what my body was using to speak to me? A flower crown also filled with thorns, asking me to accept the beauty of its fullness.

For so long, many words with the prefix “re” have flowed to me: rebecoming, reclaiming, returning, regenerating, rewilding, revitalizing, recovery even rewinding. I love these words and the concepts they’re cradling, as they all seem to share DNA of suggesting all life comes into this world knowing – full of intuition, instinct and innocence. As external forces mold and shape life, a forgetting often times takes hold, primarily for humans, and we must go “back” or move through the cycle “again” to remember, and these are the definitions of this prefix.

All these years later, I believe even more what I laid out as Elemental Rewilding is both a rich process and an open invitation to descend into the depths of one’s soul as well as ascend, bearing long lost truths for the repressed, once wild aspects of the human spirit. It’s liberation from the oppressive systems we live within and the tendency to live a goal-oriented, head-heavy life, castrated from our embodied selves. Our modern, day-to-day experiences of disconnection and blind ambition are not to be accepted but rather the bear that’s poked with truth and the poetic sensitivities of the soul and spirit.

Wildness, although a native state, oftentimes requires an act of rebellion against the societal, cultural, religious, and familial structures in which one has been raised and confined to. One must turn over every stone in life, deciphering personal truths from collective influences. The process is not passive, and it’s not manualized either. This space is for all of us to return to our wild and try to remain there as much as we can.