Typically I send out Night Raven Quarterly on the solstices and equinoxes, yet I’m only sending this summer essay out now…not because I didn’t have anything to write about but because the topic of ReWilding is what matters most to me and I’ve had difficulty articulating the deepest essence of how I experience this and also keeping this to an essay, not a book. In the past month “the president” has signed an executive order to reduce Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (where I live) and Bear's Ears National Monument by 90%...now, not only are 3 million acres of the wildlands open to extraction and off road vehicles but this order threatens wildlife, water, land, trees and plants….clean air, dark skies and an experience of Presence and Solitude that such wild places share with us. How do we ReWild Self, ReWild Earth in such treacherous times and why is it important to do so? Such is the topic of this essay…

*This year’s Inner Forest Journey cohort, jumping for joy upon remembering the Truth of who they are. (Photo by Sue Knudsen).*

Every night before I go to bed, I stand under the starry night sky burning sagebrush sending out gratitude for the day and prayers for the night, ending with “may there be a miracle by morning”… and each morning Sun rises again..The Sun is rising again…And on this morning Sun is illuminating a hatch of mayflies dancing high above the creek rising and falling in an exquisite rhythm that feels like joy in my body. Willow flycatchers swoop out from Blue Spruce and enter the dance of the mayflies receiving some for their breakfast.

Sun is also illuminating spider webs draping in the branches of trees and grasses…reveals the edging of aspen leaves and begins to speak of the heat to come on this summer day. Yet there is still the coolness of night caressing my cheeks, the scent of water meeting earth as this creek sings her song as she has done through this mountain forever. I take out my breakfast and eat with the squirrels each of us savoring the taste, receiving nourishment from this Earth…beginning our day together.

Despite what politicians and even science would like us to believe this Earth, Gaia, Our Mother! is still very much alive and lives in accordance to a vital intelligence that has been humming along for millions of years in a miraculous ecological balance as each being of nature inhabits their unique role…a role carried out with grace, purpose and well, magic. Humans have a unique ecological niche as well…yet as a species we have forgotten how to dance with the rest of creation…yet deep within us we all were born with an indigenous soul…belonging to this Earth.

We are all born with a wild indigenous soul…and a body designed to have a direct experience with the world through our senses…to engage with Nature as the other mammals do…through sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. We are designed to know the beings of Nature as our kin…to receive the delight of bird song, to know water as sacred, to breathe with the trees…to know this Earth as alive.

Yet the cultural wounding of separation occurs quickly, for some of us at birth as we are separated from our mothers for some medical emergency, or given formula instead of breastmilk to distance us from how all mammals feed their young. By age 5 if not earlier, we are set on a path of indoctrination and colonization of our soul. We are told what to think and how to behave and if we wiggle in our chairs we will be drugged into a normalcy that deadens our wild indigenous being. Inside the walls of our schools we are told that the animals we were intrigued by, the trees we climbed and the water we played in are resources or objects or we were told that the Earth is dead.

Today the names of some animals, plants and birds have been removed from children's dictionaries such as acorn, adder, almond, apricot, ash, beech, blackberry, bramble, buttercup, carnation, chestnut, clover, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt and otter. These names of nature have been replaced with words for the technological age such as broadband, blog, chatroom, voicemail, celebrity, bullet point and cut-and-paste.

Not only is this sad but this is intentional and very, very dangerous, for how can we care about the beings of Nature if we don’t even know they exist? And now even as adults the programming of Western culture is taking away our freedom to think and create as AI will do this for us…this has dire consequences for humanity as well as Nature. If we examine technology …the earbuds, the virtual realities, the cell phone…everything is intentionally designed to further our separation from nature and an additional tragedy is that the technological path requires destroying nature as well.*****(see note at the end of this essay).

In The Death of Nature, historian of science, Carolyn Merchant traces the transition from a living to a dead (!) Nature in Western culture showing this occurred in the 17th century due to the rise of the scientific paradigm that seeks to objectify nature in order to study the parts like a machine. And while this lie serves capitalism and is perpetuated by politics, science and media, thankfully Nature didn’t get the memo (although she is obviously affected by the narratives) and continues to follow the “original instructions” for being birds, animals, trees, insects, plants, water….offering their gifts to the whole ecology.

What is it to ReWild within our culture…to kindle the memory of our indigenous soul to engage with and care for All Beings as our kin and discover the ecological niche we were born to inhabit? We know in our bones we weren’t born to be consumers or cogs in the machine and definitely not robots…yet what other options do we have when the anti culture picks us up and carries us in the distorted stream that flows into nihilism?

Plants are amazing amabassadors on the path of ReWilding. This year’s Medicine At Our Feet apprentices sitting with Potentilla. (Photo by Annee Welbel).

Rewilding is as simple as going outside, opening your awareness through your senses and recognizing your belonging to a great web of Life (not the world wide web of tech). Yes, even in the city…go outside and attune your listening to the birdsong and notice what you feel in your heart…you don’t need an app for this, we aren’t interested in naming and identifying at this level…simply go out and listen to the delight of birds in their songs or go deeper into nature and sit with water, flowing water and listen to their song, drop into your body and feel the consciousness of water in your being…and know water as sacred…water as Life…and open your awareness to an individual animal observing that they have eyes, nose, mouth and ears to take in the world through their senses and notice how while you are noticing them they are noticing you and you can go through your day, your life, aware that the beings of Nature are aware of you and may even like to engage with you and you with them and when you engage you care and can you imagine what the world would be like if we cared from this place of Belonging?

“We see, hear, taste, smell and touch due to our animal senses, not because we are humans. Ironically, rather than diminishing our humanity, by conjoining with our animal self, we become complete human beings. We think so highly of ourselves, but our best traits-heart love, family life and dreaming all originated in the mammalian life wave.” (Matthew Wood)

Our senses allow us to have a direct experience of life and align us with the animals who also experience the world through senses. When we open our awareness to Nature, kinship is apparent as we witness birds making nests and raising young as we do and animals caring for their families as we do and all we have to do is look into the eyes of a deer to remember the truth of who we are in relationship with life. The wild ones haven’t forgotten their kinship with humans…they are here ready to welcome us home.

*Two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two ears…one heart…. It is time to wake up from the trance of separation….(photo by Lisa Varga)*

The Lost Words Blessing aka Spell Songs

Enter the wild with care, my love, and speak the things you see

Let new names take and root and thrive and grow

And even as you travel far from heather, crag and river

May you like the little fisher, set the stream alight with glitter

May you enter now as otter without falter into water

Look to the sky with care, my love and speak the things you see

Let new names take and root and thrive and grow

And even as you journey on past dying stars exploding

Like the gilded one in flight, leave your little gifts of light

And in the dead of night my darling, find the gleaming eye of starling

Like the little aviator, sing your heart to all dark matter

Walk through the world with care, my love, and sing the things you see

Let new names take and root and thrive and grow

And even as you stumble through my hair sands eroding

Let the fern unfurl your grieving, let the heron still your breathing

Let the selkie swim you deeper, oh my little silver-seeker

Even as the hour grows bleaker, be the singer and the speaker

And in city and in forest, let the larks become your chorus

And when every hope is gone, let the raven call you home

Inhabitants of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Box Elder County

****The Stratos Data Center that is proposed for Box Elder County near SLC requires decimating an area of wild land , (which includes a migratory bird refuge), that is the size of San Francisco. The center would require 200% of the available water in the area and would put out the equivalent of 26 atomic bombs of heat daily. This is just one example of politicians and billionaires in cahoots with the military from a futuristic virtual reality. Nature has very real limits and data centers are pushing beyond what is sustainable for Life. Please do what you can to educate yourself on the real reality behind these centers and do what you can to oppose them. My fall Quarterly will be on Sacred Activism.