Rewilding, Resilience, Renewal

A Natural Love Story

I who all the winter through

Cherished other loves than you,

And kept hands with hoary policy in marriage-bed and pew;

Now I know the false and true,

For the earnest sun looks through,

And my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew.

Now the hedged meads renew

Rustic odour, smiling hue,

And the clean air shines and tinkles as the world goes wheeling through;

And my heart springs up anew,

Bright and confident and true,

And my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew.

(Robert Louis Stevenson, I Who All the Winter Through)

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As I write this, it is sunny and the sky is an after-the-cold front deep blue. The sunlight glistens on the snow as I walk the land and feel possibilities present everywhere. I feel the energy shifting toward Spring with the promise of growth and renewal. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the buds of trees and plants show evidence of a new season soon to begin. This afternoon, under these brilliant blue skies, I walked the land again, looking for signs of emergent change. On some plants and trees, I see the buds beginning to swell. I am reminded that it is time to prune the fruit trees. There are more birds singing their favorite melodies and I notice the red-tailed hawks who make their home here riding the wind currents over the meadow. Yes, there is another month until calendar Spring, but the signs of change are beginning to appear. My heart springs up!

These days of transition in nature hold real possibilities for creativity in many domains as we open ourselves to find attunement with our Mother Earth. It is a time for rewilding our perspectives and actions in tune with the natural energies and emergent growth all around us. This rewilding and renewal will take us into places of deep creativity, whether in the arts or relationships or new life roles.

[Red Willow, February, 2025]

It is an opportune time (Kairos) to enact our evolutionary heritage of love, play, and cooperation. At this moment, I am especially open to new, vital cooperative projects as I feel the resonance with the land I live on and all its beings. They are calling to me, as well, that it is also a time of great challenge and profound threat to both personal and planetary health, which are interwoven. For those of us who live in the USA and in many other countries, we are witnessing an intense dedication by political powers to remove all safeguards and protections of the more than human world so that every facet of life on the planet is threatened. To counter these threats, as many of us as possible must find ways to work together with each other and with our bio-intelligent planet to provide local, grassroots alternatives that can be deployed to minimize the impact of destructive planned governmental action/inaction.

In other words, it is time for cooperation. Those of us whose focus, whether through writing and/or direct action, is the intersecting crises of climate, food security, and deep social and financial inequities now must come together to inspire and support each other. For some, our action will be local or bioregional, for others it will be national, and for some it will be planetary.

I began writing Living Earthwise on SubStack to help me delve deeper into what I perceived as almost intractable problems generated over the last 500-600 years by the sense of human estrangement from the natural world. I have been reflecting on these issues for the last two decades in order to understand how this sense of separation developed and what we as humans, as social mammals, can do to once again live in awareness and experience the richness of being members of the natural world, as much so as trees, ducks, paramecia, or deer. I began writing in an educational spirit, hoping to educate myself first, but also wanting to share questions and ideas and practices with others. Now, I want to move toward working with others to inspire and articulate actions that will contribute to personal and planetary health.

In this work, it is very important to focus not only on the real threats to our planet and our persons, but to see the opportunities that Mother Earth is providing. In the face of would be planet killers, we must develop the 3Rs: Rewilding, Resilience, Renewal. Each of these is more than an individual endeavor. They ask us to join together, which is our heritage as a species who has evolved to thrive in healthy relationships with others.

Rewilding is our capacity to rediscover our place in nature as a species among other species. Here is an analogy from the land I live on. This land was once a thriving forest. With settlement by white colonizers beginning in the 18^th century, the forest was cut down and over the next couple of centuries the land that once supported thousands of species of plants and wild life became heavily grazed pasture in which the variety of species was greatly diminished. For the last 40 years or so, no cattle have grazed here. In this new era, the land began to replenish or, we might say, rewild itself. Both native and non-native plants began to grow and replace the pasture grasses. This is the early succession stage of small trees and shrubs which prepares the ground for the larger species of plants and trees that are characteristic of mid-succession growth. Here, native species of wild life have also begun returning. As I wrote about earlier,(Coming to the Land: A Rewilding Story), I have felt directed by Apu, our old maple who is the elder of the land, to begin planting native trees that eventually will grow quite large. It is a mutual rewilding story, as I am experiencing rewilding along with the land. In rewilding we learn to live as a member of the natural world where we are. This is an entirely “natural” process that is available to all of us, wherever we live.

Resilience, which I studied and wrote about when I was a university professor of psychology, arises when people work together. It is a social action, always involving multiple people, whether in community or in self-determined groups. We draw strength and health from each other, just as the plants, trees, animals, insects, and birds do when living in ecological harmony.

[Live Oak Hammock, March, 2023, Okefenokee Swamp]

Renewal is the “natural” outcome of these processes, just as happens every spring when the growth in the belly of the land (underground) then emerges as new leaves, new flowers, new growth. As we open ourselves to Earth and to working with others, we, too, begin to experience renewal.

As we open and extend ourselves to work with others, both human and more than human, to counter the threats to our planet and to ourselves, we will undoubtedly create new communities. Together we will share in rewilding, resilience, and renewal, for that is the natural way that has evolved on our bio-intelligent home: Earth.

Additional Resources

Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, 2017. Duke University Press.

Four Arrows (Donald Trent Jacobs), Point of Departure: Returning to our More Authentic Worldview for Education and Survival, 2016, Information Age.

YouTube

Listening to the Quiet with Harrison Ford