practicalnaturalist, I really like your schematic of your philosophical journey. Reminds me of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs somewhat. I also really resonate with your last milestone: “moralism as domestication”, “abandonment of the save the world mentality”, “love of irony”, “shedding mechanistic worldview”, comfort with oneself and one’s attributes, etc. Very much where I’m at right now too. Interesting to me also, as I also came into rewilding as part of a long and on-going philosophical journey that was not at all linear, too.
To me rewilding is a spiritual movement. It is the task of understanding our relationship with our own selves. Knowledge is good, skills are great, but they need wisdom in order to be really something. We need what the bear, the beaver, and the deer have known all along: discipline and discernment. To the undiscerning eye these appear to be instinct and mechanism. To the discerning eye, they are attributes of wisdom.
To be honest, I don’t think the end goal of rewilding is any more complicated than an understanding of our self and who we are truly, and then a moving forward into the world now as the witness and steward to our own fate and choice. Self-knowledge sounds overwhelmingly daunting, but perhaps we feel this because it is powerfully simple.
The practice of the wild teaches us about the wild world outside, but it also teaches us of the wilderness that is ourselves. It may be said that we are nature. It can also be said that there is no nature, only us. There is only us in it’s universal, cosmic sense. No masters, no gods looking in from the outside, no dogmas, no laws. Infinity within, and infinity without. What a powerful place to be! And a place of great responsibility requiring… discernment. How are we going to treat ourselves?
So to bring my now dangerously-rambly post back to the original topic: I disagree that a spectrum and criteria-of-achievement can adequately categorize a personal rewilding journey. I think we should break things down into more material categories, much-like the trades and artisanal craft skills to which apprentice-journeyman-master titles are usually (and fittingly) bestowed. Rewilding is just too overarching and intangible as a title all to itself. I mean, hypothetically speaking, I could be a fully wild free-ranging human being without a master, and still not know how to make a friction fire, or shoot a bow. Where does that put me on the spectrum? If we take the meaning of rewilding to be synonymous with its practical skills, we lose the sense of rewilding as a spiritual endeavor and existential pursuit.