Hello all.
Cen here - welsh by blood , now living in the stix in Bulgaria.
Found rewilding whilst looking for books on basketry.
What luck.
All the best.
Cen
My name is Kyle. Iād like to go by Kyle Ray, but people call me Kyle. Iām 23 years old and discovered Rewilding 4 years ago. My childhood was filled with an intense curiosity about animals(particularly birds and snakes), and in 7th grade I realized two things. I love trees and plants and animals and that other people do things that hurt them. This inspired me to argue and to label myself an environmentalist. It made no sense to me how humans acted towards the world. That year I also discovered something that gave me the confidence to stand up and say how I felt. With the help of my sister I found my way to my passion for Martial Arts. The blooming of my social surroundings drew my energy more towards friends and my confidence to speak my mind was mostly encouraged by teachers, which was great, but it also drew me into the school system more. I guess the acceptance of other humans was very important to me, once I found some sort of identity. High school was such a pain that I mostly acted weird to cope with my new found mild depression and draining of energy that seemed to occur every morning when I walked through the doors. After 2 years my friends and I found a way to do something with all our feelings and thoughts. We started a group focused on environmental activism and community awareness. Our projects reaffirmed my desire to make a difference, in spite of the soul-crushing effect school had. Though I half-like school because I enjoy learning it felt like it left something missing. After graduation I started college as an environmental studies major. I did some cool stuff like English Ivy removal and plant identification, but the computers and the lab work(computer-lab work) and the feeling that I was just another terms tuition to my teachers, as well as a steadily rising debt that I didnāt want to pay off eventually led me to quit. Around then rewilding entered my life and began the breakdown of my faith in civilization. That sounds like a bad thing, but it freed my mind to think outside the assumption that civilization is a good way of living, which I would call difficult and stressfull. It also gave me hope.I remember reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn on the bus home from work. Absorbed in what I was reading, I barely noticed anything until my stop came, I stepped off and the words in my head began to resonate with everything I saw. The concrete and telephone wires and cars looked like the cage I had just read. I felt sick to my stomach.
After becoming involved with some very passionate rewilders or people who work to restore and pass on skills of living (which I donāt know how to broadly define) and participating in these efforts I started to see the possibilities that life didnāt have to stay the same and that helping the world didnāt have to happen within the civilized realm of environmentalism to such a degree, but on a personal and community level and in more fulfilling way than I thought possible. Still my own problems prevented me from fully giving myself to it. Coping with civilization seems harder the more I see it for what it is. Despite the new world of rewilding opening up in front of me I found myself in a depressed and desperate place. Not knowing where I was headed or if I could find what I needed Made me feel terribly lost. I ended up hurting someone I cared about and hurting many people I cared in the ripples of my actions. I lied to myself in order to lie to others about what I did. I did not know how to take responsibility for something that shattered my perception of myself. I left behind a lot of good things to escape the reality of what I had done. I moved and tried to start something new. I wanted to work towards rewilding and start a community with the people around me. I also started experimenting with entheogens or psycoactive substances to cope with my denial, to fit in, and other reasons. Reaching and hope and the drive of rewilding and finding something better led me to push through boundaries I held and I began to see on a human animal level the insane things our culture does. I broke down crying when my job required me to tear spiders and their webby homes from ornamental trees. Every tiny beautiful plant I ripped from the dirt felt like ripping apart myself. The emotional weight overwhelmed me. I hated seeing my friends forced to work jobs and seeing them smoking so much and that I did the same thing. In some ways smoking marijuana(if the drug reference is inappropriate for this forum please let me know so I can remove it) seemed like a pacifier. I still donāt know how to talk about these experiences. I had to see so many intelligent, caring, and talented people sucked in to things that seem to drain them. Some might think I was just on drugs. Thatās not true though. I wanted to find joy and feel like a part of the world around me and I worked hard to find it. The times substances played a part I took them seriously and treated them with respect as things with something to offer, however naive that might be.
In that time my family and my health became seriously important to me. For living far away I tried to do things with them and talk to them a lot.The healthier I ate, the less tolerance my body had for dairys, grains, and sugars. I began to yearn for a place to really practice rewilding skills and I felt like I needed to get back to my family. Moving was difficult I had so much that I care about. It seemed like what I needed to do.
My family was very supportive and they gave me a lot of freedom to do the things I needed to do and were very understanding even if they didnāt understand what I was going through. Their farm gave me a place also to come to terms with my actions and some of the lies I was living. I didnāt understand until then that I had some personal things I really needed to deal with and still have a hard time facing. I couldnāt have done that without my family. They keep inspiring me to try harder.
Practicing martial arts became a big part of my life again. It still is. I started reading as much as I could about rewilding skills and philosophies and putting into practice basketry, awareness, tracking, soil and plant restoration, plant food and medicine, working with roadkill animals that I found, and archery. I also felt inspired to bring my family along with me on this journey as much as they felt open to(maybe a little more than they liked). Itās tough when it feels like Iām trying to convince people of things that I feel so strongly, but that I donāt know how to communicate. The river helps. Gives us a place to play and a way to enjoy and learn together without too much pressure. Iāve probably given a lengthy enough introduction. These days I still practice these skills and try to learn more. I have some major cowhide projects under way, as well as a few skunks, and deer. Little by little learning bird language.
I hope to talk to people who have interest in similar things or maybe completely different ones and hopefully share some successes and failures. This has been my go to site for information on skills and helpful stories dealing the struggles of rewilding side by side with civilization. I would love to be part of the conversation.
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Hello rewilders!
My name is Liam. I currently split my time between Seattle and a beautiful place in the mountains outside of Republic, WA. Hopefully one day soon I will be able to live there full time and get to see the deer and wild turkeys ambling through the forest each morning. My heart swells in hearing the thrum of grouse as I walk through the woods or the mournful, lonesome sound of the wolves howling in the evening. What is more exciting than an unidentified sound rousing you from sleep, not knowing if it is the rustle of a hungry bear or simply a curious deer browsing a nearby shrub?
I aspire to a higher level of human sovereignty through knowledge, experience, and understanding of deeply practiced patterns of living. I am continuously trying to learn more about traditional perspectives and ways of living. I am studying the practical skills of hunting, fishing, foraging, trapping, and feral permaculture. My long term goal is to live a life as close to nature as possible by practicing traditional forms of living on the fringes of our modern society.
We all have ancestral roots, whether european, native american, or any of a myriad of other combinations. My ancestors may have oppressed yourās or vice versa, but we should not hold each other personally accountable for the mistakes of our forebears. Instead, let us accept the current reality, look at the best, most healthy practices from all traditional cultures and move forward via a new synthesis, a new culture that combines the best in all of us in an attempt to wrest the future away from destruction and degradation towards a healthier, happier, and freer, way of life.
I would like to connect and form relationships with individuals and groups in the inland northwest who are on similar journeys. Letās learn from and support each other!
Liam Broderick
My name is Luke. I live in the eastern woodlands of the Mid-Atlantic. I became aware of this movement through Permaculture about 5 years ago. My family was fortunate enough to recently be welcomed onto a forested property on the side of a mountain. We are in the process of becoming acquainted with this land. I love to forage, climb trees, move. Started really thinking about things when I was about to have my first child. I am very interested in what IĆ¢ā¬ā¢ll call minimalist philosophies, movement, and the inner journey. Significant and new influences for me have been permaculture, Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen and Mindfulness Meditation, Joseph Campbell, Joanna Macy, Charles Eisenstein, Parkour, Arthur Haines, Ido Portal, Derrick Jensen, Bill Plotkin, Ben Weiss, Wilson Alvarez, Daniel Quinn, Daniel Vitalis, David Abram, barefoot running.
I have dreams of a school that offers a space for learning the eastern woodlands, primitive skills, permaculture, movement and what I have difficulty finding exact words for but will call inner work similar to that of Plotkin in Soulcraft.
Hello everyone,
I have been eyeballing this site from the shadows for sometime now and I figured I would go ahead and make an intoduction. My name is Calvin. I feel as though the rewilding label fits me best. I have grown up in Tennessee all of my life. I grew up seeing, as many of us Im sure, the damages that civ life can have on a persons body, mind, and soul. Not to mention the damages to our beautiful planet and society/culture. I imagine a time when the trees went on for thousands of miles. I also look up to the stars and realize how tiny we are. I question our systems. Government, economic, financial, and so on. I recently quit my job at a steel mill. I got tired of being a hypocrite. Imagining all the damage I was supporting by working there. So I quit. Who knows where I will end up, but it will be in the woods somewhere. Iām tired of being a financial slave, tired of supporting a system thatās beneficial to few and wreaks havoc on our home. Itās sad, but I think things will fix themselves one way or another. Thanks for having me.
Hi all. My name is Karen. I currently live in Scotland, but I grew up the beautiful foresty suburbs of NH. The term ārewildā I had not heard before, but itās such a great descriptor for everything I aspire to!
Where to beginā¦rethinking the diet that made me so unhealthy as a teenager was my first introduction to going ābackwardsā in civilization. I became appalled at what humans have done to their food supply and attempted to remove everything artificial. Since then, itās felt like the more I look at the pieces of my life, the more Iāve wanted to undo them in place of better, more natural solutions. Becoming a parent has only amplified this need.
I believe that back when we were hunter gatherers we had it right. Humans were part of and balanced with the natural world, such as other animals. They ate right, were naturally fit, had healthy social communities, and lived for the present. I am continually taking inspiration from that time, and hoping to regain some of that knowledge.
For a bit more about my journey, check out my blog about living and parenting naturally at
DaisiesOverDoughnuts.com (Or DaisiesOD.com for short).
Looking forward to getting to know all of you!
Greetings, I used to be part of this forum years ago but cancelled the original subscription because the forum seemed to have fallen into disuse. There seems to be a bit more activity now and my interest in rewilding has been piqued again given a few different rewilding resources that have emerged on the Internet, so Iāve restarted my account.
I live in the Green Mountain State of Vermont, in the United States. I make my living teaching at the college/university level in the disciplines of energy, environmental and food systems, which overlap so much they can hardly be thought of as separate disciplines. I also do a fair amount of consulting work, mostly at the nexus of energy and agricultural systems. In my spare time I forage, hunt, practice a range of ancestral skills, and lead my local chapter of the Weston A. Price Foundation. I admittedly think long and hard about the mess Homo sapiens domesticus has gotten itself into and what solutions there are for those of us who want our species to continue.
Best wishes!
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Hello, everyone! My name is Dia and Iām 22 years old, living in sunny Florida. I am currently attending college for fine arts, with a focus on painting, as well as sustainability. When I am not working or attending school, I like to spend my time with and become closer to Mother Earth. I go to the beach nearly every day and love to snorkel and pick up any litter I find. Routine camping trips keeps me sane! I dislike living in a city. I also enjoy doing yoga to develop my body, to appreciate having such a wondrous stardust vehicle to witness this incredible universe. I have been a pantheist since I was young, and protecting Earth and her inhabitants gives my life spiritual purpose. Raised as a carnivore but am now a happy raw vegan to be a voice for animals and nature. The respectful partnership I see between indigenous tribes, our modern āundomesticatedā peoples, and Earth was one of the biggest reasons I decided to commit my life to rewildingā¦ as well as hallucinogens and Terence McKennaās Food of the Gods, with his argument for an Archaic Revival. The spiritual revelations I have received while tripping and that book has changed my life entirely. I am very excited to graduate college, as I will be looking to start a carpentry apprenticeship. My dream is to purchase land and build myself an eco-friendly home within the forest and every day I am working toward it. I really hope to be an inspiration to others so that they may realize that to be apart from nature and our tribal hunter-gatherer days wreaks havoc not only on Earth but on us, on our souls. Every day I see people both entranced and entrapped by this material world, conditioned to crave and desire for more possessions yet they are still so far from happiness. Heaven is being able to wake up to the sound of nature to greet the sun in the morning and to be so damn grateful you opened your eyes to see another day of what Earth has to offer.
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Welcome Dia!
Thank you so much! I am very grateful to connect with like-minded people and to share knowledge. For knowledge is power!
Hey all! My name is Tyler, and I share with all of you the general apprehension, distrust, disenchantment, and scorn for the big Civ. My entire life has been spent in Wyoming, where the wilderness is prized just as dearly as is farmland. The latter I thought would be my future, but after only a year in an agricultural setting I have already become concerned with the relationship necessitated between farmer and crop. It is now, obviously, the wilderness which is calling me. To fully dissemble the barriers between man and nature, to exist inside the divinity of the woods and the plains, to be a beneficial and supportive member in the community of life - these are my ambitions.
I cannot say when or how I exactly learned about rewilding, but generally speaking I have been studying the movement for almost a year now. During my sophomore year in college I decided to abandon my ambition of becoming a phytoremediationist - complete with lots of gene splicing and posing as god in the natural world - in favor of environmental anthropology. This was when I first began to be formally acquainted with indigenous lifestyles, alternative modes of existence and behavior, and the like. Having a B.A. in environmental anthropology, I figured,would be a nice cushion for a career focused on sustainability in general. Like many, sustainability would be guided by a Technomessiah. Quickly this approach dissipated from the perspectives I gained from organic gardening, permaculture, rewilding, anarcho-primitivism, radical self-reliance, and all the rest. So, in short, in only a brief period Iāve stepped away from the business-as-usual approach to saving the Earth and have entered into the umbral groves where the most intense, most sincere, and most effectual paradigms are being formulated. More than anything, I hope to become a part of this movement, to be one of the many - yet too few - who are seriously questioning their relationship with their world - be it that the sphere of humanity, economics, subsistence, spirituality, philosophy, etc. - and are who are marshaling forth in defense of a noble human existence.
Learning the primitive skills society has stripped away from us all, like gathering wild plants for food and medicine, building shelters, hunting, fishing, trapping, tracking, creating fire, and so on, has been a key goal of mine since the beginning of this year. Of course, an apprenticeship with nature is a long one, and I do not intend to ever cease learning such skills. As well, Iām in the process of seeking out rewilding communities within the U.S., because I have an intense desire to āwalk the walkā and to fully immerse myself in a lifestyle similar to the kind us primitivists vaunt. Not only do I want this for my own spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical satisfaction, but also so I could extend a hand strong enough to help pull others out of the mess of civilization. Helping others escape from the mess of our industrial culture is a prime concern of mine.
- TB
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Hello all!
My name is Stephanie. Iām a 27 year old female and I live in the very urban city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin with my husband and 2 dogs. I have been lurking (obsessively) for the past few days on this forum and really am enjoying it.
I am an Early childhood educator and I am currently the Director of an āeco-friendlyā (donāt even get me started) childcare center. I see the illness of our culture and civilization everyday in the lives of the families that I work with. For a very long time I was asking āIs it just me? Am I the only one who sees this? Am I just being negative and everything is actually fine and dandy?ā But stumbling across this site has made realize I was right all along.
My interests include permaculture, foraging, lacto-fermenting, reading, survivalism, and raising Monarch butterflies. I would like to start learning archery as well as some other ancestral skills. My hubby and I rent a 4,000 square foot space for our own micro-farming adventure. We started super late and only got some bush beans to germinate. Next year I plan on planting half the plot with perennials and half with annuals.
I am really excited to join the conversation and if anyone else from here is in Southeast, WI, let me know so we can chat 
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Welcome!
Ok, so I have a few questions after checking out Rewild.com more. I donāt know if itās appropriate for me to post them here, so if not, sorry.
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What happened to Jason Godesky? Is he still active in the movement?
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Is he still doing podcasts?
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I saw that you said Facebook was more active but I absolutely hate Facebook, so is there any chance this forum will become more active again? I will certainly do my best to try and stimulate it.
Hey Salad,
Jason Godesky is busy working on his The Fifth World roleplaying game. I think he just finished the beta version. When he is not working on that, he is writing the essays for this site that will be on the new main page (which he designed in collaboration with me and Willem and Ian and others). Heās around, but not doing Podcasts. For rewilding podcasts, see the Unlearn and Rewild podcast by Ayana Young. That is the best one out there at the moment.
This site is still active, but facebook is where content flows like niagra falls. I try to cross post, but even I just post things to facebook. The idea of the facebook page is to draw more people here. Itās working, but people need reminders.
Thank you for the response.
Bummer about Facebook. I just deactivated my account. It was all too anxiety provoking for me. I will just do my best to help liven things up here.
This is a re-introduction, as I spent the last 2 and a half years posting here as Goblin Girl. (Now that Iām in my 40s, it seemed like a good time to ditch that user name).
Iām a self-employed artist, married with one kid, and I live in Portland, Oregon where I work a lot with Rewild Portland. Iāve also been a maskmaker for over 20 years. While figuring out how to rewild my art, I have been researching a lot of ancient European mask traditions, and am utterly blown away by the animism that is so evident in the oldest rituals. Also starting to get together with other folks interested in masks and ritual and animism, so we can work on bringing these traditions back!
I got into Rewilding in 2011, and I have to say that the first two or three years were really, really hard. I think it is common for folks to discover rewilding and just want to be rewilded already! It is so easy to get trapped in a mind-set were every single thing you have to do everyday is analyzed in terms of itās place on a scale running from wild to civilized, and it can start feeling pretty hopeless when pretty much everything falls on the civilized/domesticated side of the scale.
But it gets better.
Rewilding is a multi-generational transformation of culture and environment that canāt happen overnight. Itās like taking off a pair of blinkers or dark glasses, and suddenly being able to see things truly. Youāre still seeing the same stuff around you, but you are more aware of the big picture, and how important even the smallest steps towards a more rewilded state are. We take as many of those steps as we can, and we set our kids up to take even bigger steps, and so on and so on. And we help those who want to take steps but are afraid or confused or donāt know how.
Maybe the world succumbs to the ravages of unrestrained civilization tomorrow. But for me, knowing I am taking those little steps, and seeing others taking little steps or medium steps, or occasional large steps into rewilding gives me hope despite the odds.
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Hello, my name is Hannah, though Iāve been known by many different ailias online. I am young, not yet 18. I failed to find any age restrictions on this forum, but if it was merely due to improper reading, I understand and am okay with being removed.
Though I am fairly young compared to those Iāve seen in other introductions (and anyone Iāve ever come across who was interested in rewilding in general), Iāve known that getting back in touch with nature, by far more than just recycling, was of great importance for years. I have traveled to many areas of the US throughout my (short) life, and I mean camping in Yellowstoneā¦not visiting NYC, so my childhood was no stranger to nature, and maybe thatās part of why Iām here now.
I used to, well still technically do, run an Instagram account on which I dicussed civilization and rewilding, as well as reviewing books such as those by Derrick Jensen or Miles Olsen, biological anthropology, pantheism, etc. However, being as young as I am, Iām in the part of life where youāre just starting to feel the pressure of joining civilization, the urging of your peers to hurry up and live ānormallyā with a part time job and an apartment in the suburbs, which put me off my typical Tumblr/Instagram rewilding discussions, but I know I need to come back to it.
Also, at the moment, Iām technically homeless (but not family-less) and roaming the Florida panhandleā¦so I do not have a set location as of now.
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Hello folks! My name is, Alice, and Iām 28 years old. Iām an artist/musician/writer/plant tender who lives in Southern Ontario. Iāve spent most of my adult life as an autodidact drifter, in and out of the wild, and Iād like to find some sense of community. My blighted urban current situation is starting to make me a bit twitchy. The only problem with practicing anarchy is that it gets lonely sometimes. I plan to lurk a bit, but I enjoy reading, writing and connecting, so probably not for long. I look forward to getting to know Rewild as a community and Rewilders as individuals. Canāt wait!
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Welcome Alice and Hannah!
And Mona Rose what an amazing sum up of your rewilding journey. I love it.