Connecting with Nature
Many of us find it difficult to have a meaningful and rich connection with nature because we are too busy trying to make ends meet and attend to all the demands our machines make on us: work, emails, texts, messages, facebook, tweets, and that’s all before we get home to spend time with our families and friends in the flesh. We have become very tame, very domesticated and the wilderness inside us is as desolate as the moon.
This unwilding is beginning earlier and earlier, as children are introduced to tablets and laptops at an ever younger age. If the parents are too busy, a screen will be ideal for holding the attention of a child who will quite quickly learn to prefer the screen to playing with it’s parents. The other advantage is that the child will stay where you can see it and remain clean and tidy. How much better it would be if our children were allowed to go out screaming around the woods and fields, getting wild eyed, ruddy cheeked and completely filthy having fun doing nothing but enjoying themselves.
There is a lot being written about rewilding, so I am not going to do it here but if you want to read more, George Monbiot, a Guardian columnist and author of Feral, a book about rewilding will be a great source of information. You can watch this video clip about the reintroduction of wolves into the Yellowstone National Park and the astonishing direct and indirect consequences they have had throughout that ecosystem : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q.
A day to Rewild yourself
The purpose of this page is to offer you as a school, company or group, a day of rewilding, but what is rewilding? Strictly speaking, it is a term used for returning land back to it’s original state, usually by the reintroduction of natural predators. Here, I use the term rewilding of ourselves to mean celebrating our natural selves through meaningful, direct contact and deeper understanding of our natural environment. It is also an active protest against false authority that persuades us that what we need for happiness is more shopping. Rewilding is a rejection of the values that have brought our planet to ecological crisis and it is an assertion of confidence in ourselves and our own abilities to think for ourselves and choose actions that are self fulfilling and nature enhancing.
I would like to facilitate your rewilding by offering a day of nature connection where you will have the opportunity to understand bird language, listen with you deer ears, awaken all your senses, and become alert and aware of the wildness of nature all around. This day will be customised to the age and ability of the group and it will be punctuated with games, fun and also times of reflection and silence where appropriate.
My credentials
I am passionate about influencing people’s attitudes towards our environment and I see rewilding as a way of doing this. I believe that we already carry deep earth wisdom and I want to help people remember this and to fall in love with nature again. With the movement from rural to urban, so much rural knowledge has been lost and we now need to nourish new mentors to pass this wisdom on to the following generations. I also lead meditation, art and calligraphy groups but all my interest is in bringing peace and transformation to the human being and therefore to the natural world. I believe that a deep nature connection will bring transformation to both self and society.
My approach is inspired by Kara Moses, an activist and facilitator of rewilding. I have attended courses at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, I take regular retreats, often in silence, I am engaged in creative arts, solo hiking, spirituality and sustainability, and have had the privilege of meeting and working with many wise and experienced people.