Well, if we’re to move forward with what I’m proposing, what is important is that we understand what I’m offering up first. Before agreeing or disagreeing with it.
The fundamental issue is rewilding, no matter what skill you’re using to enact it, looks different as you experience the increasing complexity of it. Another metaphor:
Your personal or group rewilding paradigm moves through succession stages. From exposed earth due to cultural cataclysm, into field filled with herbaceous plants (i.e. "weeds) who know how to heal bare earth, to sparse stands of nitrogen-fixing trees such as alders and poplars with short life spans, to second growth forests, to old growth forests broken up by a mosaic of everything that has come before - meadows, young forests, and so on.
Each of these things isn’t just different in the details, it’s a whole 'nother organism. It is a whole different order of complexity. Hence the aptness of the term “old-growth cultures”. We’re not just talking about people who live “close-to-the-earth” - the modern simplistic romantic conceit of native lifeways - we’re talking about intricate invisible treasure houses of oral traditions, ceremonies, and relationships that accomplish elegantly the ordering and nourishing of the human-land-spirit body.
As I mentioned before, even if you only studied the bow drill, if you studied from a “rewilding” paradigm it would take you through these stages. How you harvest the materials, where you source them from, tools you use to carve them, what you do with the coal, your conception of the purpose of the parts and whole of the bow drill set - as simple fire-making tool all the way up to universe-making ceremony that would take a week of 12 hour days to tell the story of - you are walking along an arc from bare earth to old-growth in learning the bow-drill, and every other part of your rewilding consciousness is pulled with it.
The power of this tool - a rewilding “Tree of Wisdom” let’s say - is that you can’t skip any stages. If you find yourself sneering at someone for abandoning their coal - because at “Journeyman” level a common story is the coal is a baby that holds all possibility (stories of the future) and ancestry (stories of the past) - you’ll realize that neither you or they or ready for this compassionate and generous understanding and burden.
Another way of thinking about this, is self-other-family-community. In rewilding terms:
- Self. Discovering modes of self-healing and expression.
- Other. Discovering modes of relational healing and expression - lovers, friends, etc. Your yard.
- Family. Discovering modes of family/ancestral healing and expression. Your neighborhood.
- Community. Knowing what branch of the web of rivers you are on - discovering modes of village/clan/multiple-ancestries/allyship healing and expression. Your watershed -your bioregion.
I’ve thrown up a bunch of stuff here - but none of it is “the answer”. The point is to begin to think nonlinearly - not in terms of certification, or whatever, but in terms of observing the complexity of what you/we are able to nourish and generate within and between us.
the is about complexity, not goals. A tree’s trunk is only as wide as is necessary to hold up its branches - and will never hold more than those branches. A sapling must add wood, concentric rings, to become a shade tree. this is not a linear path but a massive undertaking observable by anyone.