My name is Kyle. I’d like to go by Kyle Ray, but people call me Kyle. I’m 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 didn’t 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 don’t know how to broadly define) and participating in these efforts I started to see the possibilities that life didn’t have to stay the same and that helping the world didn’t 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 don’t 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. That’s 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 didn’t 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 didn’t understand until then that I had some personal things I really needed to deal with and still have a hard time facing. I couldn’t 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). It’s tough when it feels like I’m trying to convince people of things that I feel so strongly, but that I don’t 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. I’ve 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.