What is it to rewild?

What does it mean to rewild? In the agricultural sense it means “To restore an area of land to its natural and uncultivated state. And in so doing, reintroduce a species long since driven out.” 

Sit with that for a moment. Then let us unpack it—beginning with the idea that cultivation causes ill. This is a notion plucked from the papers of 17th-century Romantics who admonished factories and eulogized fens. And it is resurging, I think. For when I say, “rewild work,” people tend to grow reflective. They invariably want to share about some passion they’ve lost. Some treasured art that has deserted them—painting, choreography, singing, the woods. 

That’s certainly been my journey to this concept, and why the “re-” construction of the word “rewild” so delights me: It is a re-turn, a re-membering, a re-storation. I knew the term’s power the moment it leapt at me from the cover of a book my dear friend Bibi gifted me, The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape. The author so aptly named the thing Eve (my wife and this studio’s co-founder) had been reminding me for years: I am actually freer than I think. All I need to do to reclaim my lost love of the outdoors is to speak it and go within. The feature story of this inaugural issue tells of just such a trip I took to the wilds of Guyana, where this idea finally blossomed. And Marina Garcia-Vasquez also tells of it in her story of flight from burnout in Brooklyn to the cradling embrace of Palm Springs, and back.

But wait—let’s back up and re-examine that second clause: “rewilding reintroduces a species long since driven out.” In this, I am reminded of the poet Robert Bly’s parable about the snarling wildman who, when washed in magical waters, is revealed to be us, and enters society. But when he realizes cultivation’s cost, he longs to escape. I believe we are the animal, and that rewilding restores us to our interior habitat, reacquaints us with instinct, and unburdens us of acumulata and worry.

I have overworked mercilessly these past ten years, and I aim to rewild my life with the art, philosophy, and the wisdom of nature that first animated me to take on client work—but which I’ve relinquished. A grim factory has set up shop in my mind, and no matter the joys of my personal life—and they are great—it has turned the work to toil and polluted inspiration at its headwaters.

And hence, re-wilding. Restoring my ideascape to its bucolic state, making space for instinct and awe and the gravity of this beauty around us by getting out and seeing more and marveling at how freedom enlivens me. In this issue, Eve captures this concept as only a poet can, in her new column, “The Clearing,” about the moments in life we happen upon an opening, and all becomes clear. 

By these rewilding ventures, I hope to reinvigorate my work—for the measure of the journey is what it delivers upon return. Rewilding is making it a practice of life.