I have to laugh at how things sometimes come together without you realizing they’re coming together at all.
For the last several weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to feel like yourself again. That thought eventually turned into the idea for my Re-Wild Challenge invitation, and I made a Reel inviting people to join me. At the time, I was mostly thinking about all the little ways we can reconnect with ourselves through movement, curiosity, adventure, play, and simply giving ourselves permission to enjoy things again.
The Reel ended up being a collection of completely random pieces of my life: travel clips from Las Vegas and Armenia, me standing on cliffs, animals I’ve encountered along the way, and all the other little moments that make up the life I’m actually living. Looking at all of those clips together made me realize that maybe that’s what I mean when I talk about being wild. It isn't necessarily about doing something outrageous. Sometimes it’s just about being engaged enough with your own life to notice what’s happening around you and follow your curiosity.
I’ll link her letter here because I don’t want to retell her story when she already told it so beautifully. What caught my attention was the idea of rewilding as something that happens when we allow what was already there to return. In conservation, that can mean removing some of the things that have restricted a landscape and allowing nature to find its way again.
That idea gave me another way to think about what I had already been trying to articulate.
And then, because apparently my brain was not finished with this subject, I watched Hoppers on the plane.
I wasn't sitting there thinking, Ah yes, this perfectly explains my Re-Wild Challenge. 😂 It was much less deliberate than that. I was just watching the movie, and somewhere along the way I started noticing the same thread again: the relationship between humans and the natural world, what happens when we interfere with it, and the difference between controlling something and allowing it to exist as it is.
By this point, I had to laugh because rewilding seemed to be following me around.
Maybe that’s what happens when an idea gets into your head. You start noticing it everywhere. The concept was in Kirsten’s letter. It was in the movie I happened to watch on an airplane. It was in the animals I kept photographing during my travels. It was even sitting underneath the whole reason I wanted to create this challenge in the first place.
And the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea that rewilding doesn't have to be some dramatic return to a former version of yourself. I don't think any of us can go backward, and I'm not sure we should want to. Life changes us. The things we experience change us. We grow, we learn, we lose things, we gain things, and sometimes we become so focused on getting through whatever is in front of us that certain parts of us simply don't get as much attention anymore.
That doesn't necessarily mean those parts disappeared.
Maybe they’re more like an overgrown path that hasn't been walked in a while.
And maybe reconnecting with ourselves isn't about building an entirely new path. Maybe sometimes it's about clearing enough of the weeds away to see where the path was all along.
That is what I’m hoping to explore over these ten days.
The challenge itself is intentionally simple. There will be movement, reflection and opportunities to connect with other people, but I don't want it to become another thing you have to perform correctly. I don't want “rewilding” to become another version of self-improvement where we end up measuring whether we're doing it right.
I’d much rather we approach it with curiosity.
What happens when you make a little more room for the things that make you feel like yourself? What happens when you follow an interest that doesn't have an obvious purpose? What happens when you move because it feels good, take the long way somewhere, laugh at something ridiculous, spend time outside, try something you've never tried before, or simply give yourself permission to be interested in your own life again?
I don't know exactly where those questions will lead, and I think that's part of the fun.
I'll link the original Reel, Kirsten's letter, Hoppers, and the challenge details below so you can follow all the little pieces that somehow ended up connected in my head.
Because apparently my brain has decided that this is the season of rewilding.
And honestly, I'm pretty curious to see where it goes.
🐺🥁
