Part one; Welcome to Nature.
Welcome to nature; there are so many secrets here in the strangeness of all the wild things that have made the layers of the earth so rich and fertile. Fertile enough for our bare feet to walk over soft vegetation, or our wet, sodden faces to stare up at the sky and try to catch a raindrop of fresh water.
Rich enough to give us the minerals and the science to create the industrial world, give rise to modern medicine and live a longer life.
And yet still, in all that we have discovered there are secrets. Secrets that hide in the nooks and hollows of wrinkled, old trees. On the walls of ancient caves (once our homes) and in old stories from sailors who described an ocean thick with sea turtles, and mountain banked shores of plankton harvested by gigantic whales.
Intriguingly, there are secrets about ourselves hidden in here too. There is a powerful wildness to human nature, an ember in the back of our minds, waiting for air. And remembering this mysterious part of ourselves will help us to welcome our Natural World back into our lives and minds; rewilding modern society.
Not just a sight or image of nature will do this for us. It requires our taste and smell, acuteness to sound and the shivering sensation of our warming bodies in the sunrise. Or the scent of the different seasons creeping by right under our noses.
In short: rewilding ourselves takes immersion. And divergent thinking, which is just the exploration of many different possible solutions.
And one way or another, we’re going back to nature.
The journey starts in our minds and trickles on through our nerves and muscles down to our feet, telling them to move forwards and take us somewhere wild again.
Maybe it’s a body of fresh or salt water, or a forgotten patch of countryside on the outskirts of town, or somewhere lacking in structures such as pavements like a woodland or river valley.
Wherever we feel wildly at home.
It could be a moment before something happens to us here, but it will. Because when we go out in nature we engage parts of our mind that we don’t use very often, and that wakes us up to genuinely eye-opening experiences. Becoming conscious of the things changing around us.
And whilst baselines shift, our memories remain statement on the mid-spring mornings that we see a single, lonely swallow flying solo in the ebbing twilight. Or notice the questionable fractioning of habitats, fragmented, with dense patches of bluebells and other wild flowers. Or the forewarned scarcity of beetles, bees, butterflies, moths, birds and bats.
Maybe we have just been too distracted by our own creative genius, to notice that nature actually misses our companionship and symbiosis. In consideration of that, what better time than the spring, to regrow that connection.
And be drawn in interest and awe towards a nook or a hollow, hidden away in the dehydrated skin of an old tree.
