Rewilding and my search for place

in the wood, in the writing, in my mind

I’m not homeless in the way that human services organizations label those among us without the means to sustain shelter. I’m placeless—unattached, wandering, seeking, a walker without a footpath to follow back. I’m a person that roots deeply and bonds to both places and people with a life-sustaining clutch (to my own detriment, often). So to be without a place — a home — stirs my anxious energy to two notches higher than I’d like on my comfort barometer.

As a child, I had five acres at my disposal, and being not overly welcome in the house, the wood was my place. I was fearless, not courageous. I may not have known any better, but I choose to imbue my sense of safety with something close to magick. The woods, mostly cedars and scrub with luscious heaps of ferns in the late spring offered me nooks for enclosure. The feeling of nestling, crouching down to listen, seeing but not being seen, became one I yearned to create when I studied park design in my 20s.

Now the feeling is a union of body and spirit. I can taste it, just barely, until I discover it somewhere and then I am overcome. I felt it in Ireland last month. I knew I was in a place that was mine, in that welcoming, familiar, warm way that we each find only a few times in our lives. We must mark that moment, but how?

For me, it might be writing, but I wasn’t willing in July to stop the embrace of the place and risk its leaving me. So I will carry it now, into the next wander, with the belief that I can recapture it on my intentional hike to rewild myself.