Writes Deju Hu, founder of Wild Revolution . . .
In our culture, we have mostly forgotten how to love the land.
Ever since land became property, become a possession, we have treated her like an inanimate object, like a thing, something to be used and consumed for our own purposes. By seeing and consuming land this way, we miss its nature, its life blood, its beauty.
We cut down her forests, plough up her wild meadows; we forget that land is life, land is nurture, land is our only home, our ever giving abundance. Religions have compounded this perception by seeing land as a commodity, as something we can have dominion over and own. Land becomes the greatest divider between poverty and power, we use it to form the building blocks of class systems, of laws and politics, of country and nationalism, of wars, of greed, of monarchy, and of the great charades of ownership.
This attitude and its consequences have wrought havoc on the wild and on wild beings. It has created a genocide of unimaginable magnitude, wiped out many exquisite species that, in truth, are our relatives, our co-inhabitants on this exquisite planet. Somehow, we have created a culture that has lost touch with its roots, it’s home. Billionaires look to Mars for salvation, look at new ways to exploit, profit, gain for a tiny fraction of what is lost, lost forever. Extinction is a one-way journey, it’s a crime beyond all crimes, yet it is packaged and sold as objects of freedom and prosperity.
Yet if wealth is anything, it is our wildlife, our teeming forests, our clean rivers and oceans; it’s the way we treat this earth and all that live here. True wealth is well-being, a clear mind, and a heart at ease. It is the ability to appreciate this life to such an extent that the gratitude one feels is the divine message of spirit. We don’t need men dressed in various garments pointing to saviours in the sky or in history. True freedom is right here and now in the natural world, in its potential, in its ability to thrive when given a home, when left alone to simply be.
It is time to rewild the land, rewild the seas, rewild the mind, and rewild the heart. Our vision is to rewild, to honour, to connect, to appreciate earth's beauty and the ecstatic dance of the seasons. Our vision is to dare to dream of seeing the wild regenerate, to imagine a world where the feathered, pawed, hoofed, furred, scaled and winged can thrive, without the need to fence, plough, cut, profit or consume. Our vision is to let things be as they are, to give up the endless need to
do something, to tidy and know better, to imagine the possibility that nature can manage without our neurotic need to control.
May we remember, deep in our cells and bones, that nature is not something out there but that we are nature. We are the alchemy of stars, of river and ocean, of ancient earth and fire, we are what nature wove over billions of years to see herself. May we fall in love with our own ancient earth body, for lost in a great amnesia, we forgot and imagined we were separate beings, like landlocked amnesiacs abandoned on the edge of time. Yet in reality that is the greatest fake news of all. For to
re-member is to literally come back together and know one's place as one with this earth and all our ancestors.
It is time to rewild the world.
See also the previous posts:
• The Beauty of Nature
• Thomas Moore on the Circling of Nature as the Best Way to Find Our Substance
• Mistwalking
• The Divine Masculine Principle
• The Art of Travis Chantar
• Animal Energies
• “We Are Still Mythical”
• I Call to Cernunnos
Images: Subjects and photograpers unknown.
