It often feels pretentious to talk about my thoughts around my path towards rewilding. I mean, who do I think I am to turn away from the norms and follow the trail deeper into the woods?
It is also difficult to do so because I have rejected most of the labels people use.
I do not consider myself a pagan, wiccan, heathen or druid. Yes, I view the equinoxes and solstices as important cornerstones in my thinking and, yes, I have practiced with many of these communities, but am less apt to embrace the agricultural-based holidays beyond what has been called Samhain. Even then, I see that autumnal evening more as a period of intense liminality rather than a holy or spiritual day. Beyond those five periods, we have little in common. I don’t worship gods, I don’t do rituals, I no longer entangle myself with concepts of magic(k), however defined. I reject most of the New Age elements many groups have adopted since the 1970s, many of which are modern invention that have little to do with the supposed sources they are attributed to.
My practices are not those a shaman would follow, but they have shamanic truths that guide them. I think a shaman has a specific role to play in their respective culture and I do not have that role as my calling. Therefore, I am not a shaman and would never dream of calling myself one — that would be the community served by a shaman to determine if one of their members should be called that, it is not the aspiring shaman’s decision to name themselves thusly. I have recently started considering a self-named shaman to possibly not be what they claim to be.
What I do embrace is spirits; of people, animals (another kind of people), plants, earth, the elements, of everything really. Do I beseech them for favors? Give up prayers to them?
No.
But some of them do guide me as best as they are able, considering my slow wit and low intelligence. They’ve adopted me, if that makes sense, and they try to show me things that I have been blind to. I send my thanks, but I don’t consider that to really be prayer any more than I would consider thanking someone who lent me a hand in my education. I honor them, but that is not the same as worship or prayer, and I never ask for special favors, however tempting it might be.
I might be an animist, but that carries baggage with it too, by virtue of colonialist academic thinking. I’m not sure that everything that extra luggage entails is appropriate for defining my practices and beliefs.
So what is rewilding to me? Getting in touch with both true self as well and further exploring the old ways of approaching spirits in the way our hunter-gatherer forebears approached spirits. For me, that is the calling, a minimalist engagement with spirit as it is, instead of how we define it to be.
Does any of this even make sense?
I don’t know. I wonder if trying to put this into words is the wisest thing I have ever done, but I feel compelled to try at least. I’ll quite possibly learning to regret having tried to ride this tiger.
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