As a collective, I believe we yearn for a return. A return and embrace of wildness, true nature, and grounding. A return of deep-seated internal power by directly addressing the things we fear– including wilderness, creation, and death. Rewilding is a return to the natural state of both the environment and ourselves, healing, empowering, and restoring balance.
In addressing the ideas of rewilding and rebirth, we must examine and question the systems we inherit, and how we might recreate them by consciously choosing wildness. In this issue, Ian U Lockaby calls attention to the consequences of our current use of the earth and its resources, what happens when we domesticate or try to bend the land, and by extension our inner selves, to produce. We lose something fundamental. Yet, we keep buying it.
This issue also highlights writing that delves into motherhood and womanhood– profound states of being that sometimes operate simultaneously– and what it means to rewild women, to break out of domesticity and embrace ourselves fully, light and darkness alike.
In the process of rewilding, and by nature the idea of “wild” itself, we find ourselves wrestling with how to address things of the wild in language. By naming something, are we classifying it and in the same moment stealing away its wild nature? Can something named still be wild?
One of the most used examples of the wild and wilderness is the forest. Historically the woods have been a source of great anxiety. They have spawned many myths warning of the dangers of the woods. The woods are lawless, the antithesis of society and community. They are unknown. Dark. Violent. They represent our collective fear in both our inner and outer worlds. Inside, animals hunt, kill, and feed. There are rocky ledges to fall upon, flowing rivers to sweep us away, and endless green canopies to lose one’s way in, but we find ourselves drawn there nonetheless. Other often examined wild places are the sea, the desert, and the mountains– things we cannot control. These places require us to let go of control as we enter them. Perhaps rewilding is seeking release.
Enjoy curated works from Carolann Caviglia Madden, Randall Potts, Rupsa Banerjee, Rita Mae Reese, Chris Campanioni, Norman Finkelstein, and many more in Interim’s Rewilding and Rebirth issue.
-Kathryn Taylor McKenzie
Guest Editor