Five years ago, an organization I started was officially recognized as a nonprofit. For the last two years, I have been building the nonprofit with funding from a foundation that gave us a grant. It felt like a lot of money, and with that came a lot of responsibility and a tremendous amount of pressure to perform.
With eight months of funding left on the grant, I found myself on my back in Yosemite National Park. By day, I laid on a tree that had fallen next to a river. By night, on a bridge beneath the stars. No one but my dog with me, no cell phone service, no noise. Just complete silence, solitude, and stillness in nature.
Somewhere between the sound of the river rippling over the rocks in the riverbed, the warmth of the sun on my face, the butterfly flitting from branch to branch above me, and the flickering headlamps of the climbers on El Capitan, I realized just how tired I actually was. Later that night, I returned to my camper van, opened my journal, and wrote:
November 3rd
“I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t know what I want, but after 25 years [of leadership], I know it’s not this.”
Words like too heavy, not enough support, burden, too long, not sustainable, and restrained flowed onto the page. I wrote until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. I laid down, cracked the window next to my bed a little, pulled the covers up over the side of my face, and fell asleep imagining the climbers sleeping in their tents hanging on the side of El Capitan.
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of the campers in the site next to me cooking their breakfast over the fire. I slid my van window shut and got up to make some coffee. With my steaming seafoam green Yeti coffee mug in hand, I crawled back into bed and propped myself up with my back against the wall. As I took my first sips of coffee, my mind wandered to the memory of the sound of the river from the day before. How soothing it was, and how grounded I felt gazing at the rocks stuck in the bottom of the river bed.
I opened my journal to what I wrote the night before. "What do I want?” I thought. What I did know was how refreshing it felt to be without the internet and the constant stream of texts and email notifications popping up on my phone—each one sending a wave of anxiety throughout my body. I wondered how long it had been since I experienced nature without my phone or posting the photos I had taken on social media. I couldn’t remember the last time I went on retreat to a national park, went for a walk on the beach, or on a trip to a foreign country without scanning my surroundings for inspiration and consuming the experience to produce content for my work. My heart broke.
November 4th
I want there to be a discipline of no content.
Rewilding.
Letting things grow by not trying to do anything with them.
Not consuming.
Not explaining.
Not writing curriculum.
Not packaging.
Not selling.
Just stop manipulating the land. Just let nature run its course. Bring things back into balance.
Rewilding. It was a term that emerged from my memory from when we lived in England more than a decade ago. There was an article that I read there about a man in the south of England that decided to rewild land that he inherited from his grandparents that had been “under the plough since the second World War”. He stopped farming it. He stopped dictating what was going to grow here or there. He reintroduced native animals to the land, with his only goal being ecosystem restoration. He just let the land be wild. He asserted that if he did, it would restore itself to its natural order, and would yield more beauty and bounty than he could ever imagine or strategize himself. He was right. It did.
Those words—wild, restore, natural order, and beauty. They brought tears to my eyes. Something inside me was crying out for freedom after more than 25 years of harsh labor and constant demands for production, just to feed insatiable cravings for power, popularity, and success. I was in the “business” of helping people, but was I really helping anyone? At what cost?
I looked up at the family outside my window eating breakfast as they slowly packed up their campsite. I took my last sip of coffee and set the mug down on the counter next to me. Then, I wrote the question in my journal that would serve as my guide through the next eight months of the grant to today:
“What would it look like to rewild the landscape of my soul?”