Health & Wellness: Rewilding Yourself — How Summer Can Help You Feel More Human

By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr

I’m lowering my expectations, hoping to shiver while eating cold foods, desultorily weeding my garden whenever the temperature is less than 87, and still feeling the impending doom of the school year (from which I have been liberated).

I also say “It’s so hot” millions of times to everyone I come into contact with. But, truly, August is a gift. An awkward gift, but a gift nontheless.

It’s Hard to Be Super Productive When the Heat Index Goes Above 100. Good.

Lucky for us August is hot, which tends to quiet things down. People vacation, or stay inside in the air conditioning. Some companies have half-day Fridays. The heat becomes a natural invitation to reconnect with our more instinctive, embodied, and joyful selves.

In contrast to the productivity-obsessed culture that governs much of the year, summer offers a chance to rewild – to let go of artificial constraints and remember our connection to nature, play, movement, rest and wonder.

Rewilding Yourself is a Lot Like Being Seven Again

I recently read a lovely book which discusses how we can help rewild urban areas called A Natural History of Empty Lots by Christopher Brown. Brown says:

“The greatest hope in the short-term lies in grassroots rewilding — individual, household, neighborhood, and community action to achieve the rebalance our systems of law and government cannot.

This kind of change happens on a local, and sometimes hyperlocal, scale: guerrilla gardening and urban foraging, green roof building and pocket prairie planting, conservation easements and industrial infrastructure allowed to go wild.”

It turns out that rewilding ourselves is similar – I like to think of it as going feral in the best ways. For example, psychological rewilding means reconnecting with our innate, natural tendencies and behaviors, often by being in nature more and paying attention to how things grow, shift, and flow.

Summer is a season where reconnecting with our wilder selves is more accessible and socially acceptable, so let’s take advantage of that by:

• Laying under a tree, listening to the creaks and whispers
• Watching a bird feeder (birds are strange – I love their weirdness)
• Smelling everything in our gardens (tomato plants have a bewitching fragrance)
• Tasting the sweetness of fruits and vegetables (rolling the seeds along your tongue)

I love to lay under the towering hardy hibiscus bush in my yard – it smells lovely, the insects buzz and it’s as close as you can get to an approved adult fort. My neighbors who share the yard were worried about me the first time they saw me and came running out to make sure I didn’t need them to call 911. Funny but also sad – can’t we normalize laying under shrubs?

You Can Out-Play the Kids in Your Life If You Really Try

Summertime play for adults can be running, yelling, throwing, splashing, hopping, bouncing and dancing – a reclaiming of childlike joy and curiosity.

But it can also be more subtle – a loosening of cultural norms while getting back in tune with our natural rhythms and values. In Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, Katherine May talks about giving herself permission to play:

“The skills of deep play took far longer to learn than anything I’d studied before. They meant asserting the awkward right to time, space, and solitude; making a shameful claim on my own creativity…They meant putting aside time to do things that seemed pointless to the outside world.

…It was long and slow and uncertain, and often quite boring. I did not feel very much like the boy who drew cats, gravitating irresistibly towards my craft. I felt like someone fighting their way through undergrowth to reach a place they only vaguely remembered. That place was the core of me. Every moment was worth it.”