Kincentric Rewilding: Returning to the Conversation of Soil and Soul

There is a sacred hour before sunrise when the world feels transitory, neither dark nor light, a liminal portal where endings and beginnings share the sky. I have lived on the edge of dawn since my birth. Perhaps, in part, it is my destiny, or a part of me actively chooses it. In truth, the ground beneath my feet would often erupt, forcing me to dive deep into my heart and values to remember that I have a choice. From a young age, I learned that change is the only constant and that my choices were to adapt or to suffer from resistance.

The last time my life was upended was in 2021. What I did not yet understand was that this rupture was also an initiation, the beginning of a remembering I did not yet have words for.

That year broke my heart into a thousand shards, as three of the people I love more than life itself caused me great harm and suffering so profound I fought to stay earthside. Through this, the only thing keeping me grounded and helping me move through the waves of betrayal, shock, and deep grief was the beautiful home, land, and nature I lived upon. I wish I could say this place was mine, but it was not, and after years of rooting into this home, the sanctuary we had created was sold out from under us, and we were forced to move yet again.

The thought of stewarding someone else’s land again, of placing my heart and soul into more gardens that could and eventually would be taken from me without care, acknowledgment, or remorse, was too much. It felt as though the entire universe was whispering to my soul that it was time to go, to embark into the unknown, leap off the cliff, and trust that we would land on sacred ground in divine timing, allowing the path that would reveal true alignment to arrive as we became ready to receive it. And so we did.

I remember kneeling in the cool morning soil, carefully digging up the rose bushes and blueberry plants my children had given me over the years for Mother’s Day, their roots tangled deep as if they, too, were reluctant to leave. We carried them to a friend’s property, hoping they would continue to bloom somewhere safe, somewhere permanent.

The spiraling rock labyrinth we had built as our garden lay behind us, each stone once pried from the earth by our own hands, now warm in the sun as if holding the memory of our footsteps. Tears blurred my vision as I pressed my palms to the ground, feeling her steady pulse beneath the surface. Aurelius stood silently beside the massive fig tree he had nurtured from a tiny seedling rescued from a crack in the roadside pavement, its branches heavy with unripe fruit for the very first time after years of patient care. It felt unbearable to leave it behind.

The air itself seemed thick with grief, the wind moving through the leaves like a low, pleading whisper, as though the land were mourning with us, asking us not to go.

Through this new experience of loss and the pivotal realization that I was no longer willing to live in between rentals, that I would rather trust the unknown winding path ahead than give my heart to a place that was not mine, something inside me began to remember.

This remembering rose from the ground like mist, hovering at my feet, inviting me to walk with it, to find once again that breath of memory that is one’s place of belonging. Older than human language. Older than these surface identities we wear like masks.

A remembering carried in bone and breath, from stardust to soil, a knowing that being embodied as a human is a collective remembering of all we have been, a weaving into one. That my life, all our lives, your life is braided into wind and water, mycelial intelligence and birdflight, ancestral spirits and seeds, grief and sunlight.

That I am not standing on the earth so much as I am arising from it, shaped by the elemental forces that bend rivers and coax roots downward through darkness toward hidden water. The wellspring of our collective being is unfathomably deep and intertwined. And in this remembrance, my life began unfolding in new ways.

As my own remembering deepened, I began to sense how much of our collective suffering grows from neglecting this relationship. It became impossible to ignore that the disconnection I felt in my own life mirrors a disconnection unfolding across the entire planet.

We are living through shocking times in which the boundary between our human, soulful selves and the natural, elemental, more-than-human world is being actively and destructively eroded and reshaped in real time. Dying forests, alongside hospitals filled with sick children, are more than signs of disruption or warnings of mass extinction. They are visible symptoms, bruises on Mother Gaia’s skin. Beneath this harm lies something insidious, subtle, and truly devastating.

We are witnessing a crisis of collective forgetting. A forgetting of where we came from and why we are here.

So many of us have forgotten that to be human is to be entangled in the living world. We have forgotten that our bodies are collaborative constellations of species, that our breath is borrowed from forests, that the minerals in our bones come from ancient seas, and that hundreds of millions of years of symbiotic becoming shape our inner life. We are watching people drift further out of sync with the foundations of our existence, distracted and overwhelmed by too much information, narrowing into a screen-sized tunnel vision that serves no one.

In 2021, I was asked to choose something different and trust that choice. We sold 95 percent of our belongings, packed the bare necessities, and moved a simplified version of our art studio into our new home on wheels. Nomadic life began stripping away more of the illusions about how we choose to live in the world, so that memory and truth could be heard and recognized again, so that we could actively reshape and realign our lives into a more integrated whole.

And through it all, I came to learn that the energy of home lives inside of us. Living nomadically truly dismantled the myth of being separate from the natural world around us. Warmth, water, shelter, food, and safe places to land all became relationships rather than commodities.

We had to attune to new environments and develop a new way of listening for the sake of self-preservation, to attune to weather before it arrived, to sense when a place welcomed rest or asked for movement. Intuition heightened as we noticed nature’s patterns around us while hiking through new forests and encountering new species of trees, plants, animals, and insects. We observed which places felt healthy, thriving, and teeming with life, and which felt barren or unwell, where animals and birds were absent, and humans appeared sick or unhappy. The presence of kind, present humans and animals says a great deal about a place.

Our nervous systems had to relearn what it meant to exist within a living system rather than standing apart from it, sensing where we would thrive and where we would not, knowing when it was time to travel onward and when it was time to stop.

We have been blessed to have many friends we’ve met through our art, who invited us to stay on their properties as we’ve traveled. It has often felt synergistic, as though our arrival is in service to those who need support, help, or healing. The reciprocity of these experiences and the fostering of intentional community networks have been such a blessing.

Other times, we found ourselves in places that felt safe, peaceful, and deeply nurturing, and yet there were intense moments when Mama Gaia reminded us that we are not in control.

I remember one spring night in the Ozarks, lying outside beneath an electric sky while fireflies flickered through the treetops above. Firelight cast shadows at the edges of our camp as Aurelius sang softly to me, and together we cast our dreams like a net across the heavens.

We knew it was tornado season and had planned to leave if danger arose, but that required warning and time. That night, after calling in protection and speaking aloud, deep, intentional magic, we finally went inside to sleep. Almost immediately, the power blinked out, and our phones alerted us that a tornado had touched down nearby. We grabbed our beloved cat Merlin, a heavy rug, blankets, food, water, and hurried to the brick bathrooms across from our RV to take shelter.

Huddled there, we could hear the tornado tearing through the campground. When the roar finally passed, we emerged shaken but grateful to find our home still standing. The next day, walking the grounds, we saw the path of destruction carved through the trees, a line that had passed so close to us it felt like a whisper. It was profoundly humbling.

In moments like that, I felt the truth of our vulnerability and our belonging at the same time, how we are shaped by forces far older than us, and how learning to live in right relationship with them may be the deepest form of safety we have.

I have come to understand that rewilding is not a return to some imagined past. It is a remembering of the continuity of life that never truly vanishes, even when we change forms. It is a quiet turning back toward an ancient conversation with the great mystery, one that is never-ending and eternal.

Popular culture speaks of rewilding as habitat restoration, species reintroduction, ecosystem protection, and damage repair. This is wonderful work, both sacred and necessary, and I believe that something deeper is also being asked of us.

What if rewilding includes the restoration of relationships?
What if it includes the restoration of reverence?
What if it includes restoring the human heart?

There is truth in these questions, and perhaps they are questions we can begin asking ourselves and one another. Our nomadic livelihood began to feel like a remembering unfolding through experience rather than thought, an Earth-school apprenticeship that could only be learned by living inside the lesson itself.

Kincentric rewilding begins with the radical knowing that humans are divine participants in a vast web of kinship. We are not here to manage life, nor to only observe it. We are not being asked to save everyone, but to acknowledge our relations. The Indigenous and tribal peoples of this planet, our ancestors, understood this from a lived place.

Soil kin.
River kin.
Fungal kin.
Animal kin.
Air breathing, water drinking, sun-dependent kin.

All our relations are part of the kincentric rewilding of our souls. We are never alone. An unseen thread, woven by spirit, binds us to every human, every animal, every living being that has ever walked this Earth.

To rewild in this sense is to remember that we are part of the living world, not separate from it. It means repairing the connections that modern life has weakened or broken and allowing ourselves to be open and responsive to the natural world once more.

It is also an act of collective grief because remembering makes loss visible.

Wetlands drained.
Forests clear-cut.
Species gone before we could learn their names.
Ways of being human set aside for speed, convenience, abstraction, and greed.

I carry that grief in my body. Many of us do, even when we cannot name it. It lives behind the ribs, in the throat, in the restless sense that something essential is missing even when everything appears intact. It shows its face in the mass dis-ease affecting all life on the planet at this time.

And yet beneath our grief is something luminous.

A soul-deep longing.

A longing to belong to a place so deeply that its well-being matters as much as your own. A longing to participate in life rather than merely pass through it. A longing to be known by a piece of land and to know it in return, as kin that is beloved, cherished, and cared for.

During these past four years of wandering, I stopped searching for the perfect state to settle in or the perfect property to buy and began instead to attune myself to resonance, to the subtle language through which the Earth recognizes its own. I learned to feel for the nearly imperceptible shift that occurs when body and landscape meet in quiet accord, when something ancient within the bones answers something ancient in the soil.

These were places where breath deepened naturally, where the weight I did not realize I was carrying slid gently from my shoulders, where vigilance loosened its grip, and the senses opened like moonflowers in the dark. In such places, imagination felt like memory returning, a future unfolding that somehow already knew me.

Over time, I came to understand that the path itself was alive, responsive, aware. It required neither forcing nor mapping, only attention and a willingness to walk in trust as a participant rather than a navigator. Trust grew not from certainty about where I would arrive, but from recognizing that I was being shaped by the journey as much as I was choosing it.

The destination, when it exists at all, feels less like something you discover and more like a place that has been waiting for you.

I remember last spring driving into Moab, Utah, passing beneath an endless sky through Arches National Park. Magnificent red sandstone arches rose from the desert like ancient sentinels, shaped by wind and water across eons. Each one felt like a portal into a deeper remembrance, rooted in the pulse of time itself. Their curves glowed amber in the midday sun, shadows spilling like ink across the desert floor. In that place, even silence speaks.

Your body registers a different hum there, the slow exhale of stone, the distant call of ravens, the whisper of wind threading through the archways. I felt both infinitesimal and vividly alive standing beside those immense formations, their presence palpable, ancient, and quietly aware. I found myself wondering what they must think of us, these small creatures crawling and climbing all over them in absolute awe.

In such places, time behaves differently. Sound carries differently. It was there that I first noticed that something inside begins to take root long before any physical roots touch soil, and that belonging reveals itself as a relationship.

Moments like these do not remain in memory alone; they alter the questions we ask about how to live, reconnecting us to ways of being human shaped by thousands of years of living in reciprocity with the Earth.

Kincentric rewilding asks us to reconsider the foundations of civilization. What does it mean to belong to a place without possessing it? How do we live in reciprocal obligation rather than extraction or exploitation? These questions are not theoretical to me. They are alive. We are being asked to go back to “living into the answers” that these questions ask of us.

To move constantly is to understand continuity as sacred, a knowing carried by nomadic peoples for millennia, born of necessity and devotion alike. To wake in unfamiliar places is to feel how deeply the body longs for a relationship with land that endures across seasons. To rely on strangers is to rediscover how profoundly communal humans are beneath the story of independence. We are tribal beings. Interdependence lives in our marrow.

When I root again, it will be with all these lessons folded into my being.

Home is a hearth around which life gathers and flourishes. Where soil is nourished, where water is protected and honored. Where pollinators multiply, and plants thrive. Where children learn the names of plants and constellations alongside the skills of tending the earth with kindness and care. Where elders sit in sunlight, passing along stories that anchor memory to the earth.

When I allow myself to imagine what true belonging might look like, this is what arises.

I imagine spiraling pathways worn smooth by bare feet, each step a quiet unwinding of the mind... roses climbing in fragrant wildness, petals falling like small blessings into the soil that feeds them. Hugelkultur beds slowly transform fallen wood into nourishment year after year, decay becoming fertility, endings becoming beginnings.

I often think of the weeping willow I planted when my eldest son was only one, its roots nourished by his placenta, and how that tree, now twenty-four years tall, stands as a living bridge between the past and this present moment. I feel its sway in the wind, its long green veils tracing time’s passing. I recall every patch of earth I have coaxed into bloom, so many beautiful gardens, every wild hillside I have foraged, every prayer I have whispered beneath towering pines. All of it blesses my steps.

I imagine a cob oven shaped from earth and hands, sun-warmed walls where bread bakes on stone while laughter drifts through open air. I hear the crackle of firelight reflected in dancing eyes. I taste divine meals gathered from the land’s abundant offerings, a slow ritual between celebratory feasting and the garden’s bounty.

I imagine water moving through the land as a living presence, a spring speaking in clear, patient language older than any human tongue, cold enough to shock every cell awake, gentle enough to cradle grief into renewal, softly holding rebirth. Nearby, a Mama Willow stands sentinel, roots drinking deeply, branches trailing, leaves whispering in a dialect of wind. Willow, teacher of grace. Willow, keeper of water memory. Willow, teaching us to bend without breaking.

In the steam of a sweat lodge, I see grief and prayer spiraling skyward. Under a night sky so thick with stars, the Milky Way flows overhead like a river of light. The Pleiades glowing beside it like a celestial seed of memory, and silence so deep you can hear your own heartbeat. These are places where healing happens because the conditions for life have been lovingly restored.

And somewhere, perhaps within this very imagining, there waits a particular place, a spring that endures, a willow that watches the seasons come and go, soil layered with stories no deed could ever capture. Land that does not feel empty but attentive, vibrant, alert to every footstep and heartbeat.

Over time, these profound insights began to settle, reshaping my entire worldview in what felt like a natural rewilding of the path itself.

Kincentric rewilding is an apprenticeship, a lifelong devotion to Earth’s wild intelligence. It asks us for humility, patience, and rigorous attention. To rewild is to learn the grammar of roots and wings, tides and migrations, decomposition and regeneration.

The soil becomes a teacher.
Water becomes memory.
Trees stand as elders, their rings counting centuries of seasons, drought and flood, bloom and fall.

It is to kneel in soil that teems with life, a living parliament of fungi, bacteria, and earthworms negotiating survival and cooperation. Its fertility is the outcome of billions of years, held by a delicate balance. To touch the earth is to place one’s hands into the vast field of living intelligence that holds us all.

Perhaps soul, in this context, is simply the depth at which I allow myself to be transformed by relationship, the degree to which I become permeable to the needs and beauty of the wider biosphere, porous enough that joy and sorrow move through me without stagnation.

Rewilding is both inner and outer work. It is the intrinsic connection between habitat restoration and psyche restoration. It is rebuilding watersheds, which in turn rebuilds meaning in our lives. It is learning to speak again with the more-than-human world while also listening for what it has been saying all along.

At the edge of dawn, everything rests in possibility. Night’s cool wisdom lingers as light gathers strength. Birds stir in their nests. Shapes emerge from shadow. The day has not yet declared itself.

This is where I find myself now, between wandering and rooting, between grief and hope, between remembering and becoming, ready to participate in the sacred restoration of all that is at risk of being lost to the noise of the modern world.

Perhaps this next chapter of my life will be written not by imposing my own story on the land, but by letting the land’s story inscribe itself upon me, lessons written in spring water, wisdom carried on willow branches tracing the wind, teachings delivered through frost and thaw, bloom and decay, silence and birdsong.

A book co-created with rain patterns and bird migrations, by soil warming in spring and resting in winter, by the slow labor of fungi beneath fallen leaves, by the way light shifts across seasons, by the quiet transformations that only time can reveal.

I will become the scribe, listening closely enough to translate the ancient language of beings far older and wiser than myself. My deepest longing is to plant trees whose shade future generations will rest in, to restore habitats for creatures I may never see, to leave soil more alive, water clearer, and relationships stronger. To live so that my spirit ripples outward through generations unseen.

At the edge of dawn, I cannot yet see the full shape of what is arriving. I can only feel its presence, like light gathering just below the horizon, like roots seeking one another in darkness.

So I listen.
I prepare.
I lovingly tend what is already here.

I lift my face to the sun, offer gratitude for this life, and carry in my heart the echo of the land I am calling to, the land that knows my heart... my soul.

May this land find me and guide me back home.