Path to a Rewilding Mind // BRB 👋🏽
Rewilding Mind
Hi there, it’s Hillarie! Rewilding Mind is space where I share my experience leaving modern city living for a slower pace of life in the country. Read on for ideas on returning to nature, finding ourselves, and creating community. 💚
Audio Newsletter
Hey friends,
It is coming up on one year since I started writing a newsletter about my experiences getting reacquainted with nature, myself, and my community. Looking back at my newsletter archive, I am amazed by the highs and lows of the past year. And I am incredibly grateful for all of you who have been with me on this ride. Thank you.
One important lesson this life continues to serve me is that I need to take time to slow down. To be present, be quiet, and gain perspective. To do less doing and do more being. So in that spirit, I am taking a few weeks away from my newsletter and social media to reset. In the meantime, I thought I would leave you with a refresh of one of my favorite newsletters from earlier this year:
A Rewilding Mind
Looking back at my transition from life in the city to life in the country, I am sometimes amazed that I stuck with it. The journey has been incredibly tough and the learning curve has been quite steep at times. One of the biggest hurdles has been learning to embrace a way of thinking that prioritizes regenerative living practices around food, community, consumption, entertainment, stewardship, and more. I call this transition in thinking a rewilding mind, and it is difficult work.
A rewilding mind is not just about being green, eating organic, or buying sustainable products. It is much deeper than that. It is the mindset shift and behavior changes that come with understanding that everything is interconnected. It is slow, steady, and everyday actions to shift away from ideas around consumption to ways of creating, reusing, and needing less. This shift has helped me learn to live within my means, face where my food comes from, require less stuff for everyday living, be intentional in making connections, and make do with simple pleasures in life. It was not a path I knowingly pursued, and it all started when we got our house.
We bought a house in the country
It has been a year and some months since my family made the leap from the city living to our house on over an acre of land in the country. We bought a home early in the pandemic, right before the housing market went bonkers. Our offer was barely over asking price, and I wrote the sellers a thoughtful letter about our connection to this area and the home. We managed to beat an all-cash offer and got our first home for way less than anything we could buy in the city.
It was thrilling at first, but the reality of owning a home in the country set in real quick. At the time, we were living with my in-laws (parents and brother) in their large Seattle craftsman home. We liked the arrangement, and, unsure of how long the pandemic remote work would last, we thought we would use the house as a weekend retreat. We assumed that eventually we would be called back to the office and we would decide at that time what to do with the house.
Weekends in the Country
Our move to the country was slow at first. Each weekend we filled our Subaru to the brim with boxes and headed north on I-5 with our toddler. The drive takes just under 2 hours, and we used that time to listen to audiobooks, discuss landscaping plans, or sit in silence, wondering what the hell we were doing. I’ve now done that drive countless times and it is still one of my favorite drives. At first, it is a slow exit from suburban sprawl before crossing the rivers and streams coming down from Cascade Mountains. Then the view opens up once you reach the lush beauty of Skagit Valley, and just when you think you’ve seen it all, there are the incredible silhouettes of the San Juan islands.
After all that, arriving out our house felt somewhat underwhelming. The house was peanut-butter colored, and our first major landscaping project left the front yard looking like a muddy mess. Entering the house was akin to stepping into a bat cave that was empty, echoey, and had way too many insects for my liking. In a fit of annoyance, I tore down all of the existing vertical blinds without realizing how expensive new blinds cost to replace. We had no privacy in our main space for months and I tried hard to pretend like it didn’t bother me.
The kitchen didn’t have the basics setup to be functional, there was rodent poop in the cabinets, and large spiders sent me running from rooms more than I’d like to admit. All the rooms smelled funky, plumbing fixtures kept breaking, and lightbulbs were burning out left and right. It felt like we were living in someone else’s shoddy home and I resented being there. I was happy to return back to my in-laws home after a weekend away at what was supposed to be a retreat.
Hitting a Wall on Country Life
I hit my first wall one weekend in mid fall. The giant maples surrounding our house dropped an unimaginable amount of leaves and I lost it. As we approached the house, my heart sunk. I kept thinking, “What the hell do you do with that many leaves??” I couldn’t wrap my head around how to clean them up or whether I was even supposed to clean them up. I was in over my city-girl head, and I was growing more convinced that buying this house was a terrible decision.
Each day presented new challenges that felt overwhelming to manage. A leak in the attic on Christmas Eve. Spotty internet access and regular power outages. Blackberries and other aggressive plants that would not stay put. Less access to the a wide variety of foods and the quality of foods I liked. And on top of that, I didn’t know a single person in this little town outside of a few neighbors. I felt lost, alone, bored, and hungry.
Learning to Rewild
With time, we started to lean on family and neighbors to help us problem solve tough situations—downed trees, heaping snow, mystery plants in the yard, rotting wood on the deck, finding childcare, and so much more. Each time I came out the other end, I felt a little more confident that we could keep going. Tackling new problems started to feel manageable, and I started to have more words and better questions for solving them. I was learning to trust myself and others in times of doubt. This was me rewilding.
The transition to the country was frustrating and painful, but I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. Since we first moved here full-time, I had a second kiddo, started and expanded my garden, raised two ducks, made new friends, deepened relationships with neighbors, invited old friends into our new space, and drastically simplified our lifestyle. I have learned that my everyday decisions are the building blocks a life that is easeful and regenerative.
Never Going Back
Once I adjusted to this way of being, I realized that we would never go back. The everyday problems became puzzles to solve rather than events that were going to break us. We have learned to love this way of living, to enjoy using our bodies, to find excitement in creative solutions, and to be curious about new people who enter our lives. So much so that we aspire to own many more acres so that we can offer this same experience to other people who wish to rewild their own lives.
I am learning to trade busy work for more meaningful action. Through gardening, laughing with new friends, learning native plants from neighbors, becoming more thrifty, or learning a tough lesson from nature, I have experienced the power of rewilding and coming back to the simple joys of living. It is not an easy path, but it is a path that aligns with the things I value most and things I believe this world needs.
I am grateful you have chosen to join me on this path and I look forward to rewilding along with you. I will be back in a few weeks once I have taken time to be.
Take care, be kind, and we'll talk soon,
Hillarie