But when night had fallen, the sorrow of the worshippers was turned to joy.  For suddenly a light shone in the darkness: the tomb was opened: the god had risen from the dead; and the priest touched the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly whispered in the ears the glad tidings of salvation” (Frazer, 1922, p. 407). 

 The Vernal Equinoxes mark the point in the year when, rather than favoring either the northern or southern hemisphere, the Sun exactly aligns with Earth’s equator, resulting in a (mostly) equal day and equal night. For Indigenous cultures across Earth, even Europeans, the Spring Equinox represents a joyous time of reawakening, resurrection and rebirth. In the modern era, Christian Easter, Jewish Passover, Wiccan Ostara and the Zoroastrian celebration of Nowruz, to name a few, represent fragments of a collective human heritage commemorating Earth’s reawakening from a long winter slumber to once again bring forth life.  Mythologies invoke variations on the theme of mortality and rebirth.  Cybele and Attis, Persephone and Demeter, Jesus and Mary, etc.

 For me, the day also marks a death and resurrection, the dying of a lifetime of a Western lifestyle characterized by human exceptionalism, waste, excess, and repression of my emotional attachment to the more-than-human world. Clawing my way out of the debris of my past existence, I hope to be figuratively reborn, not as a perfect Human, but as an integral participant in the messy entanglements of wild earthly materiality.

 Day one begins like any other day, except the television in my bedroom that typically blasts inane distractions is gone, and no social media scrolling infuses the morning with an unhealthy dose of doom. Instead, I get out of bed immediately, attend to the needs of the furry residents of the household, and begin the first of many morning rituals to come. I choose to mark this year of rewilding with daily ritual, not because I subscribe to the dogma of any particular religious tradition, but because, as many have observed, the more-than-human world communicates not with words but through a “language of things” (Mathews, 2019; Weber, 2014). Perhaps this is at the heart of the almost universal human desire to express ourselves with song, incense, fire, dance, meditation, and feasting in an effort to reconnect within a wholeness greater than ourselves.

 I begin with the lighting of a candle and incense, centering of breath, and an invocation of my intentions – From the compost of my life’s destructiveness, I seek to resurrect flourishing for myself and the more-than-human community of which I am a part. The Australian Aboriginal notion of “deep time” blurs distinctions between Western linear notions of past, present, and future. The vestiges of this Land Community’s cumulative ecological and colonized histories are not isolated in some distant timeplace outside the present and future. The eternal now emerges from collective and co-created abundance, scarcity, love, violence, joy, and sorrow of all beings who make home here (Bawaka_Country et al., 2020).  

 I therefore think it’s fitting to mark the first day with offerings and engagement with Se-di and Sowo[1], two Black Walnut trees with whom I have already fostered relationships. These two Trees, one in the front yard and one in the back, dominate the visual and ecological landscape. Their substantial size points to their “old growth,” with lifespans that predate the settlement of this land by white European descendants and even the founding of the City of Asheville. The deep time knowing of this place infuses their ancient wood.  

 Their natural histories also dictate which more-than-humans will be welcomed to this rewilding party. Generous to a fault with mast fruiting, Se-di and Sowo feed countless birds, squirrels, humans, and other fauna with their abundant nuts each year. On the other hand, their roots, nuts, leaves, and wood are infused with allelopathic juglone, a chemical that acts as a natural herbicide, inhibiting the growth of many plant species, although not all. In co-creating and co-designing a forest of food for all who choose to live here, I will necessarily need to work with these most influential architects.

 I take them each an offering of incense and precious last cups of Coffee. I explain my intentions, ask for their cooperation, offer gratitude for their existence, and sing a spontaneous Black Walnut song for them. Then I just sit. The Rooster crows his ode to the morning, and neighborhood Crows respond with a raucous chorus. A Nuthatch swoops from Sowo’s branches to the bird feeder and back again, offering a mate (or newly fledged chick) a seed. The cool but not cold breeze brings the promise of the season while myriad voices from the surrounding hills cheep, chit, and chirp, rejoicing and co-creating this glorious morning.  

As I heap a few tablespoons of Coffee* into the Coffee maker, I register a flash of panic from my primitive, Western-constructed mind. The Coffee plant Coffea arabica, once endemic to Ethiopia, is now grown widely across the world in tropical and sub-tropical latitudes between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer. During the year of rewilding in which I will neither buy nor consume anything grown outside the French Broad River watershed bioregion, Coffee will definitely be off the menu. My Lizard brain flashes this awareness as a threat, and I feel a consumerist impulse to go out and buy just one more bag.

The ½ bag of remaining Coffee triggers an awareness that this plunge into wildness will probably occur more abruptly than I can prepare for. At stake, a few days of unpleasant caffeine withdrawal. I think of Coffee’s homeland, Ethiopia, ravaged by civil war; homeless Ukrainians, displaced by a war waged by a greedy billionaire despot, not knowing if they will have a country to return to. I think of the Indigenous peoples both of this region (Cherokee, Catawba, Creek, Choctaw) and across Earth, whose lives and ways of living were and continue to be annihilated by the inexhaustible wants and needs of self-indulgent white people (Ghosh, 2021). I think of a world, once populated by endless expanses of Old Growth Forests, diverse Prairies, and Oceans teeming with life, and I wonder: How did we ever convince ourselves that the privilege of Coffee, and all the other consumer goods we feel entitled to, represent wants so great as to justify the slaughter of the world?

As a white settler, living on stolen Indigenous land in Asheville, NC, I am deeply complicit. I have indulged unhealthy relationships with food, alcohol, television, media, and stuff to the full extent that my privileged middle-class status will allow. For Westerners, the human and ecological costs of our pampered lives are out of sight and therefore out of mind, as we wreck the world, piece by piece with oblivious abandon.

The Coffee I am drinking has a complex life cycle history beset with impacts prior to ending up in my cup. Although Coffee is a shade crop and can be grown underneath a forest canopy, the 11 million hectares it now occupies worldwide have been dramatically transformed from diverse ecosystems, supporting countless more-than-humans, into utilitarian agricultural enterprises, focusing exclusively on the production of a single species to the disadvantage of all others (Somarriba & López Sampson, 2018). In the worldview I am increasingly beginning to embrace (one that has been simply taken as essential truth by the vast majority of the world’s Indigenous people), this slaughter of sentient beings in a sentient world, for the sake of a few enslaved species useful to Western humans,  represents a holocaust** of unparalleled proportions. 

Deforestation impacts are compounded by extensive use of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, which contaminate watersheds and imperil the lives of any animals relying on the same resources. Energy and labor-intensive processing may include human rights abuses and the combustion of considerable quantities of fossil fuels. Packaging has its own separate supply chain history of environmental impacts, depending on the materials used. Then more fossil fuels are burned to ship the coveted beans from the tropics to the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union where two out of every three bags of Coffee produced are consumed (Salomone, 2003). Most of these impacts cannot be remedied by “organic,” “sustainable,” or “fair trade” practices, rendering these labels somewhat absurd.

And Coffee is only one thing that I consume regularly. Contemplating the impacts of everything I have consumed over the span of a 57-year lifetime boggles the mind. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) says:

We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity: plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Water knows this, clouds know this. Soil and rocks know they are dancing in a continuous giveaway of making, unmaking, and making again the earth (p. 383).

I have a lot of work to do to make up for a lifetime of taking. The year of rewilding will be the first time in my entire life that I will finally tip the scales the other way, leaving the world truly better off for my presence in it. The prospect both excites and terrifies me.