This post is my answer to the 
This is a story on which I have written a lot and published nothing because I always feel that I fall short on telling it properly, with all the involved participants and the different chapters that were experienced. However, I'll give myself permission to write a short version of it here for the sake of expressing what re-wilding means to me.
Our little story begins with drugs. Specifically 4-aco, a sythentic version of psilocybin, which is the active component in magic mushrooms. A friend had sent me a large badge of psychedelics so that I could sell them (yeah, I've been a dealer... got a problem with that homie?) and I was so excited to know what they were about that the next morning my breakfast was a glass of water with 4-aco.
Not half hour had passed and my mom calls me that she needs me to urgently go pick up my grandmother who lived in the countryside because she had business to attend in town. So there I go, with the drug starting to heavily kick in, I enter my mother's office so she could give me the keys of the car. I did my best to act normal though it was really hard with my mom's face beginning to twist and change colors constantly. I remember she looked like a lioness, not in a scary way but in a strong-willed way, and -shamefully- I had no idea she was a Leo yet as I developed my interest for esoteric knowledge after these experiences.
So I managed to not be taken to a psychiatric hospital and took off with the car completely tripping balls. The good thing is that 4-aco is a very smooth psychedelic, very easy to handle and I started realizing this while on the car. Everything was very crisp and perfectly in place. I understood what people meant when they said you could kick your mind into a different "gear". Never had I felt the car so soft and the motor purled in a very relaxing manner. I was completely connected to the vehicle and, being a person that hates driving, I was surprised by how much enjoyment this was causing me.
As it often happens with psychedelics, enjoyment and ecstasy can lead you to such level of gratefulness that you feel a dick about your previous behaviors in life. You start remembering all the cool things others have done for you, how it would seem that no matter how much you criticize people, they always have your back in the end.
I drove my way to the countryside while thinking about this but before I could reach my destination I burst into tears. I could not hold back the river of emotions that was flooding my very being. So many moments came to mind, so many small gestures of love that I had overlooked were just exploding before me like fireworks. It was kind of like when someone dies in movies and they show all the great moments that person had lived with others with deeply emotional piano music so you can cry your eyes out.
So I figured I couldn't go for my grandma' in this condition, with all those tears in my eyes. I decided to go to a little stream in the forest that was some 10 minutes away from my grandma's house and take some time to process the trip.
Path to the stream.
The stream... sorry for the shaky pics, I asked my mom to take these and send them to me but as you can see she's no pro at photography 😂.
I stayed in the car for a while, watching fractals and weird shapes form before my eyes until I had enjoyed enough of the psychedelic mindscapes my mind was producing. I got off and walked towards the stream until a raspberry plant caught my eye. It looked so friendly and tender I just fell in love with it. I felt that it loved me back and that it welcomed me into the place.
It was in that very moment I decided to live there. It was so obvious, everything that I was looking for in life was there. I needed no more. I also had a good amount of psychedelics to help me remember the essentials each time I strayed and had enough money to just pay my friend instead of selling them.
There were some very old and majestic poplar trees in the place as well.
Somehow I managed to take my grandma to town and do all that was required of me without giving any hints that I was absolutely smacked. Except for the conversations of gods, aliens and the astral dimension, I think I was undetectable.
The next day I took my tent, a machete and a hand-axe and went off to the stream in the forest. There was a pretty clear area and I looked for the biggest fallen logs I could find to make a roughly pyramidal structure. I was quite hyped and kept going until night fell so I made a fire.
This was what I managed to put together the first day.
Yerba Mate was essential to keeping the spirits high when things looked grim.
This was the most useless and least effective gardening attempt I've ever done, but it looked pretty.
This picture was taken recently by my mother and that's what's left of my first shelter of this forest adventure. This structure is 2 years old!
I'll be honest from the start... I didn't live in a hyper-isolated place where there was no one to ask for help if something went wrong. Three hours of walk and I could reach a town. However, I was heavily obsessed with getting off the grid as much as possible and so I would go for months pretending there was nothing else out there but where I lived.
The place I begin to inhabit was quite alright. There was a stream passing by, and a big enough patch where animals couldn't access so it was filled with wild plants and fruit bushes from where I could feed. There was abundant material from which to build a shelter, including old zinc plates, and left over plastic from greenhouses that were destroyed by the snow. There were plenty of apple and other local fruit trees, and in early spring an edible mushroom called "digüeñe" grew in abundance all over the place. Hell, I even found some old tools lying in the middle of the forest one day, so I thanked the elves for leaving me those gifts to work with.
Cyttaria spinosae, commonly known as "digüeñe" (di-gu-enie). Source
I had the company of four dogs and two cats (one of them was pregnant). The pregnant cat gave birth to three other cats and after a while left, one of the kittens was adopted and the other two remained with me. So the final countdown was of three cats in my company.
I took the newborn kittens to my mother's house until they had grown a bit.
This is where the concept of re-wilding started to take heavy weight as I had always been the kind of person who takes a lot of care of the animals he lives with, takes them to the vet, makes sure they don't spend too much time alone or ignored and tried to buy the best quality food possible.
Now I was barely surviving and was in little position to be the protector of other animals. I spent cold nights and hungry days trying to figure out ways to live in Nature while doing the least harm possible, as well as retaining my vegan diet. And perhaps veganism was a huge obstacle as despite there being food available, there was little in the way of calory packed meals like the ones we are used to having in "civilized" life.
So I begin to be conservative of my energy. I started meditating a lot, like several hours a day. I attempted to draw energy from prana and sunlight. I walked slower, I chewed for longer times my food. I guess I started adapting to what was available to me at the moment. But at the same time I started to see the dogs became skinnier and didn't look as happy as before. This hurt me the most when looking at the oldest one who was a small poodle called Cuki which was my closest companion in life.
Those were the good old days when Cuki could still run and enjoy life to the fullest.
As you can see, she was a bit older here.
Cuki developed Cushing's Syndrome which led her to start losing hair (you can see in the neck she misses a lot of hair). She also lost function of her rear legs and had to crawl around so she needed a lot of attention and caring. This happened before living in the forest and I always had hope that going back to Nature would heal her somehow. To a point I think it did and it was me who wasn't able to heal and become grateful for existence just as it was.
In this picture you can see Cuki following me. This was after she had stopped walking, but she recovered a bit, at least for a while. Then she stopped walking again. These pictures bring so many memories I'm in tears, I miss her so much... she was the absolute best companion ever.
This is Milo, who also lived with me and was a playful happy fellow and an awesome companion as well though much more independent.
Milo and Cuki.
You might think I strayed from the story and the question but I didn't because this relationship with animals was one of the biggest challenges of "re-wilding". I did feed Cuki as she couldn't move enough to hunt, but all the other animals I stopped feeding so that they would go back to their natural condition. The cats did fine and even grew fatter, but the dogs didn't fare so well.
Sometimes I would get the idea that I just had to trust the process but then I would get scared so I would go to town and buy food for them. I also had the intuition that if I left Cuki without food she would detox and eating plants, worms, whatever she was able to find until she was strong enough to find better stuff. But fear is a powerful force and I wasn't going to risk seeing her die because of my ideas.
Another challenge was social media. When I first got there I still had my smartphone and would go to my mother's house every now and then to charge it up so I could take pictures. The thing was that every time I did this I would get into social media again and get very intoxicated by it. It all seemed so stupid and false to me and yet it felt like a relapse where my addiction would resprout with more strength than before. Also, for some reason, every time I logged in I would have an unpleasant conversation with someone who would question what I was doing and telling me to get a job or some shit like that.
One day I couldn't take it anymore. I grabbed a big lump of wood and smashed it against the cellphone. It was a second-generation Moto X, not cheap at all! I probably could have taken a better choice such as giving it away or sell it, but the situation required quick action. I don't regret it, doing so was a big step towards focusing on the present moment in a life that moved so slow that it was always tempting to look for easy distractions.
In this new scenario free of modern technology things started to flow better. I decided to take another psychedelic trip and remember looking at my hands one moment: they were baby hands. I lay on the ground in fetal position feeling like a newborn. I realized that I knew nothing of the ways of Nature, that if I was to live there I had to unlearn all society had taught me.
Once I came back to this plane of existence I looked at Cuki who was shivering and realized the day had gotten cold and it was windy. I decided I would stop fooling around and got serious about building a better shelter where she could be comfortable. Ideas came easy to me and I had a heightened perception of texture, size, stability of branches and how to join all that into something that offered protection.
By nightfall, I had a much better place to hang out in and it had a nice stove made from mud and stones. The dogs, cats and I enjoyed the new warmth and the spirits of the group had increased noticeably.
The time following started to be way more enjoyable. I decided to recognize my ignorance on this path and stacked up on a lot of dog food, as well as rice and legumes for myself. Days would go by gathering building material, firewood and trying out the different plants that could serve as food or medicine. It was impressive that I had been so close to all these plants and never really paid attention to their existence.
I tried tons of mushrooms as well. Despite the warnings everybody gives you, only two species gave me a bad stomach and nothing more. Of course, I always tried out new shrooms with an empty stomach and chewing very cautiously, trying to obtain as much information as possible from the taste and smell.
Knowing Í had stored food I gave myself more freedom to go out and explore the surrounding landscape and see what was available to eat. Searching for food on an empty stomach was a mind-opening experience. Colors gained new meaning and I found out that the texture of plants said a whole lot about if they were edible or not.
The first thing that caught my attention was an orange flower. It was like a game where items that are useful have a kind of "glow". I tried it and it had a very pleasant citric taste, was easy to chew. The best thing was that there was plenty of it all around! Later I found out that the flower belonged to the bush "berberis darwinii", locally known as "michay". The flower was catalogued as edible! I was amazed by how intuition was enhanced by a state of hunger! That bush was a big lifesaver as it later produced an edible fruit as well.
Berberis darwinii or "michay". Source
I still meditated a lot and begin feeling renewed. Cuki also looked better, more lively and moved faster than before. I realized there was a strong connection between her wellbeing and my own spiritual disposition towards life.
A little table I made for cooking from salvaged material. Sorry for the trash bin laying beside but this was the only picture I had. By the way, in all the time I lived there I was never able to fill the trash bin.
Days went by and the more I learned, the more grateful I felt towards Nature. I would wake up to the singing of birds. Sometimes there was a little bird who came really close to the shelter, regardless of the cats and just stared at me for a long while. I stared back and felt happy for the magical moment.
Everything went fine for a few months until society got worried about me. I thought I wanted visitors but in time it started getting harder to tolerate them. They always came with their hurried mindset from civilization, with their minds and hearts shut to the magic that was taking place where I lived. Only a few friends really went there to appreciate life but they would still say things that troubled me.
They bombarded me with ideas of how to produce money, how to reintegrate myself into the social world. They came with irony and sarcasm. They mocked my gratefulness. They tried to make me feel a loser because I had a sexless life. They made fun of me living with so many animals or my close relationship with Cuki. They would try and make fun of me calling me a guru or a master, when it was never my intention to be any of that.
Every time someone went to visit me I would be torn inside for the next couple of days. I would become resented and begin hating society even more. I would think about how hypocritical everyone was, saying they loved Nature but living in the perfect machine to destroy it. Of course, all these thoughts would prevent me from enjoying life the same way as I was enjoying it.
This was my second shelter. To my back was a recycled tent streched out as a roof and a mixture of other recycled materials that made for a wall. That stove was my finest creation, it produced a lot of heat with little branches and kept me warm all night long. I would cook on it and heat water, it was just perfect. The mixture was really just mud and ashes, I didn't know if it would work but it held together really well!
Once visitors were gone for some time I would have to dedicate a few days to healing myself. Slowly I would let go of the negative thoughts and get back to doing what I loved. But the sexless life issue was one that usually persisted as it was something that troubled me for real. I didn't want that, I feel myself as a sexual being and have no intention of repressing that. Perhaps evolving it into a more spiritual understanding, but never repressing it.
If I look back now on why I left the forest I have to be honest that sex and desire for richer social relationships were big factors. I wanted all that I had found in Nature but didn't want to sacrifice my sexuality nor social life. I wasn't there to become a hermit, I just wanted to be close to Nature and love it. I guess I might have become arrogant and developed a sense of superiority because otherwise I wouldn't have gotten so angry at people making fun of me. People make fun of people all the time! And one should be able to make fun of oneself as well! Everyone gives advice from their limited human perspective and one should take everything with a grain of salt.
I started to think on how I could unite Nature, society, and sex. I think that's when I started becoming a bit crazy because I begin imagining building a community based on bushcraft and forest life. I went to spending a lot of time thinking and daydreaming on what it would be like. Lost in that dream, I think I completely forgot about enjoying the moment and the peace that the forest offers.
From there, everything went downhill and I got to the point of feeling depressed and wanting to kill myself. I remembered that I had told myself that if I ever wanted to kill myself I would travel with empty pockets to let life decide my fate for me. In those very days Milo disappeared and after much searching it was clear to me I wouldn't find him again. The cats were strong and adapted so all that remained was Cuki. I picked her up and we want for a long and crazy walk. But that's another story...
In conclusion I think re-wilding is all about releasing the tight controlling grasp we like to have over Nature. It's about embracing the natural cycles and allowing the restoration of what existed before humans begin to fragment everything into square shapes and whatever product could satisfy our greed. But more importantly, it is about learning to appreciate things as they are and liberating ourselves about the permanent planning of the mind of what it wishes to transform them into.
I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't become obsessed with building a community and transforming the landscape where I lived, I might still be enjoying life there with all my beautiful animal companions. We might of become wiser and more adapted. We might have learned the ways of Nature. I understand all the other things I have experienced now have given me the wisdom to realize all this, but I hope one day I have the strength to take upon that path once more.
Well, as I said before, this is a super short version of the story. I hope to be able to write a more detailed one and do more justice to the intensity of the experiences lived there in the future.
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