Wild Like Flowers, Chapter 8: Essay on Community

"Today, we celebrate life—life in the fullest sense. We celebrate the hard days—those that bring to fruition the better days because, to regenerate, carrots and cows, grass and bugs—LIFE—must die."

This is Chapter 8 of my second book, Wild Like Flowers: The Restoration of Relationship Through Regeneration. You can buy the book here. Or, you can read it here.

Chapter 8

It’s not what foods you eat;

But who you eat them with.

Driving away from the processing center with our empty trailer smashing every sludge-filled pothole, Morgan sniffled back tears. “More wawa,” demanded the back seat, and little Tecumseh loudly beckoned for something I could not give. I was lost; lost somewhere between it’s not what foods and the cacophony of our empty trailer pounding the overly-used gravel road behind us. Life lives on life, but today was hard. It could be that to manage a holistic Wildland at all, days like this have to be hard. We have to care; we have to put our hearts into the thing; into life itself. Participating in life this fully—investing everything you have physically, emotionally, and spiritually into the microclimate that we call ours—sometimes takes the life fully out of you. And that is okay.

It’s not what foods you eat, yes, but perhaps it is. We routinely comment on Wildland Tours that a regenerative life is one that heals its environment during life and through death. Death is only the beginning and regeneration is the narrative. Nature’s cyclic and beautifully regenerative patterns demand life, growth, and death to operate abundantly—to operate at all. In fact, it could be argued that life and death are not competing forces at all. Rather, they are symbiotic—this eternal and cyclical collaboration of balance is not based in conflict, but rather, collaboration in the purest sense.