Recovering the Creaturely Intuition You've Been Trained to Ignore

Any psychologist will tell you that safety is the prerequisite to play. With the high pressures imposed (from outside and from within) on our writing practice, creative play too often gets choked out.

Rewilding offers us a path—through the underbrush and wildflowers—back to psychological safety where we can begin to play again, as we once did. For the writer, this safety might begin with our physical writing space.

Now, “wilderness” might not sound like a safe space at face value, especially when you consider its Old English roots which reveal an “untamed” place where “undomesticated animals” or “wild deer” roam.

But the wilderness is never quite what it seems to be. Today we’re going to explore:

• How to find your way into the psychological safety to play again

• Practices for grounding in the spaces where you write

• A gorgeous reading of an essential rewilding text, Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ Women Who Run With Wolves