It gets lonely for rewilding folk out there. You can’t even discuss the things you hold dear, because more often than not, the people around you will consider you “eccentric” at best, and insane at worst. It can become deeply alienating. Even the most ardent person will feel doubt, even shame, beginning to take over. Great things happen when people with similar perspectives meet. I’ve seen the energy of that rare affirmation before. Such people can build off of each other’s energy, and start something really great. In exile, we’ve found ourselves with very few people we can really talk to. We want to help foster a local rewilding “scene,” a local network for sharing skills, ideas, and perspectives. If you live in the Allegheny, Monongahela, or Upper Ohio watersheds, please consider joining the Rewild Pittsburgh group I started on Facebook. From there, I hope we can expand and do more, but first, we need to find each other!

Yesterday, I took my stand against personal responsibility. Yes, against personal responsibility. I’ve certainly never had to overcome any shyness about making bold statements when I had reason to make them. Over a year ago, I wrote about vicious and virtuous cycles, including their role in my own life. I wrote about getting a new job, and a new apartment.

The move away from the start-up culture afforded me more time away from work, though not at first. I worked fewer hours, but the location required a long commute through heavy traffic. I came home exhausted, and because I no longer walked to work, my health suffered further. I remained trapped there until my lease finally ran out. Once that happened, I returned to suburbia.

If you look for “personal responsibility” on the internet, you’ll find endless pages of editorials, blog postings, forum discussions and rants on how nobody believes in it anymore. And yet, amongst all that, you’ll find no one questioning it. It seemed ironic to me; amidst all that outrage, try to find someone who genuinely doesn’t believe in it, and you’ll come up short.

Jon Young emphasizes the idea of a “sit spot” in a tracker’s education: a spot where you go, daily if possible, to spend time observing. You see how things change according to time of day and time of year; you learn to sit still and observe the world closely; you become intimately familiar with one spot and begin to understand the different relationships and encounters that go on there. I could go on forever—in fact, Jon has often said that your sit spot will become your best tracking teacher, and that nothing will teach you more about the more-than-human world.

According to common cliché, you always remember what you happened to do at the moment you first learn terrible news. Maybe you remember what you did when you first heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, or when someone shot JFK. You might remember what you did when you learned that a family member had died. I remember what I did when I first got a phone call from my mother, and she told me that they’d given away the family cabin.