Rewilding Ourselves Through Nature: You Do You

The wild aspect of ourselves, aka, the apex predator part of ourselves, desperately needs an outlet for expression and a sustainable Wild mirror in our environment.  In today's podcast, there are several directions you could go all depending on how it feels to you.  This might take the form of visiting a national urban refuge location that has been "re-wilded" and given back to Nature with native flora and fauna now flourishing. It could be that you orchestrate hunts for other apex predators; take care that you don't project your prey status onto them as the reason for this rewilding. Lastly, begin to see the intricate balance in the Wild and that we're the morons doing the managing of that which doesn't need to be managed at all.

https://www.denverpost.com/2023/11/07/colorado-mountain-lion-hunting-ecosystem-health-essential-parks-and-wildlife/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/15/climate/golf-courses-conservation-nature.html

https://oswitlandtrust.org/prescott-preserve-is-featured-in-new-york-times-article-after-shutting-down-these-golf-courses-went-wild/

https://www.denver.org/blog/post/rocky-mountain-arsenal/

Transcript

I'm Lizanne Flynn. I'm a master healer who holds space for any Earthling as they reunite body and soul. I am a bridge for relationships between all species so that 

the heart bond becomes stronger, deeper, and more loving. I serve in the roles of animal communicator, medium, and medical intuitive, and I use the tools of shamanic journeying and soul retrieval 

to support all Earthlings in their recovery from past trauma. I'm certified as a Reiki Master Teacher and canine massage therapist. This is the Animals' iView podcast.

Before I forget, I wanted to update anyone who might be an Apple Podcast listener about how the episodes of this podcast are listed on that service. As you all know, podcasts have seasons and episodes within those seasons and initially, I was taking the word season literally. So I was numbering my podcasts to correspond with the solstices and equinoxes within a year. And you know, that was fine with Apple for the first 4 seasons or so, and then it kind of went kablooie which is a technical term in Energy for broken. And Apple stopped listing the episodes because I wasn't numbering them in a way that was copacetic for them. So I'm going to be renumbering the podcasts from 2023 and into 2024 with Season X defined as the year and I think I'm going on 5 years now. And then episodes within that season so that I can get back on the wheel of the Apple podcast service in a way that makes sense to any listener. My apologies for attempting to be too fancy, I think, lol. After all the best connection between two points that being me and my listeners is a straight line without too many bells and whistles. Thank you for your attention to this PSA and now we'll get on with the program.

Throughout my second career of being a facilitator of self-healing for all Earthlings, I've partnered with many different kinds of species of Animals as well as different humans and their varied professions. This includes several scientists, a smattering of psychotherapists, several nurses and doctors, and everyone else in between. It was the quote of a wildlife biologist who was a Reiki student of mine that stands out among this sciencey-type of professions and that quote was - "wildlife management is an oxymoron" - which I thought was fabulous and I still do, I borrow it and use it often. While we don't often think of humans whose vocational calling is in the human-centric application of energy, small "e" as being open to topics of the metaphysical kind, they are the group of people on the planet on whom the hopes of the Animals overall are pinned. Because they're generally curious and ask questions about things that strike them as being curious on this planet and beyond, and they're mostly willing to say "Hey, we thought this at one point in time and now we can see that it needs to change so we will change it." I said mostly willing because Lawd knows humans in general and science specifically throughout the ages hasn't been kind to nor welcoming of those up-and-comers in their ranks. It's the curiosity though that keeps them going and wondering and asking which is something that the Animals truly do love about that type of human. Because they say "Maybe you'll come to a point where instead of thinking and believing you know it all, you'll allow your physical experience of the Energy that's present to define for you a collective synergistic dynamic that's easily adaptable by most members of your species because it's general enough to cover all bases and specific enough for you to keep on with your individual first, collective second mentality. At least until you choose to decide that this last is not in your best interest or ours." The translation seems to be accompanied by a gusty sigh of "well, if that's the best you can do" along with a bit of impatience that we keep working this problem, this lack of inclusivity of all species, on the planet. Sciencey types do seem to be the best option with religion, our other belief system, not even being on the table, period.

Across the planet, you may be aware of organizations and individual people choosing to rewild a certain part of a geographical area which means, they're deliberately choosing to plant native plants and reintroduce Animals of all different species into a space where these plants and Animals originally came from. Here in Colorado as I've talked about before, there has been the reintroduction of Grey Wolf and naturally, there are dissenting voices about whether this species was ever an original part of this state, to begin with, and other voices most notably from ranchers saying that Wolf will hurt their livelihoods by killing too much of their stock whether that's Cow or Sheep. Whether they want to admit it or not, that's the ageless tug of war between apex predators and until our species ran amok on the planet with unsustainable numbers of available resources, I think it's always been present. So that ranchers and farmers of a different time would automatically plan for this balance and rebalance of predator and available prey. It wasn't as if and not as if Wolf is canvassing their fellow packs and ganging up en masse to completely wipe out whole herds of Cattle and Sheep leaving the ranchers completely destitute. While that's already been done and continues to be done by humans to Animals such as Wolf and Mountain Lion - I'll get to that in a minute - there's a lack of fear in how an apex predator such as Wolf or Mountain Lion lives within the unified duality on Earth. They don't fear a lack of abundance because to them it doesn't exist. They don't fear other apex predators because they know that the other predator has their back to a certain extent. They know that the lives of their fellow predator are dependent on them to sustain and vice versa because they want to maintain and preserve what is present on Earth for all species. So they work in unison together taking what they need from their prey knowing that prey also depends upon this taking to maintain the health of the prey and therefore, abundance. You've likely already heard stories in Western states about the organizing of hunts for Wolf and even more so, since the reintroduction of Wolf because of these rewilding efforts, conservation vs. preservation, and because the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone, etc. Meaning, that on the great Wheel of Nature, each cog - predator and prey - is connected to every other cog, down to the smallest insect. That's why the "wildlife management as an oxymoron" is so apt - humans often have no business at all attempting to manage that which we are not a part of except as feeling victimized as prey whenever there's an errant Mountain Lion attack of one of our own at dusk or in the ocean when we are intruding on another apex predator's territory. 

The Mountain Lion note was from an editorial by a mountain lion hunter who uses packs of hounds to chase, corner, and tree Mountain Lion to kill because in their words, if the numbers of Mountain Lion become too great (not gonna happen, BTW) then their prey of Elk and Deer will suffer and I'm guessing this is their illogical conclusion, that the Elk and Deer will then become extinct or so low in numbers as fail to reproduce a sustainable number which oh gosh, humans hunt as well. It was galling to me to read how hunting Mountain Lion using Dog gives researchers valuable information about the movements of the species and their behavior. It was galling to me to read how Mountain Lion was blamed for the increase in the aforementioned attacks on humans when hello - we're the ones encroaching on their territories and as we are clueless about both predator and prey behavior we do take our stroll with companion Animals unleashed at dusk, let our children play outside at dusk when our backyards open up to a rural open space. No other predator would hunt in another's territory and no prey ventures out at dusk, period. Again, the oxymoron with heavy emphasis on the moron part. The author of the Mountain Lion Hunting editorial to which I didn't respond in print and why you all are hearing about it now, also claims that the hunt is heavily regulated by Colorado Parks and Wildlife and no one would dream of hunting illegally or taking up a rifle should Mountain Lion happen to be taking from the prey Animals who are encroaching on their territory. As I said before, all of the other predators have an understanding of how to manage themselves - I can hear just now a variation of Cheech and Chong - "we don't need no stinking humans to manage us!"

And to a certain extent, this rewilding, this attempt to bring back or give back to Nature that which we took from Her is not taken indiscriminately out of fear or because we become fully immersed in our apex predator status, but that we recognize in hindsight, that taking that which does not belong to us and destroying everything about it to have what we think is in our highest and best good will always, always, always have a domino effect about which we are so mindlessly ignorant. We think that because of our fairy tales the big bad Wolf is going to attack us sight unseen - c'mon, how many movies have you seen like this - or that Mountain Lion will reproduce like Rabbit and become so uncontrollable that other species will become extinct and we'll have to arm ourselves just to walk around in our neighborhoods at high noon. Yes, alright, that's a fair amount of hyperbole and at the same time, you all can feel the fear that runs rampant because we have failed to appropriately balance our apex predator and prey nature. We have failed to wild ourselves because we thought - key word - that by thinking alone we'd conquer the planet and all other species would submit to our rule, dominion over the Animals and all that. I think it's accurate to state that we ache to feel that lick of Wolf's tongue on our cheek and to run with them alongside the pack only because that lets us experience that wild in ourselves that we never, ever should have ignored. After all, we didn't like that aspect of ourselves. Certainly, the psychoanalysis on this one can run deep, for those of you listening who have Cat as companion Animals, I know you know what I mean. It's always a bit of a roll of the dice with Cat and that's honestly the best part. Because we feel that uncertainty and we like it, there's no two ways about that.

In the NYTimes article that naturally was the genesis of this podcast, the subject was mostly about some golf courses that are getting rewilded. I put a couple of links in the podcast notes for the article itself and to get beyond the Times paywall. The article mentions that likely because of environmental concerns the golf industry has "taken steps to lighten its environmental toll in places by using less water, sowing pollinator-friendly plants and decreasing pesticide and fertilizer use which of course, Bee will be quite happy about." The article goes on to state that "America's 16,000 golf courses use 1.5 billion gallons of water a day and are treated with 100,000 tons of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium a year. The US also has - get this "more golf courses than McDonald's locations" and also has more golf locations than any other country and accounts for 42% of all courses worldwide. We overbuilt here in the US to satisfy a need, not unlike the Mountain Lion hunter, who sees their need to hunt another elusive apex predator, never mind the justification and damage overall it does to the surrounding environment. Of course, to rewild a golf course there has to be a conservation-minded buyer and a willing seller of something whose costs far outweigh the benefits TBH, while some may disagree including my second son, I think golf is the most boring game in the world. I hardly think that it's a rewilding of self in Nature because it has none of the wild in it except for an errant gator or two down in Florida or Canada Goose here in Colorado. It's too perfect with its manicured greens and the contrast of the sand traps or ponds hardly qualifies as true contrast according to the Animals who agree with me that it's boring with everyone saying "shhhh when someone is up to putt."

A success story of rewilding has to be the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge where quoting from the article "Settling on Native American hunting grounds, homesteaders saw a similar landscape (roaming prairie) when they arrived in the late 1800s, then altered it as they started farming the land. Then the U.S. Army ousted 270 homesteads to build a munitions factory for the war effort in 1942. For the rest of the 20th century, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal was off-limits. It served as the site of manufacturing for a wide range of weapons, chemicals, and chemical weapons, with most of the world’s nerve gas originating here during the early years of the Cold War, not to mention the wholesale disposal of a witch’s brew of chemicals in an underground reservoir once thought to be causing earthquakes in Denver." The article continues with "Manufacturing gave way to cleanup and restoration in the 1980s. The 1986 return of bald eagles paved the way for the designation of refuge status six years later. It remains home to a few breeding pairs that nest here year-round, often along with migrating eagles that venture south in winter. (This should be the site of the National Eagle Repository, which handles dead eagles and distributes their feathers to Native Americans and Alaska Natives.) The refuge, which opened to visitors in 2004, is one of the highest-profile remediation sites in the country. It’s hard to overstate just how big of an environmental success story the refuge represents, with the cleanup and restoration, the return of native wildlife, and the subsequent public access to what is now one of the largest urban wildlife refuges nationwide." And I think this last part - "urban wildlife refuges" is the crystalline point of rewilding. It brings the wildlife back to the home of their ancestors and in so doing, our human experience can feel and sense the profound flow of Energy that courses between Animal and land and back again where if we choose to partake in that Stream of Energy that sometimes feels like a River our daily lives will be that much richer by far because we have selected perhaps the best part of ourselves to continue to remain united with other species on this untamed in reality planet of experiment and experience. And at least, that's how the Animals see it.

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