Rewilding
Rewilding is an illustrated myth for our time — a story about how we lost our sense of belonging in the living world and how we might find our way home again. Told through original paintings, drawings, and prose, it follows the arc from an animate cosmos to a mechanistic worldview: from a time when humans and nature were woven together, through severance and descent, toward renewal. In the imaginal underworld, the protagonist learns to listen again to the voices of trees and animals and to re-weave herself into the web of life.
The work serves as both research and ritual — a visual initiation into ecological consciousness and an invitation to remember that imagination is not escape, but participation. In writing this story, I came to see it as a modern myth, a personal cosmology that centers Earth and its beings as alive and intelligent. Rewilding offers a mirror for our times — a way of seeing the psychic and ecological wounds of colonization, patriarchy, and capitalism as both outer and inner conditions of soul-loss. It is a reminder that the world itself longs to be in conversation, and that art is one way we might begin to listen again.
This is a work-in-progress that I am developing as part of my thesis for my MA in Counseling Psychology program at Pacifica Graduate Institute (expected 2026). The graphic novel will be completed in January 2026. The text below is an early draft of the skeleton of the story; images are original artwork standing in as placeholders.
In the beginning, there were the Trees.
Before the first story was spoken, their bodies were the scripture.
They rose in shimmering columns, crowns drinking starlight, roots threading the dark earth like veins of quiet lightning.
Each trunk was a living axis—heaven above, underworld below— binding sky, soil, and every beating heart in a single breath.
The people were not separate.
They woke with the dawn-mist in their hair and slept with the sap’s slow pulse in their veins.
They learned the turning of their own blood from the turning of the seasons.
The Trees whispered the secrets of balance:
how to love without possession,
to give without depletion,
to die and leaf again.
The forest was the first temple, the first library, the first home.
To walk among them was to remember the great truth:
that the soul is not housed in the body alone,
but braided through soil and mycelium, through rivers and wind,
through every being that drinks sunlight.
In those days the world was alive with reciprocity.
The people offered songs and the Trees answered with rain.
Roots held them steady, crowns held them blessed.
They were kin, not resources;
companions in a single, breathing cosmos.
In the Beginning
But then, The Great Severance came.
Forgetting crept in like a slow frost.
The sound of axes rang.
People were forced to leave their land, the ecosystems of their blood and beyond relatives.
Goodbye to the rock people and the tree people and the caves that housed great works of art in praise of the rays, of the days, each morning one shimmering gleam.
Forests were paved over in the name of progress.
They named the world “resource,”
and each other “stranger.”
Nature went from community to commodity.
Children were born who never knew the language of leaves.
Verdant dreams faded to gray grids of streets and screens.
People left the village life and moved into their own boxes,
Walled off from each other and from their earthly kin.
They grew lonely and isolated.
Over the years, people forgot.
They felt strange and sad, but they did not know why.
They were unmoored. Unsettled.
No roots to hold them,
cut from the pulse beneath their feet.
The Great Severance
Yet the forest waits for the smallest crack of listening.
There was a girl.
She felt an ancient grief in her bones,
the memory of a presence and a loss she could not shake.
This section is still under development. This is initiation — the descent into the imaginal underworld where the protagonist learns to hear the voices of trees and animals and re-weaves herself back into the web of life.
The Girl who could Hear the Trees
This final act brings the retrieved insights back to the human world in the form of imaginal, experiential exercises to help others reconnect with an ensouled world.
