I Didn't Plan to Rewild Myself at an Art Retreat

What happens when you live the map you wrote…

There's a particular kind of restoration that only happens when you step fully away from your ordinary life and into something unknown.

Last week I spent seven days on Whidbey Island — nestled amongst tall evergreens that landmark the Pacific Northwest, with a cozy cabin that held and nourished me in its gracious simplicity, surrounded by women who came to express, create, and discover. The food was fabulous, the location stunning, the company warm and genuine.

And by day two I had reached my limit of other humans.

Not because anything was wrong. Because something was very right — as I checked in with myself, I acknowledged: this is a lot. The constant togetherness, the shared meals, the group energy. Beautiful and exhausting in equal measure.

I've been on a rewilding journey for a long time now. Coming home to myself, reclaiming what's mine, learning to trust my own inner compass over the noise of the world. It's the foundation of my forthcoming book Rewilding Yourself. It’s a transformational wilderness journey for women in midlife reclaiming their authentic selves, moving through five territories, each with their own landscape and invitation. It publishes this fall.

What I didn't expect was to live the map so literally in one week. Microcosm of the Macrocosm.

The Pondering Pond

Every rewilding journey begins here — with stillness, with curiosity, with the quiet question: what if? It was curiosity that brought me to this retreat on this island. Curiosity that kept me there past day two when every introverted cell in my body was ready to go home. Or at least find more psychic space for myself.

The Pondering Pond isn't a place of answers. It's a place of honest questions. Of self discovery. Of being present. Of asking what one is avoiding by staying too busy.

The Whispering Winds

This is where the challenge isn't necessarily a dramatic crisis but the quiet friction of being with others when you're used to being alone. Of discovering your edges not through catastrophe but through a communal dinner table and a shared creative space.

I spent a fair amount of the week here. Learning that my edges are information, not failure. Learning that discomfort doesn't always mean something is wrong — sometimes it means something is real.

The Mystic Mountains

Touch Drawing in the quiet. Hands and arms moving across tissue paper laid over paint, not quite sure what would be revealed when it lifted. Sometimes like dancing with an energy wanting to form. Sometimes my mind tried to take over and think its way through it. Both were valuable. Inner guidance showing up not as a voice but as a mark on a page.

I came home tired. Full. More myself than when I left.

That's rewilding. Not a dramatic reinvention — just the slow, patient return to what was always true about ourself, accessed through curiosity, friction, stillness, and creative expression.

The journey has a structure, although it often isn't linear in nature. And it tends to find you whether you're looking for it or not.

The question is — are you open to it?

I’d love for you to subscribe to my weekly Substack writings at https://injoy2day.substack.com/ where I share about embodied living, inner work, and the rewilding journey. Post are sent out every Sunday.

Warmly,

Suzanne