Welcome back to 🌿🌙 THE EARTHY WRITER: My Rewilding Year 🐝✨
This is episode 18: “The Art of Surrender” – Our Final Rewilding Lesson. Recorded during the Full Wolf Moon in Australia, this episode explores how surrendering to life’s unexpected turns can deepen our connection with nature’s wisdom. Join me as I share how a disrupted plan for a grand finale solo adventure turned into the perfect lesson about true rewilding, through the lens of Michael Singer’s “The Surrender Experiment” and nature’s own examples of adaptation and flow.
In this Rewilding Episode, you’ll learn:
- How nature demonstrates the power of surrender through trees bending in storms and rivers flowing around obstacles
- Why resisting our natural cycles keeps us disconnected from our wild nature
- The profound connection between surrender, the Universe’s flow, and our rewilding journey
- How letting go of control can lead us to exactly where we need to be
- What my unexpected ending to this year-long journey teaches us about true rewilding
About your host:
Hi 👋, I’m Gisele Stein. I’m a novelist and a nature-lover, writing magical women’s fiction from my cosy cabin on Wadandi Boodja in Western Australia.
Episode Transcript:
Happy Full Moon, everyone. And thank you so much for tuning in one final time during my rewilding year. Before we dive into this final episode, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the Wadandi People, the traditional custodians past and present of the land that I’m speaking from today.
And – you guessed it – acknowledging the Wadandi means that I have officially arrived back home after visiting family overseas in Africa and Germany over the past two months.
I’m incredibly happy to be home. It’s summer over here, which the Wadandi call “Birak”.
Birak is characterised by arid winds in the mornings and a coastal sea breeze in the afternoon. The rains are easing up. The sun shines hotter, the ocean is getting warmer, and the days longer.
But as much as I’m glad to be home, the nature of my rewilding challenges have thrown me quite the curveball. You see, these episodes have always aligned with the full moon – it’s been my commitment to share the results of each month’s challenge under that silvery light. But right now, I’m lying in bed with a nasty flu and the kind of jetlag that makes you question what century it is.
And I’ll be honest – I’ve been feeling pretty disappointed in myself. Because I had this epic final adventure planned. From the start of this rewilding year, I knew how I was going to finish it. That was, you could say, the whole point of the year: For my final challenge I was going to head out into the bush for a week-long solo journey, to put everything I’ve learned this past year into practice. Just me, my pack, and the Australian wilderness. It was going to be the perfect bookend to this rewilding year, you know?
But instead, here I am, sipping my tea, and having to surrender to what my body is telling me.
I thought about postponing and doing the adventure later, then recording the podcast for the next full moon, which wouldn’t be the end of the world, of course. But something about postponing didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t want to turn this rewilding year into “a year and a month.”
And so, I had to really sit with this – this disappointment, this quote-on-quote “failure”. Especially because I’ve committed myself to share my lessons learnt publicly with you.
But today, as I’ve decided to record this, I’m realising that there’s actually something beautifully fitting about having to surrender my original plans for this final episode. It creates a perfect real-life example of the very idea I wanted to explore with this project:
Because Nature itself is constantly surrendering and adapting.
Trees bend in storms rather than standing rigid and breaking.
Rivers flow around obstacles rather than trying to force through them.
Animals migrate when conditions aren’t suitable rather than stubbornly staying put.
This natural flexibility and adaptation is, at its core, surrender.
Just like nature has periods of rest and withdrawal – during winter, during nighttime – my body is demanding that same kind of rest. And if you’ve been following along on my journey, you know that last month’s challenge was all about that: IT was about wintering and resting!
And here I am, being called to do exactly that again. Only last month’s winter was a voluntary one, while this one now is not by choice.
And it’s because I have done my homework last month that I can try to do this gracefully now. Be gentle and kind to myself. Surrender to my body’s need for rest, rather than pushing through.
And by doing exactly that, strangely enough, I’m falling into a much deeper alignment with my own natural rhythms than if I had pushed against it.
We modern humans have created all these ways to resist nature, to shut her out:
We use artificial light to stretch our days longer.
We blast the air conditioning to pretend the seasons don’t exist.
We use technology to override our body’s signals when it’s telling us to slow down.
But true rewilding means letting go of this illusion of control we think we have.
We are part of nature. That is, at its core, the lesson we are here to learn when we develop an interest in Rewilding. That is rewilding.
And these moments when we’re forced to surrender – when our bodies say ‘no’ and we have no other choice but to listen – those are actually the moments when we come home to our true nature. When we truly rewild.
I’d actually like to zoom out a little more for a moment, and talk about how this trust in nature’s cycles, this returning to our own wild, is I believe even bigger than our connection to the Earth, to the other animals and the plants and the moon.
And to do so, I’d love to introduce you to a book that I re-read every year. I listen to the audiobook which is read by the author himself, actually. And the book is called “The Surrender Experiment” by Michael Singer.
Most people who know Michael Singer might be familiar with his most popular work ‘The Untethered Soul’, which is about freeing ourselves from limiting thoughts and beliefs. But ‘The Surrender Experiment’ is somewhat different and to me, it carries so much more power because it’s about the author’s personal experiences with surrender, with letting go. So, Michael Singer essentially decides to let go of his own attachment to ‘the outcome’ and instead starts saying yes to whatever life presents to him.
Now, this doesn’t mean he becomes passive. Instead, he decides to accept what the Universe brings his way and then acts with full commitment from that point. And what unfolds in his life is absolutely remarkable. From living as a young hermit in the woods, he ends up founding a billion-dollar public company, all by following where life leads him rather than forcing his own plans.
And what I love about this perspective is how it shows that surrender isn’t weakness – it’s actually a profound form of trust. Trust in something bigger than our individual plans and desires.
Surrendering to the flow of the Universe leads us to places we never could have planned – kind of exactly like what’s happening with this final episode.
And we can see this surrender happening in so many ways. Right here, right now, I’m having to let go of my planned adventure and listen to what my body needs. In nature, we see this same kind of yielding everywhere. Think of a fallen tree – it lets go of standing tall, but in doing so creates this amazing new home for fungi, insects, and eventually new saplings. Nothing in nature tries to hold on to permanent control.
And then there’s this even bigger picture – we’re all part of these massive patterns in the Universe. The moon pulls at the tides, the sun drives our seasons, and these huge forces are constantly at work in our lives. And when we surrender to these bigger movements instead of always pushing our own agenda, we often end up exactly where we need to be.
So maybe this change to my final episode isn’t a failure at all – maybe it’s exactly the teaching I needed. Maybe true rewilding isn’t about controlling our connection to nature, but about surrendering to being part of it.
And there’s something quite beautiful in having this be my final lesson of the year. That underneath all our plans and expectations, all our doing and controlling, nature is quietly showing us another way, and possibly a better way.
Teaching us, if we’re willing to listen, how to simply be.
And so, this is now the time where I’m going to leave you be. I’d like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening. This project was never about reaching the masses; it was a very personal journey that I knew I would not commit to if nobody was watching. And it has taught me so many things – things I could never have expected a year ago. I will still go on my solo hiking adventure some time in the future. But when I do, it will be between me and the Universe, something I’ll do when she calls me, not when I need to force it into my modern human life.
And while this is the end of this podcast project, I’m happy to report that it’s not the end of The Earthy Writer. I have decided to move her over to YouTube, where I have started to use this name for a weekly vlog that I’ve started over there. So, if you’d like to keep following my journey, head on over to YouTube. I might do another podcast project in the future, so this space isn’t going anywhere. And of course, the old episodes are always here for you.
I wish you all the happiness in the world and I hope you do something wild this next year.
Thanks again for listening.
Bye, bye.
Hi ♥️, I’m Gisele Stein, author of feel-good novels with a little magic and places like characters, which i craft from my cosy cabin on Wadandi Boodja in Western Australia. Have a look at my books here. I’m also podcasting as The Earthy Writer, to document my rewilding year: Every new moon, I set a new rewilding intention for the month, and every full moon I share my learnings with you…