Rewilding: A Return to the Writing Life

Rainbow Over Mesa Verde, Original Photo Renee Podunovich

I left my writing studio in 2012 after 15 years of creative reverie in the SW Four Corners region of CO and moved to a newly booming but still easy to live in city. I just wanted a break from the creative deep dive and the endless expanse of the Colorado Plateau. I wanted to play in an urban setting; I wanted to be new. I left my art supplies and writing journals in a box in my shed on my property in the high desert and showed up to my downtown apartment creatively empty-handed. I still wrote some psychology articles and did daily journaling while living there and enjoyed a rich immersion in dance and conscious movement modalities. Yet, five years later, in the middle of a mindless shopping experience, I decided that to go another year without being claimed by the vitality of poetry was unacceptable.

Therefore, I decided then and there, in Nordstrom’s lingerie department, I must re-wild my poetic self. From experience, I knew it would require me to expand in ways that would stretch my current capacity to meet all those words I had left running feral in the massive wilderness of the unconscious.

At the time, I had picked up a copy of Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia, which is Martin Shaw’s very manly poetic and eco-philosophical meanderings. Inspired by his passionate, raw dedication to place-based writing, which had been my mainstay writing style before abandoning ship, I started contemplating in earnest what my next best option was at this mid-life juncture. It probably was not another cocktail at another newly opened restaurant in that little foodie city.

It is never with ease that I dance with poems. It requires an effort to leave the comfort of self as I have thus far imagined it. It takes a willingness to address limitations in awareness to approach the imaginal realms’ immensity. Allowing new lexis to swell up is like deciding to catch a wave one is not sure can be surfed entirely. What it wants to communicate is always uncertain at first. Still, the call, after years of being in the fallow, filled me with gratitude and awe at the creative process and its absolute unwillingness to be tamed, managed, or corralled.

Setting up writing projects for myself has been a way to keep the flow flowing. So, in early 2017, I decided that a trip to Costa Rica, written off as a business trip, of course, would be a suitable way to consider what would come next for my creative life and an excellent way to celebrate my 48th birthday. I planned to try my hand at travel writing. It seemed like a safe way to dip my toes back into the fomenting ocean of wordplay. And people make money from it, so it appeared practical too. Within a month, I had booked the trip. I headed abroad only to find my brain turning off the minute I landed on the runway in San José, Costa Rica, despite the intention to be seduced by the muse, fully and unabashedly.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

Upon checking in to the Airbnb rental in Esterillos Oeste, the cottage owner told me that if I saw any giant toads in the courtyard, I should not lick them. An unusual but fair warning. A few days later, I would find my brain in a melted state similar to the yard’s mangos. The magnificent tree was huge, abundant with fruits with thousands on the tree yet and thousands on the ground. The smell of them was a layering of fresh and ripe to overripe and rotting. It wafted into the open-air courtyard on waves of warm and warmer air steeped in humidity I had not experienced prior, even in south Florida. The smell was layered and intriguing, at first delicious, then quite sickening. In fact, the smell was absolutely distracting, such that I could not write much for the days I stayed there.

Since I had split the trip between Airbnb authenticity and a resort, I decided to spend my time interacting with the locals, both the Canadian ex-pats that have settled the steep hillside in the undeveloped, tranquilo beach town and the local Ticos. They were patient with my rickety Spanish. I wandered the beach a lot, ate breakfast each morning at an outdoor beachside cafe, enjoying the establishment’s freshest fruit smoothies amid a pack of 6 rescue dogs who had notably large smiles. It was a mangey dog love-fest, and I lingered there sipping freshly squeezed juice, letting the breezy sea air soothe me. I watched a three-foot-long iguana take a mango and haul it up a palm tree to snack on, heard the racket of the Scarlet Macaws in the local almond trees, and saw their brilliant flock many times. The town has a Mermaid! The statue (pictured above) is so far out into the surf that I did not meet her up close. She is a mystery still, a presence surrounding the place, gazing into the sea at Something Profound.

Siren of the Sea photo by Jerri Johnson on Flickr

“The heat will suck the soul out of you,” the man running the front desk at the resort told me when I checked in a few days early. I had decided to move from the Airbnb due to invisible insects that bite ankles relentlessly (perhaps some relationship to the rotting mangos). I was looking forward to proper air conditioning and poolside drinks. Still, I was hoping something more would come from this burst of rededication to my writing, to my vitality. Too bad I am not a better visual artist. In the tropics, I can see how one might enjoy painting nude bodies in bright pastel colors like Gaugin did on his “exotic” travels. That kind of effort seemed appropriate in some way that engaging my brain to organize words did not.

And so, the inspiration I aspired to on my first days in the country, in the cooler mountain setting of Alajuela, was in the end like the mangos; simply feeding the hunger of the dialectic, changing shape and form, stewing in its own life forces and creative juices, as any good creative process must. It was more proof that I never know what the pen will spill when the creative fire takes off. And sometimes it just smolders for a long while before catching, and that’s ok, part of the process, though staying with the smoke can be a challenge. In my favorite travel memoir, The Songlines, the storyline, so wonderfully sung throughout, has entirely unraveled by the end, as Chatwin is claimed by the magic of the Australian Outback and his encounters with Aboriginal culture. In the last chapter, he appears to give up sewing it all together and lets his notes, written on bumpy roads and by firelight, be a list of loose threads. He let go, was reclaimed.

Note: the last four paragraphs were the extent of my “travel writing” attempts. From here, I can chart in my notebook how the thoughts and words spiraled off into philosophical grappling with the 6th great extinction and radical climate change theories, half-baked personal essays about existential dread, and unfinished poetry. The trip was a success in relaxation and adventure but did not produce a finished product. Until just now perhaps as I reflect upon its true success with new eyes.

Fast forward a few years, and I find myself back at my writing desk in the high desert. I moved back from the city, rededicated to settling into a quiet writer’s life. It has been a wonderful homecoming with multiple projects and collaborations that feel meaningful and challenging, including a new chapbook and a letterpress project. The global pandemic and sheltering in place have unexpectedly helped me “settle in place.” I continue to re-wild my life and let myself be thoroughly claimed by my spot on the earth without the distraction of unquenchable wanderlust. The situation has challenged me to stay grounded in my creative flow without the overindulgences and manic energy that used to accompany my creative life in my younger years.

For me, poetry is part of living an engaged life, a daily medicine that keeps me tethered to balance despite the uncertainty and anxiety of current uneven conditions. Nothing is forever or permanent, but for brief moments in this global pause, I find a connection to my writing life that felt elusive prior. As if something I was constantly chasing is right here in the end. I am grateful for the net of words holding me steady in the uncharted waters of the times.

Also published in Inedible Ink at Medium.