08/06/2026
The Wild Within: What Plants Taught Me about Life, Recovery and Renewal by Brigit Anna McNeill 🌿
Her mission, she explains, is to rewild the stories of both plants and ourselves. To release nettle from its role as “nuisance”. To restore our forgotten intimacy with elder. And, in doing so, to reconnect us to our sense of wonder – which, it turns out, is also a powerful way to peer closer into the self.
“Perhaps the real sting of Nettle was never in their leaves at all, but in the story we’ve been given about them – w**d, a nuisance, something to be avoided, pulled up and paved over,” she writes. “Something that hurts if you get too close.”
And she asks, “How many of us have been given that same story about ourselves?
..McNeill found a different kind of transformation 🦋 Reawakened by the study of plants, she was able to reach deep into her internal soil and pull forward a newly “rewilded” or “composted” self. This isn’t about replacing or rejecting what was there before, she explains, but about reconnecting.
It is a process she likens to a dandelion’s ability to push up from between concrete cracks, bringing sunshine to bleak places. And whatever your own personal struggle, the following eight words alone feel like a map to firmer ground: “Wildness is not fevered consumption but sacred reciprocity.”
Revelling in wildness - India Bourke reviews The Wild Within: What Plants Taught Me about Life, Recovery and Renewal by Brigit Anna McNeill. She discovers a joyful introduction to herbology that reminds her to 'remain alert to the enchantment inside all that grows'...
Read more at https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article6647-revelling-in-wildness.html
