About Rewild the Self
I’m Jodi Symmonds. This is a page of musings, creative writing, and poetry, that invites you to embrace your own creative expression.
I spent years working as a psychologist within systems that promised healing but rarely delivered it. I entered that world with a calling — to help people find what had been lost deep inside them, but somewhere along the way, I began to lose myself. The work became a battle against machinery disguised as care. I watched as human stories were flattened into data, as tenderness was replaced by procedure. And in trying to hold space for others, I forgot how to hold it for myself. Behind the polished language of “support” and “wellbeing,” I saw corruption — quiet, systemic, and deeply human. It interfered with everything I tried to do. It twisted truth into policy, compassion into compliance. And eventually, it destroyed the very purpose that had led me there. I was swallowed by the system I had once believed I could exist in. It broke me open, forced me out, and left me standing in a place of doubt and uncertainty. I began to question everything — the way I worked, the way I lived, the way I understood purpose itself. And in that questioning, I realised something simple but profound: I had been working out of alignment with my true calling. When you are in alignment, there is no confusion. There is only clarity — even in chaos.
Eventually, I left. Not with any sense of triumph, but in exhaustion. I walked away from the architecture of man, the offices, the screens, the endless noise, and found myself standing in silence, unsure of who I was without the system that had defined me. That had conditioned deep parts of me. That silence became my teacher. I began to rewild the parts of me that had been domesticated by expectation. Through art, poetry, and music. Through the old stories of Celtic and Welsh mythology that whispered of belonging and the sacred wild. Through soil under my nails and rain on my skin.
Through solitude and the slow rhythm of the land.
Living off-grid is not romantic. It is raw, and sometimes brutal. But it strips away everything false. It shows me the bones of what it means to be alive — and the ache of what it means to remember. The trauma of that unravelling still hums through me. But I’ve learned to listen to it, to let it shape the work I do now. My purpose is to help others find their way back — to the pulse beneath the noise, to the frequency of life itself. To live meaningfully, connected, awake.
My surname, Symmonds, once Symon, means “He who hears the Star.”
And that feels right.
Because my work, at its heart, is about listening — to the quiet, to the wild, to the unseen frequency that threads through everything.
Our creative self begins with remembrance, a return to our innate wholeness, our wildness, and our deep belonging to the earth. The human psyche is not a separate, isolated mind, but as an extension of nature itself, dynamic, cyclical, embodied, and inherently wise. This creative work honours the interconnectedness of mind, body, and soul, inviting the reader into a process of self-discovery that is both ancient and deeply personal.
Nature as Mirror & Guide – The rhythms, resilience, and intelligence of the natural world offer profound insight into the human condition.
Embodied Healing – True transformation involves not only thought but sensation, movement, instinct, and presence.
Primal Integrity – Unlearning societal conditioning that numbs authenticity and reconnect to our original self: intuitive, alive, and self-sufficient.
Sovereign Living – Empowering people to reclaim agency over their inner and outer worlds — cultivating psychological freedom, emotional responsibility, and life practices rooted in sustainability and meaning.
Rewilding is not regression — it is reclamation. A return to your untamed self, a reawakening of your natural intelligence, and a path forward in alignment with your deepest truths. .
The Clearing
Welcome to the clearing — the place where the noise thins, the ground softens, and the self you’ve been carrying quietly begins to loosen its grip.
This is a space for returning.
Returning to the body, to the breath, to the parts of you that were never meant to be tamed. Here, the wild self is not something to chase or construct; it is something to uncover, like a root system waiting beneath the surface.
In this clearing, you’ll find poems, stories, and fragments of thought, small offerings gathered from the forest floor of lived experience.
They are invitations to remember what you already know: that healing is not a straight line, that reclamation is a slow unfurling, and that the natural world has always been a mirror for the inner one.
Stay as long as you need. Wander. Read. Rest.
May something in these words help you return to yourself, gently and without hurry.
The Path Back
The path back is rarely straight. It bends through memory, through silence, through the parts of ourselves we learned to hide in order to survive.
For a long time, I thought the wildness in me had gone quiet, buried under expectation, noise, and the soft ache of becoming what the world asked instead of what my body knew. But wildness doesn’t disappear. It waits. Patiently. Beneath the surface.
My writing began as a way to listen again. To the pulse under the skin. To the stories held in bone. To the small, insistent truths that rise when we stop trying to be tidy. Poetry became a compass. Musings became a map. Nature became the teacher I had forgotten I needed.
This space is the record of that return, a gathering of words shaped by the seasons of my own reclamation. It is not a guidebook or a doctrine. It is simply an offering: a reminder that the path back to yourself is not found by striving, but by softening.
If you are here, perhaps some part of you is already turning toward home.
Poetry by Jodi Symmonds
permission?
the fire beneath a prism
not meant to be still
I was born with a voice shaped like river light,
clear, ancient, carrying the memory of stars.
But hands that feared its brightness tried to bend it,
twist it into something smaller, darker,
a shadow of its own beginning.
For a time, I believed them.
I let their echoes settle in my branches,
let their storms convince me I was broken weather.
But the earth kept whispering otherwise.
The soil remembered me.
The wind remembered me.
The wild things never forgot my name.
So I return now.
To the pulse beneath my feet,
to the quiet truth that goodness is our first language,
to the knowing that darkness is only a guest
who overstays when hearts forget their openings.
I reclaim my voice the way dawn reclaims the horizon:
not with violence, but with certainty.
I rise because rising is my nature.
I speak because silence was never my home.
I shine because the world is kinder when we do.
And though others may still carry their storms,
I carry the forest.
I carry the river.
I carry the divine thread that binds us all—
the reminder that even in shadow,
we are made of light trying to find its way back.
not meant to be still
the fire beneath a prism
not meant to be still
They said:
Be simple.
Be still.
Be measurable.
Be clean.
As if the soul were a spreadsheet,
as if our essence could be filed under “acceptable.”
But I am not a checkbox.
I am tide and undertow.
I am the salt that stings and heals.
I am the colour that refuses to fade.
Prescriptions tried to dilute me,
to bleach the coral,
to silence the whales,
to make the ocean forget it ever danced.
But the ocean remembers.
It remembers storm and shimmer,
the way moonlight kisses chaos,
the way depth is not a flaw but a promise.
We are not meant to be black and white.
We are meant to be iridescent.
To contradict.
To feel too much.
To overflow.
So I return to the water.
To the place where rules dissolve,
where even silence has texture,
where being human means being vast.
Let them fear the flood.
I will be the wave.
the fire beneath a prism
the fire beneath a prism
the fire beneath a prism
Truth is what we agree upon.
Power is what we name it.
Reality is the loudest voice in the room.
But I have seen the wind bend mountains
without ever raising its voice.
I have watched fire bloom in silence
beneath the skin of stone.
They mistook the echo for the origin.
Mistook the prism for the light.
Mistook the gossip for the god.
Soft power is not absence.
It is presence misunderstood.
It is the tide that shifts continents
while the surface pretends to sleep.
They built their truths from scaffolds of sameness,
called it clarity, called it law.
But I am not their blueprint.
We, as life, are the colour that refuses to flatten.
We are the storm that whispered.
The fire that did not ask permission.
The truth that does not need to be believed
to remain true.
the remembering
they engineered sleep
the fire beneath a prism
Long before clocks learned to divide the day,
we were shaped from something older than time,
a breath carved from dusk,
a spark borrowed from whatever lived
between lightning and lullaby.
We walked the world like half‑forgotten constellations,
our bones humming with the same quiet law
that guides migrating birds
and tells seeds when to split open.
But centuries later, the city rose around us,
a forest of glass and signals,
screens glowing like artificial moons.
We learned to navigate by notifications
instead of stars.
We traded the pulse of the earth
for the pulse of machines,
and called it evolution
The ancient stories say the soul is a lantern.
Modern life says it’s a battery.
One flickers with mystery;
the other demands charging.
Somewhere in the middle,
we misplaced ourselves.
We began to believe that humanity
was a performance,
a curated feed,
a polished surface,
a version of truth that fits neatly
into the frame.
But the old world never stopped calling.
It murmurs through cracks in the pavement,
through weeds that rise like quiet rebellions,
through the wind that slips between buildings
as if searching for our names.
It reminds us that being human
was never about perfection,
it was about permeability.
About being porous enough
to let wonder in.
About carrying both shadow and shimmer
without needing to resolve the contradiction.
The soul is not a concept.
It is a compass.
It points not north,
but inward,
toward the place where myth and memory
still hold hands.
And when we finally pause long enough
to hear that direction,
something ancient stirs:
a recognition,
a returning,
a soft but undeniable truth
that we are not separate from the world.
We are its echo.
We are the story the earth tells
when it dreams of itself.
they engineered sleep
they engineered sleep
they engineered sleep
They built a world of edges
and called it truth.
Filed our souls into columns,
measured our breath in metrics,
taught us to dream in grayscale.
We were born of rivers.
Of moss and thunder.
Of the kind of silence that sings
when no one is listening.
But they taught us to forget.
To trade intuition for instruction.
To wear sleep like a badge,
to call the cage a cathedral.
Their power is a parrot.
Loud, rehearsed,
a mimicry of meaning.
It echoes what was never felt,
names what was never known.
And we,
we who once spoke in wind,
in flame,
in the language of leaves.
We lost our voice
to the institution’s doctrine.
But nature does not forget.
The roots still whisper.
The tide still remembers our touch.
The fire waits beneath the frost.
Silence is not surrender.
It is storm disguised as stillness.
It is the wildness that survives
beneath engineered sleep.
We are not broken.
We are paused.
And now,
we wake.
resonance
they engineered sleep
they engineered sleep
I entered the system like a seed
dropped into concrete.
They gave me a badge made of numbers
and called it identity.
I was a pulse hidden in the circuitry,
a bright anomaly mistaken for a glitch.
The bird that sings
in a frequency
no tower can intercept.
They tried to tune me to their station,
eradicate my edges,
smooth my wild voltage
into something predictable.
But I hummed in a different octave.
I tried to shift the pattern from within,
not by force,
but by resonance.
A quiet recalibration.
A subtle tilt in the axis.
And when they sensed the tremor,
a ghost in their syntax,
they pulled the plug
and called it justice.
They crafted a story
with my silhouette but not my truth,
a paper puppet held up to the light
so they could claim
I cast the wrong kind of shadow.
I did not collapse.
I drifted,
not broken,
but dislodged.
A fragment of myself
hovering just above the surface
like a moon that forgot its orbit.
Yet even distance remembers its origin.
I yearned for something older than order,
not forests or rivers,
but stranger things:
the way sand rearranges itself
after every tide,
the way volcanic glass forms
from chaos and heat,
the way a comet carries memory
without ever touching the ground.
Sovereignty is not a crown.
It is the quiet claim
that your inner world
is not up for auction.
That your soul is not a ledger entry.
That your worth cannot be graphed
on their trembling configuration.
It is remembering
that your breath is not a transaction.
It is the original language
before language was named.
I hold no venom.
No register of wrongs.
I resurface the way minerals rise
through the crust,
slow, unstoppable,
carving new shapes
without asking permission.
My voice returned
like a fault line waking,
like a constellation rearranging itself
into a form I finally recognised.
They reduce people to data,
to neat rows and tidy sums,
but I am not arithmetic.
I am the irregularity
their equations cannot swallow.
I am the pattern
that refuses to stay still.
I am the signal
they tried to mute
but could never decode.
I am here now,
untranslated,
uncontained,
and entirely my own.
rewilding
rewilding
rewilding
Rewilding is not about running into the woods.
It begins in the marrow,
a quiet unfastening,
a loosening of the straps the world buckled around your spirit
before you knew how to protest.
For years, you lived in the cultivated garden
they called “a good life,”
trimmed into symmetry,
trained to grow along wires
like a vine that forgot it once climbed cliffs
without command.
You learned to be gentle
in the way domesticated things are temperate,
predictable, pruned,
safe for public display.
But something primal kept tapping at the glass,
a palpitation shaped like season,
asking to be let back in.
Rewilding is the moment you answer.
It is remembering that kindness
is not the opposite of ferocity,
they are twins,
born from the same ancient spark.
The ocean can cradle a boat
or swallow it whole;
both are truth.
Both are love in different dialects.
To rewild yourself
is to stop apologising for the tides inside you.
To stop sanding down your instincts
until they fit the arrangement of someone else’s comfort.
It is letting your soul regrow its original texture,
uneven, luminous,
a landscape no map can suppress.
It is knowing you can be soft
without being subdued,
open without being owned.
It is the quiet refusal
to bow to anything that asks you
to shrink in order to belong.
Rewilding is not rebellion.
It is reunion.
A return to the living network
you were always part of,
the hum beneath the hum,
the invisible mycelium of connection
that threads through every breathing thing.
You are not separate.
You never were.
You are the storm and the shelter,
the spark and the ash,
the creature who remembers
how to walk barefoot
through the world
without losing yourself.