Creating ancestral skills communities is central to rewilding. We need people sharing skills together, we need people tending land together. These communities don’t form over night. It takes time to build them. I spoke with Lucy O’Hagan in February of 2020, in one of my first episodes of the Rewilding Podcast. Now it’s February of 2025 and a lot has changed in the last five years. Their community has grown, our friendship has deepened, and I continue to be deeply inspired by their work. Last August I traveled to Ireland to attend the first ancestral skills gathering on the island, facilitated by Lucy through their organization, Wild Awake Ireland. It was a life-changing experience for me, which was something I really didn’t expect. If you haven’t listened to our first podcast together, I would recommend going back and listening to it before you listen to this one. In this episode, I hope to pick up the conversation from where we left off five years ago, ask Lucy to share insights from the last five years of building a rewilding community in Ireland, and share my own stories of visiting Ireland.

NOTES:

The Rewilding Podcast, Episode 4: Complex Contexts w/ Lucy O'Hagan

Wild Awake Ireland

Language Movement: an dream dearg

Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape

Wisdom Sits in Places

Support the show