Reflections on 2025, and Turning Gently Towards What Comes Next

This time last year, we were still emerging from a period of loss, frustration, and reckoning — personal, practical, and political. Since then, something has quietly shifted. Not a dramatic relaunch or a sudden breakthrough, but a steadier sense of integration and direction.

Much of 2025 has been about simplification and focus.

Rather than spreading ourselves thin across many strands, we chose to centre the work that felt most alive and necessary. For us, that meant returning again and again to birth, land, and community — and letting other things fall away.

Emma completed her year as a Temple Guardian at Da-a-Luz, a powerful and formative experience. Yet as the year unfolded, it became increasingly clear that her heart was calling her back to the forest, to local birth work, and to supporting women and families closer to home. That return coincided with the unfolding homebirth suspension crisis in Gloucestershire, which pulled Emma deep into advocacy, writing, and legal challenge — including published articles in Midwifery Matters and now working alongside Birthrights in a case heading towards the High Court. It has been intense, demanding, and deeply rooted in the belief that birth is a place where culture, power, and care collide.

Scott, meanwhile, has been working full-time during term time since July, while continuing to run Rekindle youth work through the summer months. Alongside this, a great deal of practical, unglamorous labour has taken place: putting a roof on the roundhouse, clearing long-held clutter from the permaculture allotment, and making space — physically and energetically — for what comes next. This clearing has felt symbolic as much as practical.

Throughout the year, we continued to show up where it felt aligned: running the Da-a-Luz birth space at Land Skills Fair, gathering at Rainbow Camp, Sattva, and other spaces, and intentionally simplifying our offerings. Rather than the wide range of animal and craft work we’ve held in the past, we focused primarily on birth-related work — conversations, support, presence — allowing that thread to deepen rather than fragment.

At Samhain, Scott also held another powerful community clean-up and work weekend at St Anthony’s Well, clearing heavy silt from around the edges and tending the site with care and respect. This kind of work — practical, seasonal, and rooted in place — sits at the heart of what The Rewild Project has always been about. A further clean-up day is planned for Imbolc, continuing this ongoing relationship with the land and its waters.

As we look ahead, the completion of the roundhouse feels like an important threshold. Once finished, it will become a space for bodywork, workshops, women’s and men’s circles, birth worker gatherings, postnatal support, practitioner meetings, womb massage, and closing ceremonies. Not a single-purpose building, but a living, responsive space — shaped by what is needed rather than by rigid programming.

Alongside this, our thoughts have turned again to SEED — the long-held vision of community, land stewardship, and cultural repair. Over the coming months, we’ll be quietly solidifying our ideas, experience, and learning into something more workable, achievable, and rooted in reality. SEED has never been about selling a polished dream. It’s about honesty, collaboration, and learning how to live differently in a culture that has dispossessed many of us of land, heritage, and rhythm.

Everything we do comes back to the same questions:
How can we serve?
How can we gather?
How can we live more truthfully, even when it’s messy and unfinished?

We don’t believe in perfection. Anyone offering a shiny, flawless vision of community should be treated with suspicion. What we’re interested in is real relationship, real work, and real repair — with ourselves, each other, and the land.

As we move into 2026, we’re opening the door again to gathering, growing, and gently rebuilding community. Not from scratch, but from experience.

If this resonates, you’re warmly invited to walk alongside us as we continue.