By Daniel Oros
At first, I thought the project was about youth work. Classic rookie mistake. You hear „Erasmus+,” you see the forms, the budgets, the polite emails with too many people in CC, the sacred European ritual of attaching the wrong version of the document five times until someone finally names it FINAL_FINAL_REALLY_FINAL.pdf and you think: Ah yes. A project. But Re-Wild was never a project. It was a forest wearing a project’s clothes.
It arrived with three bodies: Latvia, Croatia, Romania. Three NGOs around the fire. Three ways of saying the same thing in different weather: „We are tired of teaching young people how to survive inside cages. Let us show them the door back to the weather within.” I was there with Human and Tree, from Romania, carrying my bag of ideas, doubts, good intentions, unwashed socks, and that strange little inner animal who pretends he knows where he’s going. Spoiler: he did not. In the beginning I tried to be professional, words like framework, methodology, deliverables, nodding seriously, acting like the soul can be scheduled between coffee break and dissemination strategy. The forest laughed. Not loudly. Forests are classy like that. It just dropped one leaf in front of me, and the leaf said: „Bro. Chill.”
Then came sixteen months, enough time for a wound to stop performing and start speaking normally, for strangers to become mirrors, for mirrors to become annoying, for annoying people to become beloved, and for beloved people to reveal the exact place where you still don’t trust life.
I cried in this project. Not cinematic crying, not the elegant single tear of a French movie poster. The ugly, honest kind, where the body stops caring about your reputation and files a public complaint. I cried because something in me felt seen, and something in me felt crossed, and because sometimes community is not soft hands and herbal tea. Sometimes it is a bunch of humans accidentally stepping on each other’s invisible toes and then deciding whether to run away or stay. We stayed. That was not guaranteed.
Somewhere around month six, a decision had been made, not by everyone, by some, and communicated as if the rest of us had also decided, which we had not. I sat with it through an afternoon session, through dinner, through the particular quiet of a shared room in a foreign city where the ceiling is not your ceiling. The professional part of me had advice: Let it go. Raise it diplomatically. Remember the partnership. But the animal in me was standing very still at the edge of the field. Then the fox came, bright, fast, nervous, holy. The red fox of anger. Not the kind that burns things down (though it carries matches, let’s be honest, just in case), but the kind that arrives saying: Something precious lives here. Stand guard.
Before Re-Wild, I thought anger was fuel, pour it into the engine, drive harder, prove more, win the imaginary court case in your head at 2:17 a.m. But anger is not fuel. Anger is a bell. When the bell rings, you don’t worship it, you don’t smash it, you listen. You ask: What threshold was crossed? What part of me did I abandon for the price of being agreeable? What sword did I leave rusting because I wanted everyone to think I was kind? Kindness without boundaries is just self-betrayal with good PR.
I laughed in this project too, the special laughter that only happens in international projects: exhausted facilitators explaining depth ecology while someone hunts for an adapter, serious adults building altars out of sticks and realizing the stick has better posture than they do, Latvians, Croatians, Romanians all standing under the same weather, discovering that the human soul has subtitles but no perfect translation. The Trickster was always in the room, wearing muddy shoes, looking at whatever sacred thing we had just built and asking with complete sincerity: „Yes. Very profound. Now can someone explain why we are crying next to a pine cone?” Somehow that made it more sacred. Because sacred does not mean serious. Sacred means alive. And alive things move.
Which brings me to the second teaching: movement is sacred. Not productivity, not hustle, not the little capitalist hamster wheel with Bluetooth headphones, but movement. Walking, wandering, leaving, returning, moving through conflict instead of administrating it. There was a week in the middle of the project where something inside me had gone very still, and the stillness was not peace. It was the specific grey of a house that has closed all its windows and decided to call it safe. Stagnation does not arrive like a monster. It arrives like comfort, bringing a blanket, saying: Stay. You know this pain. Why risk a new one? And little by little the mind grows a grey fur over everything, the soul starts losing its feathers, and you begin calling numbness „stability.” The body knows. Walk. Not because the answer is somewhere else, but because some answers cannot reach you while you are sitting in the chair of your old identity.
Then came money, the old dragon in the basement, the awkward uncle at the spiritual dinner table. For years I heard people speak of it in only two costumes: angel or devil. Either it is corruption, proof you sold your soul to the fluorescent gods of Excel, or it is salvation, the applause of the marketplace. But Re-Wild taught me something stranger: money is a river. A river can flood, can dry, can be poisoned. A river can nourish a village, carry seeds, bring people from one country to another so they can sit in a circle and remember they are mammals with passports. Money is not good or evil, it moves toward channels. If the heart is false, money becomes a swamp. If the heart is true. not perfect, not saintly, but true, money becomes water, and it nourishes those who are aligned with their way.
By the end, we made a guide. That is what the world can see: pages, methods, drawings, a thing you can hold. But what I really brought back was harder to print. I brought back the fox-bell of anger. I brought back the holiness of movement. I brought back the river with coins in its mouth. I brought back the knowledge that trust is not a soft feeling but a practice of standing near the fire after someone has misunderstood you. I brought back Latvia, Croatia, Romania, not as logos, but as weather systems inside the chest. The proof that a project can become a rite. And that youth work, when done with enough wildness, enough humility, enough mud on the shoes, is not about teaching young people how to behave, it is about helping them hear the old animal under the concrete. The one still breathing. The one still waiting. The one who says: You are not here to be domesticated by fear. You are here to belong so deeply to life that even your anger becomes a guardian, your movement becomes prayer, and your money becomes a river that remembers the sea.