What Makes Living Wild Different?
Small groups. Big curiosity. Meaningful connections.
We don't believe in rushing through a destination or collecting experiences just to check them off a list. We walk, we listen, we get curious, and we make space for the unexpected.
Our journeys and camps are rooted in ecological learning, community, creativity, and reciprocity, with a commitment to honoring the people, wildlife, and landscapes that make each experience possible.
GET TO KNOW YOUR GUIDE
Molly Swan
Founder • Field Guide • Wildlife Tracker • Forest Therapy Guide• Curious Naturalist
A little about journeying with me
I know the wild. Trained as a South African field guide, certified wildlife tracker, and forest therapy guide, I bring knowledge and curiosity to every experience.
I'm endlessly curious. Give me birds, bugs, plants, and a little herbalism, and I'm in my happy place. There's always something new to discover!
I've walked this path myself. Living and learning in the African bush transformed how I understand nature, connection, and belonging.
I personally host your journey. Thoughtfully curated small groups trusted local partners, and support from hello to welcome home.
I travel with intention. Conservation, reciprocity, and genuine connections are at the heart of everything I create.
My Story
Before you journey with me into wild spaces, I want you to know the path that led me here. Living Wild is not simply something I created or something I do. It has grown from what I have lived, walked through, questioned, grieved, and been shaped by.
I believe the wild has a way of calling us back to ourselves. Sometimes that call comes through curiosity and wonder. Sometimes it comes when life forces us to slow down and listen. My own path here has been woven through loss, love, adventure, chronic pain, deep healing, and a lifelong desire to understand the living world around me.
My hope in sharing my story is not that yours will look anything like mine. It is that somewhere within it, you may recognize a piece of yourself. Maybe you are longing for reconnection. Maybe you are standing in a season of change. Maybe you simply miss the version of yourself who climbed trees, got dirt under her fingernails, made things with her hands, and looked at the world with wonder. Wherever you are, I want you to know there is space for you here.
I am a Pennsylvania native, and my relationship with nature began long before I had words for it. As a child, I wandered the woods behind my home, built forts from fallen branches, flipped over rocks to see what was living underneath, made mud pies, listened to birdsong, and sat quietly amongst the trees. Nature was my playground, but it was also the place where I felt most like myself where I was safe, curious, imaginative, and free.
Girl Scouts became another part of that story. What began in childhood eventually came full circle as I stepped into leadership myself. For more than a decade, I have had the privilege of helping girls build confidence, independence, curiosity, and connection. I love watching what happens when young people put down their phones, walk into the woods, build something they didn’t think they could build, get a little dirty, laugh around a fire, and realize they are capable of more than they knew. In many ways, I think I’ve spent my adult life trying to protect that same sense of wonder in myself.
My professional path did not begin in conservation. For twelve years, I worked as a hairstylist and educator through Aveda. I loved helping people feel seen and cared for, and that world introduced me more deeply to environmental responsibility, Ayurveda, plant wisdom, and the relationship between personal wellbeing and the natural world.
But travel kept pulling at me.
A visit to my brother in Botswana changed the trajectory of my life. Spending time within a local village challenged many of my assumptions about what we need in order to feel rich, connected, comfortable, and happy. Then, camping from Maun to Victoria Falls, I encountered the African wilderness for the first time.
I watched elephants move through open landscapes. I stood beneath skies that seemed impossibly large. I experienced the scale, beauty, complexity, and humility of being one small human within a much larger living system.
Something in me woke up.
That curiosity eventually led me back to Southern Africa in 2022, where I began working alongside an ecology team and stepped more deeply into conservation. I went on to train and work as a safari guide and wildlife tracker, learning to read tracks and signs, recognize bird calls, understand animal behavior, and pay attention to the relationships unfolding everywhere around me.
Tracking changed the way I see the world. It taught me that the landscape is always speaking and we simply have to slow down enough to notice.
I later spent time living and working nomadically in Namibia, supporting conservation efforts around desert-adapted elephants. But while I was learning to read landscapes, I was also being asked to learn how to read myself.
I had experienced the sudden loss of both my mother and grandmother, and grief had settled into my life in ways I did not fully understand at first. Around the same period, I began experiencing chronic pain similar to pain they had lived with. For so long, I had believed that strength meant pushing through, working harder, staying busy, and carrying on.
Eventually, my body stopped allowing me to live that way.
Slowing down became less of a choice and more of an invitation.
I began paying attention to my nervous system and exploring practices that helped me reconnect with my body rather than constantly override it. Breathwork, meditation, gentle yoga, forest therapy, and TRE—Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises—became part of that process. I began noticing where I was holding tension, where grief lived in my body, and what happened when instead of asking, “How do I push through this?” I started asking, “What do I need right now?”
Healing, for me, has not been a straight line or a finish line. It has been an ongoing practice of listening.
The African bush became one of the places where I could hear most clearly. Elephants became teachers. Birdsong became medicine. Silence became a mirror. Walking slowly, tracking, sitting beneath trees, feeling my feet on the earth, breathing, creating, and allowing myself to simply exist without constantly producing gave my nervous system opportunities to soften.
That experience changed not only how I live, but how I guide.
I continued deepening my relationship with plants and natural wellness as a home herbalist, growing, harvesting, and learning from herbs and the everyday medicine available around us. I later became a certified Forest Therapy Guide, which gave language and structure to something I had intuitively understood for years: sometimes we do not need to conquer the trail, identify every species, or reach a destination. Sometimes our work is simply to slow down, engage our senses, notice, receive, and remember that we belong here too.
Today, I bring these seemingly different chapters of my life together—Girl Scout leader, wildlife tracker, field guide, forest therapy guide, home herbalist, traveler, educator, creative, conservationist, and woman who is still learning how to listen to her own body.
Living Wild grew from all of them.
I want to create the kind of spaces I wish existed more often for adult women: places where we are allowed to be curious again. Where we can build a fire, make something with our hands, paint with plants, learn a new skill, wander through the bush, stretch our bodies, sit quietly beneath a tree, laugh until our stomachs hurt, share stories around a fire, and rediscover the parts of ourselves that adulthood sometimes asks us to leave behind.
A little bit healing space. A little bit Girl Scout camp for grown women. A little bit adventure. A lot of curiosity.
There is room for restoration, but also for play. There is room to meditate and room to be silly. There is room to learn from knowledgeable guides while remembering that none of us ever stops being a student of the wild.
Whether we are walking through a Pennsylvania forest or following elephant tracks through the African bush, the intention remains the same: to move beyond simply seeing a place and begin experiencing ourselves as part of it.
Living Wild experiences are rooted in reciprocity. I believe that if we receive from wild spaces, we also have a responsibility to care for them. Our journeys create opportunities to learn from local guides, participate in conservation, support communities and ecosystems, and consider the impact we leave behind. Connection leads to understanding. Understanding creates care. And care can become action.
We are not separate from nature. We are nature.
And perhaps remembering that changes how we care for the earth, how we care for one another, and how we care for ourselves.