🌸 Spring Equinox 🌱 The Mystery of Emergence 💦 Write Your Wild River – April 20

“Pleasure gets lost under the weight of oppression, 
and it is liberatory work to reclaim it.”
–adrienne maree brown

Dear Wild Nature Hearts,

All of sudden it appears: The blossom. The catkin. The Dawn. The Clarity. The Intuition. The expression of grief. The surprise courage. The storm. The rooted purpose. The energy stretching itself through your whole body.

The surprising hatchlings in the nest of your heart.

What was absent or hidden from plain sight, now with the right conditions announces itself as if it were always there, a bold and necessary part of the whole world. And it is necessary. 

This is the Mystery of Emergence.

Of course, we suspect it never really disappeared, it had merely gone underground

 a while, being nurtured by the fruitful darkness, by the necessary and fertile rest. It had perhaps been extending its hidden rhizomes through the body of the earth, through your body, awaiting the appropriate time. 

We may find that some Emergences are so utterly new, so unlike what came before, they catch us by surprise–So we must be there, like a birth doula, to catch them.

This is the Mystery of Emergence.

Do you, like me, find your own body needing to move more, stretch more, feel more? And your heart? Does it too need to move more, stretch more, feel more? With longer days and wild desert blooms, both my body and heart are expanding into more capacity for movement and pleasure.

In courses like Threshold, Write Your Wild River, and Deep Belonging, we often experiment with different energies, ranging from grief to ecosensuality. Finding our own organic and authentic/authored sources of pleasure is not only our birthright, but is essential for being able to show up fully for the enormous challenges of this collective moment. We embrace our sumptuous ecosensual pleasures, those sunrise joys and full moon madness (see THRUM Circles), in order that we might be alive enough to put our shoulders to the wheel this Great Turning.

Simultaneously, I am experimenting with going without. I am participating in fasting during this month of Ramadan, in solidarity with Palestine. Among many things, it is putting me in touch with the feeling of having enough (see The Fierce Empty below). There seems some wisdom in voluntarily abstaining, a medicine to limit. Yes, gastronomically, of course, but it touches something less tangible than physiological hunger. One becomes more attuned to that full/empty gauge, sensitizing me more subtly to what factors are fueling those impulses to fill: Reach for those snacks. Reach for those possessions. Reach for that validation. Reach for that knowledge. Reach for that distraction. Reach for that numbness. Reach for that productivity.

As a result, it is evoking psycho-spiritual-somatic inquiries: How much is enough? What does it feel like to be satisfied? (see adrienne maree brown podcast below) What are the implications of such inquiries for not just my life, but for the collective? In a surprising way, it puts me in touch with a wild abundance. It also invites a deep gratitude and a sensual savoring quality to pleasure when the fast is broken every evening.

So here we are. We slowly emerge (or leap!) from our winter dens and old forms. It had its harshness; it had its creature comforts. But Life and light beckons. Liberation calls, and we become hungry for expansion, for play. For planting love where the dragons of fear lay. Our dreams and purposes have been incubating. They, too, will not bare being covered forever. 

Our role is to tend. To continue to cultivate them with intention. With the proper tending, these micro-blossomings may grow into their fullness, feeding the world and the Grand Metabolism with beauty, calories, heat, sweetness.

This is the Mystery of Emergence.

So, what seeds of deep imagination or embodied truth are sprouting for you, asking for tending? Which ones help lead us to places/feelings/structures beyond Empire?

Or as adrienne maree brown expresses it in the context of deep time: “How can we, future ancestors, align ourselves with the most, resilient practices of emergence as a species? We embody. We learn. We release the idea of failure because it’s all data. But first we imagine. What are the ideas that will liberate all of us?”

This is the Mystery of Emergence.

Upcoming:

• Write Your Wild River starts April 20 (see more below) REGISTER HERE
• Grief and Rage Circle Saturday, March 23 at 10am PDT (see below)
• Our next free Thrum Circle will be with the dark moon, Sunday, March 24, 5-6pm PDT.  Our theme this time is: Emergence.
• The next round of Deep Belonging in the Great Turning starts next month, April 3.  REGISTER HERE

Wishing you an embodied, emboldened, empassioned, and emergent week!

with the sweet scent of poppies praising the desert sun,
Ryan

Read the Rest of the newsletter HERE.