Kiss Me a Huckleberry, Teach Me the Storm: An Ecosensual Playshop

For some time I’ve held Sundays as an excuse to explore slowly ad specifically in an ecosensual way – meaning simply being more present to opening my senses intentionally to what/who is around me. I occasionally post some experiences as #EcosensualSunday and last year collected ecosensuality-themed poems in a collection called Kiss Me a Huckleberry. 

The emerging catkins, huckleberry blossoms, swamp lanterns, and flitting/flirting butterflies and bees have inspired me to gather these orientations into the form of a playshop to explore these capacities together.

Kiss Me a Huckleberry, Teach Me the Storm is a 4-week playshop inviting us into a deeper relationship with the sensual wisdom of the living world. Through sensory exploration, creative earthiness, poetry, and playful encounters with the more-than-human world, we will explore how the living world invites us into deeper intimacy, play, and, yes grief—teaching us through sweetness, storm, and the many ways life touches our senses. 

In-between sessions: gentle invitations for simple on-the-land practices—ways to continue sensing, listening, and exploring with the more-than-human world in your everyday surroundings. As a way to anchor these capacities in our home, we’ll also craft an Ecosensual Altar and chart our Pleasure Lineages.

This playshop is about refusing Modernity’s call to numbness and remember how to feel with/in/as the world again. 

Nature is inherently sensual. Our body and senses are one of the surest paths back to our own aliveness, our own joy and wholeness. One step at a time, we wander and wonder, smell and feel, reclaiming our sacred embodiment. How wondrous it is to be sensing creatures among a juicy, colorful, delicious, scented, symphonic, tactile, powerful, sentient world! How intimately we belong. No matter how hard Empire tries to sever us from that fact.

We slowly caress the myriad textures of the world. We feel the sun and water and wind deliciously on our bare skin. Colors titillate and the scents and shapes of the world intoxicate. Spring in particular unleashes these vital energies-out there and in here-they are not separate.

As brontë velez invites us, “Be in your gifts, be in your power, be in your love, be in your pleasure because we need that vibration right now. We need a vibration right now collectively that is centered around us being able to have the capacity to dream something else into being.”

DATES: Sundays, April 12 – May 3
TIME: 9:00-11:00AM PST | 12:00-2:00PM EST
Online | Sliding scale: $100-$150
(Note: Limited to 8 to ensure intimate and empowering space)

REGISTER HERE or VENMO: RyanVanLenning with the note “Huckleberry” and a good email for zoom link.

Come taste the berry and touch the bark. Come listen to the wind and learn what the storm might teach. Come be a pollinator of your own aliveness – and therefore the world’s.

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

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WILD SYLLABLES OF THE FLESH

My body-heart is in an open relationship
with sun and grass
wind and water
mud and moss.

The stone and sea and all the sumptuous syllables
of earth’s flesh
are also my lovers.

Who every moment are saying:

My marrow the mountains, 
my skin your skin,
my belly the beast
my fertile fingertips ferned.

Roll your palms slowly across mine,
and feel the turning of the season
within you, earth says.

On you.
With you.

I am Abundance spoken through the wild syllables of the flesh.

No false beat will keep me from you,
touching forever
bodies enfleshed.

(Included in Kiss Me a Huckleberry)