About Wild Nature Heart

As meaning-makers, knowing what story we’re in matters—
in our own lives and in the collective.

It’s no secret we are living through seismic cultural and ecological shifts,
a time of both vast uncertainty and radical possibilities.

It has been called The Great Turning & feels like a grand Rite-of-Passage.

We can think of this as a Collective Initiation calling us
to deepen our belonging with animate web of life,
to compost stale stories and oppressive ways of being,
and to help birth what is emerging.

We each have a beautiful role to play in that story.

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I’m Ryan Van Lenning, a guide shaped by Earth’s wisdoms, the stories carried in landscapes, and the lessons shared by elders and liberationists. My work isn’t about fixing us or fitting in. It’s about disrupting modernity’s trance of separability and inviting us back into animate web of life, back into entanglement—with land, with lineage, with all the parts of us that have been paved over and starved of wonder and connection.

Through classes, ecotherapy, wilderness ceremonies, creative arts, and gatherings rooted in Earth-intimacy, I support people to live into their truths, passions, and purpose, and to navigate the thresholds where grief meets love, where disorientation meets meaning, and where the more-than-human world arrives as teacher and elder.

I am passionate about facilitating re-connections with wild nature and our most empowered selves to assist in the work of repairing broken belonging in this time of the intersecting ecological and social challenges.

I live and work primarily among the diverse forests and rivers of so-called Humboldt County, in Northern California, traditional Wiyot and Yurok territory. I like cinnamon ice cream, fantastic fungi, and river ottering. I love lichen a little more than reasonable and have trouble with (colonial) time management.
My current apprenticeships are to composting, fire, and emergence.

What is alive in you right now?
How do you want to reconnect?

I’d love to hear from you:  ryan@wildnatureheart.com

Wild Nature Heart supports us to connect with the wisdom of inner and outer wild nature, to cultivate earth intimacies, to embody our wholeness, and to live our wild purpose into the world in order to inhabit our particular niche in the ecosystem of healing and justice.

I believe in cultivating human wholeness and that our world needs each of us being present to what is, including grief, rage, and ecosensuality as portals, in order to be more fiercely ourselves, offering our unique gifts back to the human and more-than-human community as we transition to cultures of care. (I call this Composting Empire.)

Like so many others, I am on an ecospiritual uncolonial journey. What this means to me is anchoring into a deep earth spirituality that nourishes deep belonging in order to do the decolonial and anti-programming work that I believe we are called to do in this global moment. It is a journey because it is a daily and life-long practice that is multi-generational and multi-species. With Earth as mentor, we are invited to practice simultaneously being both death doulas to the world that is dying and birth doulas to the ones being born.

As crises continue to invite us across thresholds of initiation,
we crack open the paved highways of our hearts to allow the tributaries of our holy longings and wild purpose to flow in and out.

To cross this threshold into species maturity with a next-season guest pass we must make keep our imaginations robust and make moves that subvert inherited paradigms of fear and supremacy. We are being invited to fall through the inherited maps into new territories towards collective liberation.

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I am a certified Ecotherapist through The Earthbody Institute, studying with Ariana Candell, where I also teach Levels 1-3 Ecotherapy, both online and week-long Immersions. I am a certified Wilderness First Responder through Foster Calm. I previously taught Philosophy, Comparative Religions, and Environmental Ethics in the Humanities Department at Sinclair College in Ohio.

Poetry and writing is one of the cultural-delivery systems through which I explore creative earthiness and the themes of the Great Turning. My debut books, Re-Membering: Poems of Earth & Soul, and High-Cooing Through the Seasons: Haiku From the Forest formed the root and my newest collections, One Bright and Real Caress, From Inside These Wild Ones, An Ambitious Silence, Kiss Me a Huckleberry, Within the Cave Something Pulses, and Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony became birds flying the nest. You can forage for them here.

The 2019 Jodi Stutz Poetry Award by Toyon Literary Magazine was awarded to my poem ‘And All the Walls Between Them’ responding to current immigration policies and social injustices. I have published articles, essays, and poetry in Earth Island Journal, Deep Time: The Journal of the Work That Reconnects, Truthout, various poetry journals, and the books Behind the Mask: 40 Quarantine Poems from Humboldt County and A Walk with Nature: Poetic Encounters that Nourish the Soul.

I live and work primarily among the diverse forests and rivers of so-called Humboldt County, traditional Wiyot and Yurok territory. Group wilderness programs are also in Trinity County and Inyo County in the Eastern Sierra region.

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