Wild Nature Heart
Walking Together On An Ecospiritual Liberatory Journey
Riverever
River, I trust your journey.
I’ve been mostly quiet about this one. Maybe appropriately: Rivers have their own timing.
While Becoming Beautiful Barbarians and Watershed have been making their way into the world, this little creature has been quietly moving alongside them.
RIVEREVER is a collection born beside, inside, and in devotion to living waters.
Over the past few years, I’ve followed them through mountain headwaters and buried urban creeks, dammed and undammed waters, rapids and eddies, grief and astonishment. Somewhere between trickle and the sea, these encounters began gathering themselves into a book.
In Riverever, rivers are not backdrop. They are kin, myth, mirror, memory, motion.
Riverever is ready to journey downstream on the fall equinox.
You can check it out and preorder here.
Empire Is Young. Earth Remembers Other Worlds.
Spend sufficient time among redwood, stone, and lichen elders and Empire begins to feel like a temporary administrative error, or a nervous system glitch.
A futile attempt at paving over
and filling up with all the wrong things.
A hungry ghost.
An ungrieved wound.
Maybe one day it will be made sacred through collective tending.
The voracious maw of settler culture
got almost all of the old growth elders in California.
Almost.
There are still redwoods standing who remember worlds before highways, property lines, parking lots, nation-states, wars, and the stories we mistake for normal or necessary.
(the poem ‘Old Survivor’ in Watershed explores this subject)
Lichen remembers another pace. Stone remembers another scale. Water carries memories we can only faintly fathom. As Ponca elder Casey Camp-Horinek says, “Water doesn’t need us to save her – she needs us to remember we are her.”
And I think of the ancient olive groves of Palestine, some tended by families across generations, as supremacist settlers and soldiers uproot and destroy them. I think of the old cottonwood trees people are defending at the so-called border in Arizona, one named Grandmother, where an Empire is trying to erect more monuments to domination and separation.
Different trees. Different lands. An old colonial appetite.
Empire always attempts to destroy beings who remember.
Forests.
Languages.
Ceremonies.
Names.
Villages.
Seeds.
Stories.
Bodies.
Burial grounds.
Ways of relating that reveal its own arrangements as neither natural nor inevitable.
Memory is dangerous to domination.
And yet: Empire is young.
Earth remembers other worlds.
I keep returning to this. Not as reassurance that everything will somehow work out or an invitation to passivity, but as a foundational ecospiritual orientation.
A continuous reminder that the world we have inherited is not the only world humans have made, nor the only one we are capable of making.
Empire is not our original instruction. Extraction is not the oldest story. Property is not the deepest relationship. Supremacy is not the inevitable shape of human belonging.
A reminder that beneath and beyond the architectures of domination are older practices of:
kinship, reciprocity, ceremony, commons, care, resistance, relationship, grief, gift, and belonging.
Ways of knowing ourselves not as conquerors standing over a dead world, but participants inside a living one.
With so many others, I feel our struggle is simultaneously to compost the spell of Empire and to grow new/old worlds.
To become kin to what survives it.
To remember ways of being that Empire works very hard to make us forget.
To keep our shoulders to the wheel.
To stay vision-hearted.
Perhaps this is part of the practice now:
Spend time with beings older than the stories and patterns trying to convince us they are permanent.
Sit with an Elder Tree. Touch stone.
Watch lichen take centuries to write a sentence.
Recline at River’s edge reading the grammar of Water’s flow – glyphs of slow swirls and quick sentences.
Ask what they remember. Keep our ears open for what they refuse and what kind of world they are still quietly practicing into being.
And listen.
Pavement cracks as weeds shout Life.
Borders move. Governments implode and vanish.
Empire’s scripts become archaeology.
And all the while life keeps emerging, relationships coalesce, deeper memories surface seasonally.
Sending old growth strength and living waters,
Ryan
What beings help you remember that Empire is not permanent?
What helps buoy you in the work you are called to do to birth possibilities beyond Empire?
📚 Becoming Beautiful Barbarians & Watershed have arrived
They arrived.
They’re beautiful. I can’t wait to begin signing them.
After years of wandering through notebooks, rivers, forests, grief, laughter, edits, and countless cups of fir tip tea, the first printed copies of Becoming Beautiful Barbarians and Watershed are finally here.
In a couple of weeks, the first signed copies, along with their Companion Ecologies and whisper cards, will begin their journey.
If you’ve been meaning to invite one or both into your life, preorders remain open through August 15.
I’d be honored to place one in your hands.
Then the first migration begins.
Thank you for helping these first THRUM morphs find their way into the world.
with fire for the becoming and water for the returning,
Ryan
Director of Creative Earthiness
Wild Nature Heart
The Flowering Ones – Every blossom is an invitation
Just look at the costumes summer is adopting.
August’s Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day has arrived, and this month we turn toward the Flowering Ones.
Every blossom is an invitation.
Not merely to admire beauty, but to enter more deeply into relationship with the blooming world. Every blossom we admire is already in conversation with bees, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, wind, rain, fungi, and futures not yet born.
Delegates from the Commonwealth of Small Miracles are convening for their annual convergence to discuss impossible colors, pollinator hospitality, and other urgent matters. I dropped in for a bit to see what they were up to.
Inside you’ll find a blessing for the blooms, playful invitations for meeting flowers with fresh eyes, and a handful of reflection prompts for remembering ourselves back into the great flowering.
May the blossoms near you slow your pace, awaken all your senses, and remind you that bold beauty has always been one of Earth’s oldest conversations.
May this be a small invitation of enchantment and a small offering of gratitude to the blossoms around us.
Enter the Flowering Ones Issue here:
with extravagant purple possibilities,
Director of Creative Earthiness,
Ryan
RE-ENCHANTMENT & GRATITUDE DAYS
Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Days are anchored to the first Saturday every month, but can be celebrated any time. They offer invitations for blessings, practices, and poetry honoring a being or aspect of nature.
Next month, on September 5, we tune into: The Small Ones
Time to Touch It
Modernity is the refusal to be in touch.
—Bayo Akomolafe
A small glimpse from Watershed, a collection of poems about grief, kinship, witness, and return.
This poem, “Time to Touch It,” lives near the center of the book’s inquiry: what happens when grief can no longer remain distant, private, or abstract.
What happens when we lend our tears back to the watershed?
Time to Touch It
beside the mountain creek
minding (mending) my own busi(y)ness
arriving empty
full of all the sick and stuck
more confusion in the numb little toe
than dare to admit
this unraveling has a slow descent
finding fog has a grip on time
silence pulls all into itself
even raven’s entrails go quiet
meals here are not sweet
but packed with minerals
all seems frozen but the southern sun
and the stream rehearsing thaw
in the water, a reflection—
whose face is it?
ash on skin
or skin on ash
out of the corner of the eye (soul)
tears inside stones
can barely allow the amount of grief (longing)
carried by the water (world)
it is following its promise to gravity
to flow into (out of) all the cracks and sacred swirls
offering a single Now—
rock-water-air-sound-ear-heart
and even mountain
is a cloud
from that whoosh—a knowing—
how separate we’ve made everything
how thing-like we’ve made everywho
how we’ve built a world
we keep saying we don’t want
so impossibly alone (together)
so, standing inside it,
the Source—clear and wet
reaching into the water
it was finally time to touch it—
hand to chest
chest to water
down below
stars in the water
and love—
all the unspent pain
still shimmering
no need to understand—
water is already moving through
If this watershed speaks to something in you, I’d be honored to place a copy in your hands.
Preorders include a signed paperback copy, the digital Companion Ecology, and a small set of printed whipser cards. The book will begin making its way into the world in August.
Water: The Living Current – July’s Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day
July’s Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day guide is here, and this month we turn toward Water.
Water as source. Water as kin. Water as current, carrier, teacher, shapeshifter, and living memory.
This month’s issue, Water: The Living Current, invites us to enter more consciously into relationship with the waters that hold us: rivers, creeks, rain, fog, ocean, aquifer, tap, tear, blood, and breath.
Inside you’ll find a blessing for the living waters, poems and river-whispers, simple practices for drinking, listening, blessing, and befriending your watershed, plus reflection prompts for remembering ourselves back into flow.
May this be a small offering of gratitude to the waters within and around us.
Enter the Water Issue here:
Let water soften what has gone rigid, flow your grief, splash your imagination, and invite you into play, kinship, and nourishment.
with flow, kinship, and renewal,
Director of Creative Earthiness,
Ryan
RE-ENCHANTMENT & GRATITUDE DAYS
Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Days are anchored to the first Saturday every month, but can be celebrated any time. They offer invitations for blessings, practices, and poetry honoring a being or aspect of nature.
Next month, on August 1, we tune into: The Rooted Ones
Field Sighting: Beautiful Barbarians in Their Native Habitat
Field Observation: Beautiful Barbarian (Homo imaginalis/Homo metamorphicus/barbari pulchri)
Habitat: thresholds, ecotones, collapsing empires, mountain ridges, places where certainty grows thin, and possibly swells like summer fruit
Known behaviors: composting inherited stories, practicing permeability, building altars from ordinary debris, tending beauty amid collapse, occasionally jumping beyond sanctioned maps.
Diet: wonder, wildness, sacred wounds, volcanic yeses, upstream pasts and regenerative futures
Conservation status: once believed extinct, now reappearing in scattered dreamsheds across the continent
Pre-orders available now.
Ships August.
Living Light – A Sun Re-Enchantment Day
All life is lit from the same old fire.
It’s the power that drives the whole shebang.
Giant sequoias. Great whales. Algae and bacteria at the base of the food web. Sun is the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as the poet Dylan Thomas memorably put it.
Sun is the sacred central fire around which our planetary siblings pilgrimage. The old flame whose angles give us seasons. The fusion dynamo 93 million miles away whose borrowed rays make the Moon glow.
No wonder so many cultures have known Sun as god, elder, kin.
The scale is astonishing: a million Earths could fit inside it. At 4.5 billion years old, Sun is middle-aged. Its core burns at temperatures reaching millions of degrees.
We learn such facts in grade school.
Then somewhere along the way, our enchantment wanders off.
Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Days are an invitation to participate in the Great Turning: to re-enchant our lives, to re-belong ourselves to the animate web of life with gratitude and awe.
This month’s invitation is simple: meet Sun in your own way.
Through words, attention, art, learning, ceremony, altars, song, or deep listening. In your own landscape. At your own pace.
Enter the Sun Issue here:
Let Sun burn the fog off your imagination.
Allow the central fire to touch one unproductive swath of your unmonetized mammal body, one quiet chamber of your illuminated heart.
I’d love to hear what you notice. What you touch. What touches you back.
with radiance and return,
Director of Creative Earthiness,
Ryan
P.S. Summer solstice arrives SUNday, June 21. In the Northern Hemisphere, it officially begins at 1:24 a.m. Pacific Time. The day will be 15 hours and 6 minutes long where I’m at. Look yours up here.
RE-ENCHANTMENT & GRATITUDE DAYS
Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Days are anchored to the first Saturday every month, but can be celebrated any time. They offer invitations for blessings, practices, and poetry honoring a being or aspect of nature.
Next month, on July 4, we tune into: WATER
Introducing Becoming Beautiful Barbarians & Watershed
imaginal buds have arrived
and they are legion
For a couple years these books have existed as scattered poems, field observations, river conversations, gargantuan griefs, delicious dreams, and improbable acts of hope.
Now the first two THRUM books are emerging into the world.
Becoming Beautiful Barbarians is the fire/imaginal morph within the THRUM ecology. A collection of poems for those practicing remaining vision-hearted, permeable, and alive amid the unraveling of old worlds.
Written from the threshold between collapse and re-enchantment—these poems wander through composting empire, ancestral belonging, volcanic Yeses, roadside sutras, dragon ethics, and dreams of Butterfly Earth.
Watershed is the water morph. A collection exploring grief, belonging, tenderness, and the strange medicine of screaming with the sea and returning our tears to the wider watershed. It traces a path through loss, kinship, and witness—refusing numbness and joining the waters that move through all things.
Together they form the first visible expressions of THRUM: a living literary organism cultivating post-imperial imagination, tending grief, and re-membering our place within the animate web of life.
* * *
PRE-ORDERS ARE NOW OPEN
Start with either current, or enter through both
Each preorder edition includes Companion Ecology, field notes, and other emerging artifacts from the wider organism.
For those wishing to journey more deeply, I’d love to gather in a post-release threshold circle with you later this summer.
The books will ship in August.
More excerpts, field notes, and strange transmissions soon.
with rivers, rootlets, spores, and shapeshifting clouds,
Ryan
Unauthorized Conversations with Awe
Even amid noise and numbness, busyness and overculture exhaustion,
the world continues extending tiny invitations into participation.
Awe keeps leaking through.
The frog croaks from a hidden pond.
The creek practices surrender beneath logs and around stones.
Salmon waxcaps appear overnight, announcing:
did you know mycelial fish have been migrating beneath your feet this whole time?
Deep spring in late May can carry a particular feeling:
half-opening,
half catching up with the season already underway.
Summer within reach, but not fully arrived.
Parts of ourselves return slowly,
like deer at forest edge,
curious about the blueberry bushes
I obviously planted just for them.
We gather our juice like Santa Rosa plums ripening in silence.
Meanwhile:
The 8-year-old tells a dirty joke about bees.
The lupine clan are already multiplying their joy.
Sweet peas find something to lend their tendrils to.
And you discover your skin has missed wild water so much
that despite its cold bite,
you jump in anyway.
Maybe earth intimacy begins there—
reaching back.
with lupine leaps and purpling pollination,
Ryan
Director of Creative Earthiness
Wild Nature Heart
below find a small root-thread from Becoming Beautiful Barbarians
(forthcoming August)
Unauthorized Conversations with Awe
Don’t be quiet about beauty
don’t be silent about love
not in times like this
even the ones who think
it’s quaint and queer
this unruly praise
even the ones loudest and preening
ache through miles of debris
even the silent ones hiding
among the blackberry brambles
want to taste the fruit
of unauthorized conversations with awe
everyone is talking roots…
but we say, grow past
even the ones they gave you
beyond the names Empire gave you
past the farthest sideways glance
let your true roots follow
their twisted trajectory
and crooked hungers—
brave yearning creatures
seeking the Sacred Well
let them dig
stretch your inimitable stretch
undomesticate your dangerous dance
keep digging
seize your true and vital name
from the center of Earth
then rise wild and rootdrunk
until the secret shakes itself out
clean and feral green
finally screaming—
Yes, Yes
I want that too!
Meeting the Bees Eye to Eye – A World Bee Day Reflection from the Heart of Empire
For me, re-enchantment begins simply:
stopping all my antics of disappearing and learning
(again and again)
how to pay attention.
On a mad meander through the forest the other day, amid a tangle of fir, ceonothos, huckleberry and salal bushes, my friends and I suddenly stopped.
What’s that?
shh, listen.
Then the wild whirring from the canopy.
The sound was emerging from a hive high up a tree. We could barely make out the occasional flitting movement of a bee against the bright sky, but we could hear—we could feel—the buzzing activity of the community of small ones.
Today is World Bee Day and I lean into it as an invitation into reciprocity and relationality, rather than only awareness-posting.
An invitation to bend down close enough to hear the world humming beneath the machinery of modern life.
Last month, while researching pollinators for the Pollination edition of Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day, I kept falling deeper into wonder—from flowers communicating with bumblebees through tiny fields of static electricity, to bees navigating by the angle of the sun through sacred waggle dances, to exhausted bumblebees falling asleep inside flowers and sometimes even holding each other’s feet while they rest.
I can’t help but feel a huge part of the crisis of our time is that we have become too committed to shiny solutions while losing contact with the living hum underneath things.
The poem below emerged from that tension and from an encounter with a single bee.
I was in the southwest corner of South Dakota in the Black Hills—Paha Sapa—reflecting on the ways that landscape had been so utterly reshaped by settler culture. Like my home state of Iowa.
And like the lands and waters of Minnesota, where I was en route to join Anishinaabe water protectors resisting a thousand-mile tar sands pipeline crossing the body of the world.
My mom had just died. The world felt feverish and fraying. I was uncertain of my next steps and in need of some small dose of fortitude. I was hungry for small proof that beauty and participation still mattered
Then there was this bee.
Pilgriming from bright lavender wild bergamot flower to black-eye Susan coneflower, my mom’s favorite bloom.
It made me stop. A small interruption.
A whispered instruction.
My humble attempt to listen to the bergamot bees.
What if the small buzzing ones are carrying instructions for how to survive the century?
Bending to the Bergamot Bee
Until our bodies become tuning forks
buzzing to what’s real
and
emerging
until bergamot-bees become
stop signs
on our paved road to paradise
prophets pollinating passwords
and warning of the cunning catastrophes
hidden inside our perfect plans
until our knees are dirty
from falling
in fertile failure
giving up on figuring it out
in order to meet the bees
eye
to
eye
becoming doulas
tending the threshold of the moment
unless we unshackle ourselves
from the spell
of our shiny solutions
we will continue exiling each other
and the thrumming world
pulling pollen from every last pore
to build the smartest prisons
incarcerating ourselves
away from the gratuitous golden hum
I find myself continually enchanted and humbled by the Small Ones.
The future may belong to those still capable of being interrupted by a bee.
‘Bending to the Bergamot Bee’ is part of Becoming Beautiful Barbarians, a forthcoming chrysalis of poems for those dreaming beyond Empire and practicing how to stay imaginative and alive during the strange unraveling.
That collection is part of Thrum—a 6-morph living literary organism from the Wild Nature Heart field exploring grief, imagination, ecological re-enchantment, and re-membering deep belonging in a more-than-human world.
If this piece stirred something in you, you might also enjoy the Pollination edition of Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day—a free small monthly field guide of poems, reflections, and practices devoted to re-inhabiting the animate web of life.
(This month’s theme is Soil and next month’s is Sun.)
Perhaps becoming beautiful barbarians in this Great Turning means rejoining the pollination party of the world.
Or perhaps simply remembering that we were never separate from it.
The phrase “Welcome to the Pollination Party” has been following me around as both blessing and instruction ever since I first encountered it on a sign (see above) in a tallgrass prairie restoration site five years ago.
Welcome to the Pollination Party: An Ecospiritual Decolonial Journey—another morph emerging from the Thrum ecosystem—is slowly finding its way into the world, too.
All the Terrible Things Will Become Tumbleweed
The old house of empire is groaning at the beams.
Becoming Beautiful Barbarians is a poetry collection written from the threshold between collapse and re-enchantment—carrying wild kin, unraveling empires, deep-time trust, and the dangerous act of remaining openhearted in a burning world.
Here’s a glimpse into one dimension of it—an animist anti-imperial fairy tale of ecological return from the borderlands. Written near the U.S.–Mexico border wall, Arizona.
Huff and Puff
(All the Terrible Things Will Become Tumbleweed)
I huff and I puff to blow the house down.
The house wears a white picket fence
a rusty iron curtain
a prison wall, a stale tale
a slave patrol
pretty plastic flowers
and an unacknowledged darkness
in the basement of things—
my lungs bellow
but find no purchase on its ramparts
I am politely ushered back inside
for some sweet lemonade
the house has many tricks and treats—
so much sugar, yet tastes of death
So I invoke Wind—
I huff and puff
I paw and claw
Raven caws.
Lands on the barbed wire, winking.
This house fell out of a tornado
a sucking storm of hungry ghosts
a hurricane of hubris
landing on all the good witches
on Plymouth Rock
on the desert tortoise
It paid no heed to the sacred river
crashed right down on right relation
and the seventh generation—
they’re not in the constitution of this house.
I huff and I puff.
I sneeze and wheeze.
Wolf disappeared here.
Along with bear and pronghorn
condor and elders
so many other pilgrims.
But ancient kin
are again on the horizon.
Put your ears down to the ground
and you’ll know it to be so.
Dams are falling all around us.
Look! A gorgeous storm is gathering.
Cumulus clouds know no border.
Water flows heedless of empire.
Condor’s stretching arc greets us—
holding the horizons-eye-view
Dear Butterfly, mighty monarch
delicate and deep-timed—
your pilgrimage beyond
these petty border wars—
you too are an Elder
we reach for right now.
Hail River’s freedom.
Hail Seeds amidst debris.
Hail return of the canine crew.
Will you be wild-winged with me
and migrate the miraculous?
Will you be a good wolf with me
and blow this wicked house down?
Perhaps you, me, butterflies and exiled packs
tortoise queens and lizard monks
salmon and condor clan
will form a rebel alliance with Wind
For Wind has muscle
and a thousand faces
eroding empires into dust
As the old prayer says—
“Come like the wind and cleanse.”
Yes, the house will fall
A dismantling, then—
a tumbleweed revelry in celebration
not of victory,
but of return.
In the meantime,
we continue to huff and puff—
from our bellyroot
through our hybrid fangs
with delicate wings
and unconquerable lungs.
We have deep time on our side—
all the terrible things
will become tumbleweed
Included in Becoming Beautiful Barbarians, a chrysalis of poems for those practicing how to stay permeable, imaginative, and alive during the strange unraveling.
These poems wander through composting empire, ancestral belonging, volcanic Yeses, roadside sutras, dragon ethics, and dreams of Butterfly Earth.
Monarchs migrate across multiple generations.
No single butterfly completes the journey.
Perhaps liberation works similarly.
If you’d like to be among the first to know when it arrives later this summer, you can join the list.
In the meantime, if you’d like to wander through other earthy poetry collections, you can find them here.
Imaginal Buds Are Gathering
Over the past year, a body of work and play has been slowly crawling across the landscape.
Some of you have already walked beside small pieces of it through courses, playshops, solstice circles, grief rituals, and scattered poems shared here and online.
Now two new books are nearing the threshold of arrival—
Lend Your Tears Back to the Watershed
and
Becoming Beautiful Barbarians
Different rivers of the same watershed. Different morphs of the same living organism.
The first, Lend Your Tears Back to the Watershed, is a sacred wound-tending field disguised as a collection of grief poems.
It’s a book that doesn’t try to tidy grief into easy resolutions, but instead lingers with its textures and lets it move—through the body, through language, and through the wider watershed we are not separate from.
Its terrain stretches from ancestral wounding and my mother’s garden after her death to collapsing ecosystems and the violence of empire, but also toward confluence, kinship, and the quiet ways life keeps reaching for one another.
The second, Becoming Beautiful Barbarians, is an initiation text written from inside the unraveling—a chrysalis of poems for those practicing staying permeable, imaginative, and alive during these times. These poems move from composting Empire and ancestral belonging to volcanic Yeses, roadside omens, dragon ethics, and emergent dreams of Butterfly Earth.
Both are my way of touching the goo of our moment while listening for the worlds trying to emerge through the cracks.
Together, they are part of a wider ecosystem of poetry, practice, and earth-rooted narrative.
I’ve quietly been calling it a photosymbiodeme—inspired by a lichen phenomenon where the same fungal being partners differently with sun-eating life and emerges in multiple forms adapted to different conditions.
One being. Multiple expressions.
The ecosystem includes these two books emerging from their chrysalis, as well as an ecoplaybook for re-inhabiting the animate web of life called Earth Intimacies, a trickster morph titled Composting the Spell of Empire, a decolonial pilgrimage narrative called Welcome to the Pollination Party, and a porous, shape-shifter called Permeable, devoted to perception and the dissolving edges between self and world.
I’ll share more later this summer, but for now, in the spirit of spring sprouts, a small poem:
We are the Machine, We are the Rust.
We are the Empire
and the Heart that Composts Empires.
We are the Emergency and the Inter-mergence.
We are the Lover learning to leap.
Right here in the Brambles.
Right here in the heart of the Beast.
How big can our sky be?
How deep our roots?
Let’s walk each other home.
In the meantime, if you’d like to wander through some earlier poetry collections, you can find them here.
With lichen love from the wild edges,
Ryan
No Amount of Miles – Lend Your Tears Back
We know that grief refuses to stay in its assigned lanes.
It spills—across categories, across places and species, across distances we try to keep between things. It also accumulates, adding layers that thicken our lives.
Over the past year, I’ve been working on a collection that lives inside that spilling and accumulation.
It’s a book that doesn’t try to tidy grief up or find easy resolutions, but instead feels grief’s textures and allows it to move—through the body, through language, through the wider watershed we’re not separate from. From ancestral wounding and mom’s garden after her death to collapsing ecosystems and violence of empire.
I try to honor the contradictions and complicities as well as the numbing and raw, uncontainable tenderness that keeps breaking through it all.
It’s my way of touching into the basket of personal and collective grief and rage that we all carry.
running our fingers
over what needs
to be touched
I’m sharing one poem from that unfolding here.
No Amount of Miles
It’s the 5th month of the year
and we’re out here foraging mushrooms
and mass shootings
nettles
and the good ol’ business
of war—it seems they’re always
in season now
climate reports
outnumber monarchs
in so-called California
those who love butterflies
just a little too much
found at the bottom of wells
those who love trees
just a little too much
found cross-legged in tents
with bullet holes
hands in the air
headlines blur—
historic highs
historic lows
cop cities and open-air prisons
added to budgets
already bloated with bombs
Our language thins,
shapeshifting—
rage farming and trauma dumping
added to the dictionary
acorn, wren, catkin—cut
replaced with cut-and-paste
AI and delulu
I can understand adding
deadass and pink-washing
snipping Vitamin G
and frutescent snollygoster
(though the latter might offer
some comic relief
amidst the hellscape—
which they also added)
but heron and newt
sea otter
Inyo rock daisies?
somewhere in this pruning
something goes missing
a thread
tying the loss of words
to the loss of lives
and aren’t we all at a loss
for words
at a certain point
we are no longer able
to gather our griefs separately—
one for this meal
one for that
we put them all
in one deep basket
stack them
or dam them
and call it survival
There’s an app
that can locate us precisely—
where we walk
how far
but not why
you can walk from anywhere
to anywhere
with enough heart
and heart-ache
yet miles are just another metric
and we’ve already walked everywhere
on this exhausted map
no amount of miles
will carry away the ache of
the missing dreams
the missing birds
the missing streams
the missing words
the missing stars
the missing justice
the missing village
that our basket expects
we can no longer summon
belief in the places
they told us to believe in—
new coordinates beckon us—
but walking might be holy now
might make the sky inside us
a little wider
not enough to hold it all
but just enough to stay human
to each other
enough to keep us here
running our fingers
over what still remains
what still asks
to be touched
The collection is called Lend Your Tears Back to the Watershed.
To be released later this summer. I’ll share more soon. Be on the list to be among the first to know when its available.
For now:
maybe the work isn’t to hold it all—
but to let it move. Together.
Returning to the watershed.
—Ryan
P.S. Header: actual photo of the day the sun didn’t come up during the California fires -”Orange Skies Day” – Fall 2020
10 Invitations for Living Earth Day in Every Moment
“The planet does not need more successful people.
The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers,
storytellers and lovers of all kinds.”
― David Orr, Ecological Literacy
Earth Day is not a date. It’s a way of being.
Every day, week, month…every moment.
A re-membering of our true identity. A re-inhabiting our deepest belonging.
We don’t just live on Earth—we are of Earth. We are with Earth.
We ARE Earth.
We honor Earth by becoming re-enchanted—by staying in wonder and relationship.
By falling in love again—with trillium leaf and dew drop, with dawn and dusk, with each shapeshifted moon, with each other and the many selves we are becoming.
By opening all our senses—to the texture of madrone bark, the scent of lilac, the taste of early spring’s herbs, the subtle colors of morning’s whispered hints.
By opening all our ears to birdsong and silence, and to the voices that Modernity would rather us pave over.
By rooting in something older than Empire, and become intimate with the wisdom of flowing water, elder trees, and mountain time.
By breathing into widening circles of belonging, giving thanks for the vast animate web of relations that makes our lives possible.
By practicing a brave grieving and healing—tending the sacred wounds we carry, the wounds we cause, and the illusion of disconnection itself.
By practicing creative awesomeness and boldy offering our particular gifts, experimenting with co-liberation in small acts, tending the muscles of imagination, and by committing to the next right step in this Great Turning.
There is an extraordinary shapeshifting underway—full of challenge and possibility
No single act will save us—not a beach cleanup, political party, policy, or “green” product.
Yet reshaping how we relate can make everything else possible.
When we practice presence and slow to the pace of relationality, we begin to support the needed transformations, whether that’s with our plantcestors, our griefs and longings, our waters, or each other.
As emergent strategy reminds us, small acts become patterns, patterns become movements, movements become paradigm shifts.
Just as the ripple becomes the wave. The wave becomes new worlds.
Thank you for reading.
Wishing you an earthy, embodied, emboldened, empassioned, and emergent week!
Ryan
10 EARTH DAY-IS-EVERY-MOMENT INVITATIONS
🌏 Anchor into an unshakable ecospirituality—rooted in deep time, reciprocity, humility, gratitude, love, and animist relationality.
🌏 Slow down. Let something new emerge. Build sky (spaciousness) and earth (grit) within. Erect your No. Stretch your Yes.
🌏 Befriend your watershed. Know your plant kin. Praise the soil. Listen to river and tree elders. Don’t forget the smalls.
🌏 Become accomplices for Indigenous sovereignty, frontline water and earth protectors, Black, Trans, and Palestinian liberation, reparations, relocalized post-capitalist economies, anti-imperial imaginings, and #LandBack. Decolonization is not a metaphor.
🌏 Celebrate your senses. Revel in ecosensual pleasure. Let awe and wonder move you.
🌏 Tend the rivers of grief and rage. Co-create cultural containers that can hold intergenerational wounds, metabolize harm, and cultivate connection and imagination.
🌏 Listen for your callings and follow them with the devotion of a monarch’s migration—beautiful, improbable, a little foolish.
🌏 Build your capacity for discomfort. Learn the difference between discomfort and danger.
🌏 Disrupt inherited maps. Divest from Empire. Compost supremacy and power-over scripts. Reinvest in cultures of care and repair.
🌏 Step beyond hope and hopelessness. Become intimate with seasons, with butterflies, with the neglected parts of you still alive inside. Let the wild way move through you—like something ancient remembering itself.
Saturday, May 2, We Celebrate Soil
Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Days are the first Saturday every month, and offer invitations for blessings, practices, and poetry honoring a being or aspect of nature. This month we joined the Pollination Party with our Pollinator Kin.
Next month, May 2, we tune into the teeming vitalities of what’s beneath our feet: SOIL.
Be sure you are receiving Wild Nature Heart newsletter to be part of the Pollination Party.
One Bright and Real Caress: A Playshop in Being Here
Can we be here now?
Really be here?
A playshop in staying with what is.
There are a thousand ways we leave our life. You know them: Staying busy. Staying numb. Staying distracted. Staying elsewhere.
Every so often, something interrupts the habit—a yellow-tailed bird lands so near you it takes your breath away. A butterfly lands on your hat on the first warm day. A word a stranger speaks penetrates your absentmindedness. A grief refuses to be paved over any longer. A persistent Yes! bubbling up you can no longer ignore.
These are moments that opens wider than expected—time dilates, past and future fall away, and you feel it: the possibility of really being here. Not conceptually or spiritually bypassed. But here-now, as sensation and participation.
One Bright and Real Caress is a 5-week experiential journey into presence, where nature connection and creative permeability become doorways into direct contact with the moment and the more-than-human world.
Together we explore the subtle ways we escape, practice meeting life without agenda, deepen intimacy with impermanence, and expand our capacity to say YES! to the full spectrum of being alive.
Through embodied practices, wild writing/expressive arts, and nature-connection invitations in relationship with place, we practice inhabiting our lives.
This is not about becoming better—but about becoming more here and staying with what already is alive. Not perfect presence, but real participation in the messy, fleeting, astonishing ceremony already underway.
In part emerging from the field of the poetry collection One Bright and Real Caress (all participants will receive a copy as a part of the course), this journey invites us back into the simple, radical practice of being here. We will work with poetry, yes. Not to interpret, but as doorways and spells of attention. As invitations to step more fully into the astonishing aliveness of the world.
DATES: Friday Mornings, June 19 – July 24
TIME: 9:00AM- 11:00AM Pacific Time | 11:00-1:00PM EST
Online | Sliding scale $125- 200
(Note: Limited to 8 to ensure intimate and empowering space)
Register here, or VENMO: RyanVanLenning with the note “One Bright” and a good email for zoom link.
Reconnect with Nature: Four-Week Ecosensual Journey
For some time I’ve held Sundays as an excuse/opportunity 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, May 3 – May 24
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
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)
Welcome to the Pollination Party! Celebrating Pollinator People on Re-Enchantment Day
“Among the humble-bees, for instance, the workers
do not dream of renouncing love.”
~Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee
Welcome to the Pollination Party! My practice this week was simply to notice: who are the flitting, flirting, flapping, crawling, buzzing, whirring, partying pollinators around me?
I was surprised at the first to show: a hummingbird, flashing their ruby in all the right places. Who turn out to be one of the birds known for prolific pollinating (more than 8000 species!). Then among the newly emerging blooms of the meadow, wild western honey bees methodically exploring spring-scented ceanothus, frenetic smaller sweat bees and flies of various kinds among the salal and huckelberry bell blossoms, and slower and lower bumblebees amidst the ox-eyed daises and purple thistle.
On the warmest day, the low hum of the Pollinational Party could be heard (in between the high hum of the jets above). I learned that plants produce more nectar when they hear bees buzzing (often matching the musical note D). It made me wonder what other soundscape surprises are always there waiting, should we be quiet enough to listen.
Pollinators are this this month’s Re-enchantment and Gratitude Day guest, and like last month’s Birds and February’s Moon, we encounter kin with countless forms and wisdoms. We typically think of bees and butterflies, but the Pollination Party is large and diverse: beetles, bats, birds, moths, flies, waasps–and yes mosquitoes–all get in on the celebration. Some are generalists and some are specialists, like the Yucca Moth that pollinates the Joshua Tree.
Apart from being intriguing, beautiful, and mysterious in their own right, they are absolutely critical for ecosystems. About 80% of flowering plants and 80+ major food crops depend on flying insect pollinators for reproduction..As renowned biologist E.O. Wilson remarked, “If all humanity were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
Re-Enchantment and Gratitude Days are about participating in the movement during this Great Turning for the re-enchantment of our lives, re-belonging ourselves to the animate web of life with our gratitude and awe.
The invitation is to participate by celebrate the Pollination Party through words, intention, art, learning, ceremony, altars, song, or deep listening in your own landscape, at your own pace. See below for different invitations to celebrate Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day:
POLLINATOR GRATITUDE BLESSING
POLLINATOR – PRACTICES
POLLINATOR – POEMS AND SONGS
POLLINATOR – RESOURCES
Pollination is the bridge between possibility and reality.
I’d love to hear about your experience and unique ways of connecting with Pollinators in intentional way.
Wishing you all the buzzing and nectar you need right now,
Wild Nature Heart Director of Creative Earthiness,
Ryan
Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Days are the first Saturday every month, and offer invitations for blessings, practices, and poetry honoring a being or aspect of nature. Next month, May 2, we tune into what’s beneath our feet: SOIL.
Writing as Refusal, Writing as Compost, Writing as Spark
The next round of Write Against/Beyond Empire is next Wednesday, April 1.
This is a gathering for people carrying grief, rage, confusion, clarity, and imagination in a time of imperial violence, lies, and psychic exhaustion. Together we’ll write from earth, body, and heart—not to perform despair or draft polite appeals to power, but to metabolize what is happening and to let our language become tools/toys of orientation, refusal, and possibility.
Through short somatic grounding, guided prompts, and collective weaving, we’ll practice writing that refuses the state’s gaslighting, that can hold heat without burning us out, and that nourishes imagination that reaches beyond Empire’s nightmares.
No prior writing experience needed—Come as you are; bring your facorite pen, your body, your truths and confusions, and whatever words are ready to arrive.
This is a temporary altar for words that want to live beyond Empire’s poverty of imagination.
If this feels like something you’ve been carrying without language or movement, you’re welcome to come surface words and sparks with us.
Register Here or Venmo: RyanVanLenning with a note “Write Against Empire” and an email for zoom link.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” —Arundhati Roy
That Equinox Imagination and the Mystery of Emergence
All of sudden it appears:
The blossom. The catkin. The unfurling fern.
The dawn.The evening star. The crescent moon.
The clarity. The lightning strike of Intuition.
The bubbling up of grief, of unexpected courage.
The pollination party. The unexpected crack in the old story. The vision beyond.
The surprising hatchlings in the nest of your heart.
This is the Mystery of Emergence.
I pause to smell the ceanothus and wild pink currant racemes, who weren’t here a couple days ago. I get giggly with the sudden three-leaved trillium treasure. My innocent child comes out to play when I see those first swamp lanterns emerge.
I also fall to my knees with gargantuan grief when I hear the news. What news? Any news they’ve been throwing at us lately. Later I’m going to make a natural soap out of the california lilac flowers. Maybe it’ll help pollinate me, wash away some sick and stuck.
We’re not only in a state of Emergency, we’re in a state of Emergence. We have to name it: Systems are Falling/Failing, the OverCulture has become a fallow Winter field, and yet—Spring arrives. And along with it, buried things are unveiled, secrets uncovered, new and needed imaginings birthed. In nature. In ourselves. In the collective.
If it’s true what the poets say, that we are in the battle of imagination, (“The war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it.” —Diane di Prima), I want to be on the (in)side of Earths Imagination, unfurling life’s unrelenting onwardness, pollinating with abandon, sharing, singing, shining,…
Because it’s also true what artist Xenia Marie Ross Viray says, “In nature, creativity is just existence, flowers bloom, and feathers shed. Life breathes and every bird sings. Stones glisten and light change color. Existence is art.”
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.
This is the Mystery of Emergence.
Of course, we suspect it never really disappeared, but had merely gone underground for a bit, 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, in the caverns of your heart, 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.
So here we are. We slowly emerge (or leap!) from our winter skin and old forms. It had its harshness; it had its creature comforts. But Life and light beckons. Liberation is still calling, and we become hungry for expansion, for play, for words and worlds beyond the tired ones that a poverty of imagination bequethed to us. We hear the bees buzzing love where the dragons of fear lay.
Our dreams have been incubating—They, too, will not bare being covered forever. They clamor for fresh air scented with citrus and lavender. Take a moment, lend your nose.
Our role is to tend. To continue to cultivate them with intention. With the proper tending, these micro-blossomings may grow into their fullness, a balm to a hurting world, a confused world, and feeding the Grand Metabolism with beauty, calories, heat, imagination, and sweetness.
This is the Mystery of Emergence.
What seeds of deep imagination or embodied truth are sprouting in you, asking for tending?
Which ones help lead us all beyond the inherited scripts? Beyond Empire?
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.
Wishing you an embodied, emboldened, empassioned, and emergent Equinox!
~Ryan, Director of Creative Earthiness
(See below for an equinox poem and Beautiful Emergences)
Wishing you an embodied, emboldened, empassioned, and emergent Equinox!
~Ryan, Director of Creative Earthiness
EQUINOX
I’d misplaced a bit of my balance
in that long journey through
the winter underground
so on the first day of spring
I waded in with caution
but Earth wanted me to jump in
demanding my whole body
so I fell into her unkempt and full of kablam
an unplanned splash
as baptism singing spring
an open sun offering
in polyriverous praise
eager soul and skin again
finding equilibrium
(Included in Re-Membering)
Beautiful Emergences
Sometimes the Beautiful Emergences can difficult to see amidst the clamor and the headline horrors, but visions and practices beyond Empire ARE emerging. I want to name a few that I have seen recently across our landscape:
- Movements for the rights of nature, including rivers and the first designated insect: Native stingless bees in the Peruvian Amazon have become the world’s first insects granted legal rights.
- Several #Landback successes, including a landmark Tribal Stewardship policy that just passed in California, with the goal of putting 7+million acres into stewardship of Indigenous
- The Klamath River is flowing freely with the four dams removed, with massive ecological restoration and the return of salmon spawning upstream further than they have in 100 years. Also in the Yuba and McCloud RIvers.
- Cultural and Regenerative fire practices are booming, healing both cutlure and the landscape.
- Condors are coming back, Bison herds are being restored from Alberta to Illinois to Mexico, and monarch butterfly populations are rebounding.
- People are experimenting with solidarity economies, regenerative conflict, and new/old ways of imagining community safety beyond policing and prisons
- People are increasingly engaging with ancestral recovery and healing; and deepening roots beyond nationalism and Whiteness.
- People are increasingly finding New/old ways to hold/flow our enormous subterranean streams of grief, together in small groups and rituals.
Imagine if these got half the airtime as what the ruling class has decided is normal.
We need to know what is happening to fuel hope and we need to see alternatives to feed our imagination for what is possible.
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Moon Has a Long Memory: A 13-month Lunatic Apprenticeship
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Kiss Me a Huckleberry, Teach Me the Storm: An Ecosensual Playshop
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