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

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

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

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.

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.

This playshop is for that.

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.

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)

“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.

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.

It’s dark in here.
That much we can agree on.

It’s easy to want to panic.

To grasp about for threads
hitting your head hard on things
a step in any direction.

But please please
don’t follow the wrong thread home.

It’s so easy to miss your thread
when you are seeking anything
not to feel this way.

Humbling to learn yet again
that forgetting is as relentless as winter.

Yet remembering is as persistent as spring.

Feel your beautiful arch grow.

You were meant for this.

You are already at the opening
because you already are at the heart.

The thread is not a trend or trope.
The thread is not someone else’s hope.

It cannot be consumed, only created—
spun from your abdomen.

(Where the silk comes from is a mystery)

It is not a person or a plan.

Give up on superheroes,
purge all perfect things.

A thousand glorious threads
but they are not all yours.

The thread is who you are.
What will kill you not to do.

Not to be.

Your way of going deeper into the world
is the thread that leads us out

like the light that trees keep deep
in their roots

calling us back home.

(Included in the collection Within the Cave Something Pulses)

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, 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)