Wild Nature Heart

💚10 EARTH DAY-IS-EVERY-MOMENT ACTIONS

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Ryan Van Lenning

Happy Earth Day and full moon vibes, beautiful beasts!

Of course, we don’t just live on Earth—we are OF Earth. With Earth. We ARE Earth. There is no separation.

May we all fall in love with each leaf and dew drop, each dawn and dusk, with ourselves and each other. May we open all our ears to birdsong and all that is being invited at this moment, both the challenges and opportunities. May we cultivate our wild souls and sink into the wisdom of flowing water, elder trees, and mountain consciousness. May we breathe into ever-expanding circles and embody gratitude for the interconnectedness of all our relations that makes our lives possible. May we cultivate brave healing for all our sacred wounds, the wounds we inflict and the self-imposed wounds of supposed disconnection with Earth and each other.

No beach cleanup, no political party, no ‘green’ product, no EPA rule itself will save us and the planet, but this reclaiming of intentional relating can usher in the needed transformations. As emergent strategy shows us, tiny manifestations emerge and combine until a whole paradigm shifts.

The ripple becomes the wave. The waves become new worlds.

Of course, Earth Day is every day, week, month…every moment. We can honor the day by becoming re-enchanted, by offering our unique gifts to a world in need, by practicing co-liberation with each micro-action, by keeping our muscles of imagination robust and full of surprises, and by committing ourselves to that next right step in this Great Turning.

Thank you for reading.

Wishing you an embodied, emboldened, empassioned, and emergent week!
with spontaneous emergences and the slow growth forest of us,
Ryan

🌏Anchor in an unshakable ecospirituality (rooted in deep time, reciprocity, humility, gratitude, love, enchantment, animist relationality)

🌏Slow down. Allow something new to emerge. Practice skills for building sky (spaciousness) & earth (grit) within (i.e. regulating our nervous system). Practice Erecting your No, stretching your Yes.

🌏Befriend your watershed, get to know your plant kin, praise the soil, listen to River & tree elders, don’t forget the smalls

🌏Support & become accomplices in indigenous sovereignty, frontline water & earth protectors, black liberation, reparations, relocalizing & post-capitalist economies, anti-imperial imaginings, & #Landback efforts. Decolonization is not a metaphor.

🌏Celebrate your senses, revel in ecosensual pleasure, allow awe and wonder to move you.

🌏Tend the vast rivers of grief & rage. Co-create & participate in cultural containers of trust that hold the charge of inter-generational sacred wounds (traumas) together, that tend the pain at the root of impulses to dominate & possess,
and that cultivate deep connection and imagination

🌏Listen deeply for your particular callings & follow them with the commitment of a monarch butterfly’s pilgrimage—beautifully, ridiculously, and like a sacred royal fool (what is yours to do and discerning when and how you get pulled off center)

🌏Build your capacity for discomfort (discern the difference between danger & discomfort)

🌏Chip away at inherited maps, Disrupt supremacist and power-over scripts, Divest from Empire (most ecological thing we can do is compost Patho-Adolescent Incarceral White Modernity, the mad mansion we find ourselves within). Re-Invest in cultures of Care and Repair.

🌏Learn to dance in fields beyond hope and hopelessness. Rather, become intimate with butterflies and the seasons, pace of the moon, parts of you that you’ve neglected still flitting about inside your Meadow. Let even the most disturbing questions & daring dreams drip down the canyons of you. Relinquish the binary game of shiny hope or dark despair, but let Life live through you.…and from there, the Wild and Wingéd Way will emerge like the butterfly from the cocoon, which not even the mightiest Empire can withstand.

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

Posted on March 16, 2024 by Ryan Van Lenning

Leave a Comment

“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.

THE FIERCE EMPTY

Posted on March 14, 2024 by Ryan Van Lenning

Leave a Comment

Fasting is one most ubiquitous and ancient spiritual technologies. Just about every religious & spiritual tradition I’m aware of has some tradition of fasting.

But it is one that many of us modern mesopotamians have lost connection with. Perhaps like me, you were not raised with any connection to fasting.

I only came in touch with it as part of wilderness rite-of-passage ceremonies, as both participant and guide. Over 4 days/nights, it becomes very clear how fasting can be a portal to connecting more deeply to the rhythms & wisdoms of our body, heart, psyche, and spirit.

Fasting allows us to physically remember (or experience for the first time) what it is like to be hungry without relief. The posture of humility that accompanies it helps us touch in on how utterly dependent/interdependent we are.

Fasting is not merely abstaining from food. For me, just as important is abstaining from usual distractions, ways in which we habitually fill up, escape from the moment or parts of the world or ourselves we ignore. If we’re not always taking in, we are available for receiving or seeing in new ways.

Fasting becomes a way of cleansing in order to listen to the living world. An emptying out to receive something anew—The Fierce Empty, as Martin Shaw calls it.

It can open up deeper intimacies. Sometimes what we receive is clarity about what feeds us, and what we are here to offer.

In our new moon Thrum Circle Sunday we had a rich conversation as we explored various meanings of fasting. One of the etymologies of fasting is from Old English fæstan, meaning “to make firm; establish, confirm, pledge,” so we ended with a dark moon meditation, asking: what might we temporarily refrain from, to help support and deepen our commitment to our intentions, or goals, or purposes?

I think of how on the dark moon we are able to see the stars more clearly and brightly. This is one gift of darkness and temporarily refraining from the incessant filling.

As that misfit mystic Rumi put it, “There’s hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness. We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox is stuffed full of anything, no music.”

___________________________

#TheFierceEmpty is an experimental series exploring the concept of fasting through a ecospiritual, animist, mythopoetic, and liberatory lenses. It weaves together the personal and the collective, and the presence of the moment with deep time. It is in contrast to the empty found in heart of the hungry ghost, and is curious about other species of power and possibility living inside an intentional emptying out.

What to Learn From an 11,000 Year-old Elder?

Posted on March 12, 2024 by Ryan Van Lenning

Leave a Comment

If you’ve been in the Mojave and Sonora deserts you know creosote bushes are ubiquitous. Creosote plays a pivotal role in the desert ecosystem as a keystone species. Creosote has earned the title of “nurse plant,” helping many young cacti and other plants to establish, as well as providing habitat to many critters burrowing underneath, from mice and lizards to rattlers.

Not as appreciated is the fact that we’re essentially looking at old growth forest, and in the case of King Clone, very, very old.

It was on my pilgrimage list this winter to meet King Clone, so on Saturday I spent some (deep) time with them. King Clone is a 11,700 year old creosote bush ring, one of the oldest known organisms.

Think about it: this magnificent plant was just a wee lad here before modern nations, before the Roman Empire, before any empires. Before even settled human agriculture!

Every section of this enormous plant community are genetically identical. The original central aboveground part of the plant died way long ago, but the plant continues to expand underground sending up new shrubs (clones) which now form a ring. It has continued to grow and expand since.

The ecological preserve site is largely unmarked, and a passerby would not notice anything out of the ordinary compared to the rest of the landscape.

I approached I would any sacred temple, with reverence — I was curious about a being that has seen the ebb and flow of the human drama over centuries, even millennia.

They were nursing one of my favorite smelling plant friends, pink sand verbena. Laying in the middle of the circle, I tried to tune into deep time plant consciousness.

From the highway a few miles away I heard motorcycles and semi-trucks hauling all our precious plastic cargo to warehouse stores. I couldn’t help but be struck by the juxtaposition of the speed of modernity and the pace of this plant community.

Whether it was me, or King Clone, I heard a language beyond words, leaving me with a sensation of a deep and slow patience.

As I said goodbye, deep time awareness met the ephemeral moment in the form of a rainbow.

Deep time is now.