Wild Nature Heart
Walking Together On An Ecospiritual Decolonial Journey
Deepen Your Connection With Nature & Your Wild Soul Calling
It’s deep summer–sun-kissed blackberries, cool water, hot skin, Venus nights, toes in the sand, playfulness. We’re right there with you!
We wanted to let you know about three different opportunities to deepen your connection with nature and your wild soul calling that we are offering in these next few months: a Wilderness Backpacking Journey, a Writing Wild Workshop, and a Vision Quest.
Say Yes to Your Wild Nature Heart Backpacking Journey, August 22-26.
We just returned from the Yosemite high-country, scouting locations for some of Wild Nature Heart’s upcoming journeys, including the one coming up next month, our final mountain adventure for the summer. It’s simply stunning and unbelievably peaceful up there. We had some inner and outer wilderness adventures of our own, including creek therapy, fire night, lake swimming, cross-country orienting, and oh yeah, the marmot that stole our socks. We’re pumped to bring people up on the mountain! Are the mountains calling you?
Write Your Wild Daylong Workshop
Writing and nature a good allies and good medicine. We invite you to spend a day in nature to explore the magical alchemy that can happen when you take the time to slow down, be really present to the natural world, and then write from that place.
Fall Wilderness Vision Quest
The voice of your true self does not give up easily. It’s been whispering to you, maybe for a long time, and maybe the time to listen has arrived at last. The modern day vision quest is a new-old practice of setting time aside in sacred ceremony to be by ourselves in wild nature in order to leave behind the voices of the world, cross over into a liminal space where our senses re-awaken and we are able to re-member our place as a part of and a-kin to nature.
Wild Nature Heart’s wilderness vision quest program involves 2 days of preparation, a 24-36 hour solo fast, and 1 day of incorporation before returning home. The fast is not only from food, but from news, devices, and other ways we can distract ourselves. Our programs are small (group of 4-6 participants), to ensure an intimate setting.
Celebrate Your Summer Wild Nature Heart
Nature is the Master Teacher. One of the biggest lessons is that change is a constant and movement is perpetual–nature unfurls the next moment/season/image out of the old. This applies as much to the movement within–can we be present with this ever fascinating dance?
Our Wild Nature Hearts are rich from spring nurturing and swelling with the unfolding summer season. In April, we marked spring with a powerful EMERGENCE weekend of nature, community, and soul witnessing. It feels like yesterday we were sitting in the meadow together in council circle with the sun on our backs, creating nature art, mirroring, sense walking, and singing and sharing around the fire.
It was such an honor to share time in sacred circle with 7 other people on the land! We all returned nourished by each other’s soul stories and a connection with the earth community. The mystery of how it is that the exact right people show up to weave the tapestry of interconnected stories continues to astound us. And it’s what feeds us as we create new programs.
Now, spring is ripening into summer and Wild Nature Heart too is ripening with summer programs that celebrate wholeness, affirm our sensual bodies, and embrace our big dreams with purpose and playfulness.
Many summer fruits are growing, but we are excited to announce two of our juiciest: Say Yes to Your Wild Nature Heart July Wilderness Journey and our Claim Your Wholeness and Soul Calling Individual Mentoring Packages.
Of course, we are also continuing to expand our free themed Meetups along the American River in Sacramento and the redwoods in the Oakland hills.
OTHER OFFERINGS & UPCOMING EVENTS
- Ryan is offering custom-designed 1-5 Night Individual and Small Group Guided Soul-rooted Wilderness Journeys during parts of July through September–Contact us with your dates and needs.
- Nature Art From the Heart – FREE EVENT (June 2, Redwood Regional Park, Oakland)
- The Way of Council and the Four Shields – FREE EVENT (June 3, River Bend Park, Sacramento/Rancho Cordova)
- Wilderness Vision Fast (August 22-26, Yosemite Backcountry – Contact us for details)
Why the Wild?
Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.” — Terry Tempest Williams
Why the wild?
We embrace wild nature to not abandon ourselves.
We go to listen. We go to remember. There we can hear without distraction. Without the million and one voices of the world that want us to be and do things their way.
We can hear the true things at the center of our selves, the deepest whisperings, the ways in which we show up with either fear or love.
Wild nature is our most ancient place of belonging. It is us. We are one facet of the great wild expression. That is why it can be a clear and powerful mirror for the movements of our psyche.
Whenever there is too much: grief, busy-ness, confusion, unknowing, anxiety, distraction, pain…we can go into the wild and there find the answers within and all the juicier questions.
And we go to celebrate, to play with joy amidst the beauty of our natural world, to have that love affair with the bigger, more-than-human world.
There we access the deeper breaths, the richer dreams, the soft and strong animal of our creature bodies, and the natural eros that permeates ourselves and the world.
It is where we can find more clearly the wisdom of the psyche and the wisdom of the body having that conversation with the wider intelligence of the world.
We step into our fullest selves and wildness meets us fully in return.
Spring Emergence Weekend
It was a powerful weekend of nature, community, and soul unfurling. It feels like yesterday we were sitting in the meadow together in council circle with the sun on our backs, creating nature art, mirroring, sense walking, and singing and sharing around the fire.
It was such an honor to share time in sacred circle with 7 other people on the land! We return feeling nourished by everybody’s soul stories and the connection with the earth community. The mystery of how it is that the exact right people show up to weave the tapestry of interconnected stories continues to astound us. Here’s a small glimpse of the magic.
Gratitude to all!
Happy National Poetry Month!
🦋April may be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot immortalized in his poem The Wasteland, though we don’t think so. We are rather fond this time of year, because of the longer days and the land stirring with life, but also because it’s National Poetry Month. It’s a month for all of us word- and nature-lovers to geek out on writing, reading, breathing, swimming in earth #poetry and give full controls over to our mytho-poetic consciousness.
SHARE an original #poem with us and on your social media channels with the theme of EMERGENCE, SPRING, or PLANTING. Then tag @WildNatureHeart and use the hashtag #wildnatureheart. We’ll share some of your poetry on our Instagram and Facebook, PLUS we’ll feature one of our favorites in our #spring Newsletter.
Happy poeming!!
Katie and Ryan
Here’s the rest of the poem that the above image introduces, called “I Bent My Ear” by one half of Wild Nature Heart, Ryan Van Lenning.
They were calling for attention
as I walked past—
the ladybugs and horsetails
the mugwort and the trillium
bellowing the rainbow through the redwoods
and baby ferns
curled like seahorses of the forest
confided in me
I supposed I could have kept up my pace
stepping past them,
never learning what song they were singing
or what the the slug was saying
in its bright hum of the earth
from his banana mouth
and sure-footed saunter
But as they were calling
so charmingly and gently
I slowed down
bent my ear
and gave them what they asked for.
And here’s the first few lines of The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot.