Walking Together On An Ecospiritual Liberatory Journey
I’m both tickled like a butterfly and hungry like a caterpillar for Wild Nature Heart’s new course/journey starting next month.
THRESHOLD: Earth Intimacies and the Art of Transformation is a 6-week course journey dedicated to tending both our personal and collective thresholds with intention and heart. With the images of threshold crossing and caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation as guiding metaphors, we will deepen our ecospiritual practices, practice being present with the whole of what is at our doorstep, and proliferate imaginal buds for what is emerging.
This course/journey is one container to deepen into the next turn of our spiral and where we can meet each other, stay with the awe and trouble, and be transformed.
Over 6 weeks, we’ll explore through Online Gatherings, Council Circle, Poetry, Somatic & Soulful Practices, and Creative Expression.
The style is emergent, playful, curious, awkward, vulnerable, and honoring.
THEMES WE WILL TEND:
🦋Crossing the Threshold: Intention and Inquiry
🦋Ecological Intimacies & Sacred Kin Apprenticeships
🦋Sacred Pauses and Deep Listening
🦋Cultivating the Proliferation of Imaginal Cells
🦋Sacred Grief and Pleasure as Portals to Liberation
🦋Uncertainty: Sitting in the Waves & Expanding Our Skies Within
🦋From Caterpillar Modernity to Butterfly Earth
𝘈 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘰 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘰𝘳 𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘰𝘯-𝘵𝘩𝘦-𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 ceremony/𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘦-𝘰𝘧-𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘢𝘨𝘦
DATES: Fridays, Oct. 13 – Nov. 17
TIME: 10:00am – 12:00 pm Pacific Time | 6-8pm GMT
WHERE: ONLINE – Zoom (and practices with the land between)
Recommended Investment: $199
Other options: $149-$249
*10% of the course’s proceeds will go to front-line water & earth protectors.
**Scholarships available for BIPOC
If this alluringly stirs something in you, JOIN HERE Or drop me a line: ryan@wildnatureheart.com
I’m both excited and curious about Wild Nature Heart’s new course container starting next month. Falling Off the Map is premised on the sneaking suspicion that we’ve exhausted the exhausting maps we’re caught in. That we are being invited to fall through inherited maps into new/old territories of being and relating and imagining.
It is oriented more around questions than answers, as too quick and certain answers might be one way we try to dominate mystery, maintain control, and manage our anxieties.
🌞How can we relearn to honor and listen to/with/as Water? As a being in its own right, with fluid intelligence and the source of life?
🌞What if we lived and loved from a space of deep time?
🌞What if we apprentice to slugs, practicing S.L.U.G. (Slow Life Is Unparalleled Greatness)?
🌞What if we kissed other-kin in the center of our cells?
🌞What if grief is a sacred portal calling us back home?
🌞What if lichen can help complicate our notions of identity as individual selves?
🌞What happens if we sit with the bare shit in the woods?
🌞What if “Wonder is an essential survival skill for the Anthropocene”? (Robert Macfarlane)
🌞What if this civilization is already dead? To what/whom shall we give allegiance?
🌞What if we called our anxiety desire, and let it be a garden? (Natalie Diaz)
🌞What if the interpersonal is political is interspecies?
🌞What if instead of living in someone else’s tired imagination we poured our longings into a new collective dreamshed?
FALLING OFF THE MAP: Trickster Practice In the Great Composting is an 8-week interactive course dedicated to proliferating imaginal buds and practicing ways of being beyond the inherited coordinates of Modernity, through an animist, ecospiritual, liberatory lens.
Over 8 weeks we will explore together through Online Gatherings, Council Circle, Emergent Dialogue, Poetry, apprenticing to water, slug, and lichen, dream council, and integration activities.
The style is emergent, playful, curious, awkward, vulnerable, & honoring.
DATES: March 24-May 12TIME: 10am-12pm PST | 6-8pm GMTWHERE: Zoom
If this alluringly stirs something in you, Register to join Or drop me a line: ryan@wildnatureheart.com
💧Recite the eon-long poems in our blood
💧Relish our grand and gratuitous re-enchantment
💧Kiss the other-kin in the center of our cells
💧Allow prophetic artistry to germinate from our magnificent failures
💧Waltz whimsically with all the big and little deaths
💧Let our inner cops out of jail
💧Caress each other’s voluptuous sacred wounds
💧Give mad meanders to ourselves and others as sacred gifts of holy unscripted dream-frothing
💧Embrace every subtle turn in the thick now, and every now amidst each paw print in the turn
💧Inhabit the inexhaustible sky within our extended nervous system
💧Enlist the species of our dreamshed ecosystem as agents of co-liberatory remembering
💧Activate magic metabolisms acquired and acrobatic
💧Eat the long shadow into ourselves like one walking from dawn to noon
💧Evoke erotic enzymes as engines of transmutation dissolving imperial incarcerations
💧Feel through to the furry and ferned fingertips on the landscape, caressing life
💧With delicious dendritic swarming map new cartographies of animist aberrations
💧Drink and be drunk by more wild water 💦
Winter Solstice blessings!
May we relish deep rest and be nourished by the slow gift of fruitful darkness, wooing and embracing the dark parts of us into the circle of Self ⭕️. May we nurture the inner fire on our darkest nights. May we honor the returning light and bless the gifts we hope to embody in our next season, greeting Sun with a smile and song.
I. Sip the Season Darkly
Darkness has arrived
wrapping its inky cloak
across the season of our lives
long shadows and owls
stand tall and salute
the arc of autumn’s slow song
becoming winter’s long march
asking us not skip too quickly
over the hour
with an eager eye grasping
towards cherry blossoms
awaiting on the other side
Drink deeply from the season,
they say
Drink from the cup overflowing
with the sweet & fruitful darkness
Sip the season darkly
in its slow embrace
Wisdom hidden from summer’s glare
may yet pass our lips
should we have the thirst for it
The bright and busy world goes under:
We go to the cave, the secret one
in the mountain of ourselves
seeking stillness
and listen for it—
the true voices amidst
The Silence.
Can you hear them?
II. Within the Cave Something Pulses
We’ve been here before.
Many times—as far back
as it will be forever forth.
The Big Rhythm holds it all.
Within the cave something pulses.
We hear it, feel it, even now
that which deepest dark cannot smother
and even winter’s hands cannot touch
tender tendrils of a luscious vine
bearing the wine of our heart
Some secret vial
distilled for this very hour
to sip the season brightly
A Remembering—Aha!
Sun too misses its lover earth
and cannot too long stay away.
Like you, Sun was meant for this: to shine.
To not share that big love is a wounding.
So in this darkest hour
the sun knocks on the nearest horizon
and announces The Return with a steady beat:
“Dear Love, I’m Here.”
Which is exactly what we find
written on the walls of our cave:
“Dear Love, I’m Here”
As we open new eyes
like the first breath after coma
and though it’s just a whisper now
it is enough to start it all again
and again…again….again…
“You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything-
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! –
powers and people-
and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.” – Rainer Marie Rilke
Befriending darkness can take many forms. In an over-illuminated world, could it be that we’ve let go of some of our ancestral connection to the gifts of night? Some have even proposed that because of light pollution, kids growing up without the wisdoms and mystery of the night sky are deprived of something essential to being human. Could we begin to treat darkness as a long-lost lover with whom we can reconnect?
1)Noticing Illumination
Practically, we can begin to notice how our easy access to nighttime illumination in our homes and neighborhoods can override our body’s messages or the season’s recommended daily allowance of darkness. Or what about that all-too-common modern urge to scroll our phone before we lay our head down for the night? Where are we banishing darkness? What effect do these habits have on our nervous system? Our quality of sleep? Our natural rhythms?
2)Silent Night Walk
Just what it sounds like. Find a nice, safe area to take a meander when it is dark. What do you notice that you don’t notice in full visibility of daylight, in yourself and the surroundings? If going alone does not feel good, go with a friend and make a commitment to keep part of the walk in silence.
3)Dark Bathing
You’ve heard of forest bathing. You’ve maybe flirted with rain bathing. Dark bathing is like sky-gazing but you sit or lay in complete darkness. You allow yourself to float on the waves of darkness, becoming permeable to its soothing waters. In darkness, our perception of form dissolves, which can allow us to experience different textures inside and out.
4)Invoke your inner slug
We might spend time with slugs, snails, mushrooms or other slow creatures, or evoke their image and energy. Can we meet the slow ones at their pace? Sometimes even watching a video of them regulates my nervous system and brings out a deeper breath.
For regular things you do, try it 80% of your normal pace. Now how about a half of the speed? Do you notice any resistances within to letting go of freneticism and list-making?
This isn’t about not getting things done. But about bringing presence to what is being done. We can also practice delayed responses and pregnant pauses, becoming comfortable with silence, not filling the space.
5)Sense Walk (see handout in week #2)
Evoking your other senses while covering your eyes
6)Saying no/saying yes
To support our own pace, we might practice saying no to another’s rhythm, and say yes to your own. For some, this is actually the hardest, because of ingrained people-pleasing coping mechanisms, though it can be where the real juice is.
This is where we also notice narratives that arise and accompanying emotions like guilt. How can you also invoke your inner slug and fungi to help compost those narratives and emotions?
7)Slow Eating and Eat for the First-Time Challenge
How would you approach a banana if you’d never seen one before? A pomegranate? A few years ago I started doing a video-taped “eat for the first time challenge”, where I encounter a fruit or vegetable as if I’d never seen or tasted it before. It was meant to be more humorous than ecospiritual, but it was a good way to experience with beginner’s mind. It also re-awakened the simple awe and mystery of the things we put into our bodies everyday. An extension of this can be to bring to mind all of the processes and people, human and not human, that it took to get that particular food to you. Guaranteed to keep us rooted in gratitude and slowness.
8)Befriend the Smalls and Nighttime Creatures
What about those ladybugs? That blade of grass with one bulging dew drop? That snail and the piece of lichen they are munching on? Or how about the unseen, but heard critters in the night? The owls and coyotes?
Have you ever noticed that when people are asked to envision an animal ally it’s often a majestic bird or mammal, like a jaguar or eagle? I remember when slug and soil and beetle came to me, it felt like I was no longer overlooking a whole world under my feet (literally).
Don’t forget the Smalls in your basket of Whos
Don’t forget the smells when you’re looking for clues
Don’t forget your nose when you’re searching for hints
Don’t forget the sense of all of the scents
Don’t forget your ear, to put to the ground
Don’t forget the slow when you forage for sounds
Don’t forget to see from the snail-point-of-view
Don’t forget the Smalls in your basket of Whos