Wild Nature Heart
Walking Together On An Ecospiritual Liberatory Journey
From Inside These Wild Ones: Dispatches from Somewhere in the Entanglement
Some years ago, I launched an experiment: for most of a couple years, I lived almost entirely outside in local forests. Either with a tent or without, with only the breathing sky as heart-home roof, I called redwoods and rivers my home, my kin.
As the poem ‘The Silent Here of Things’ puts it in From Inside These Wild Ones: “I never walked so slow, never inhaled so many trees / savored so many stars / Dawn hung around my neck / like a sigil / river stones became emblems / of radiant belonging.”
Sometimes I would nudge into morning breakfast with swallows, mallards, deer, silver lupine, and the poet William Stafford or Ko Un on the riverbank. Other days were met with the scent of bay tree and bear, peregrine and the treasures of storms.
All this was by choice, a decision I made in order to live closer to the land, learn from the seasons, and align with my purposes. I wanted to lean into a multi-species, embodied, and soulful participation in the unfolding symphony of life. It was simultaneously one of the most grounding and exhilarating couple years in my life. It was not always easy, but never have I felt so consistently alive.
But truth be told, it was also a feeble attempt to escape—or at least not overly invest in—the values and conceits of Modernity, and its accumulated noise, machines, waste, and wars. While the story of that wrestling match is a different one, I can say that it provided me with both the perspectives and fuel to be able to stay rooted while also staying with The Trouble.
When I crossed the threshold of that pilgrimage, I had said I was apprenticing to the seasons and deep listening. To the call of poetry and guiding people into their own versions of deeper belonging in their own lives. The lessons and insights are incalculable, ones I am still integrating.
I learned everything is a window. I learned Everywho speaks and is unabashedly themselves. I learned a keener inter-dependence with the living and dying more-than-human world. I learned to caress the contours of a Grand Meandering pouring mountain hearsay into the ears of the sea.
Above all (below all?), I learned that whatever deep belonging is, it is something not earned, but inherent, by virtue of our intimate relationships within the animate web of life, as citizen of the Cosmos. There can be no loneliness in such a robust community.
All these are lessons and messages that can be difficult to hear within the stale scripts of an OverCulture that we inherited, one that has severed us from so much that is our human birthright.
This experiment in threshold living was the context in which the poems in the first books Re-Membering, High-Cooing Through the Seasons, and One Bright and Real Caress were born, as well as the majority of the poems found in From Inside These Wild Ones.
An anarchist ecology would remind us that we’ve only been inside this rusty cage of the OverCulture for a few seconds and here as humans for a few minutes, from the perspective of Deep Time.
Most of those minutes have not been cursed with the burden of over-civilization. Yet we’ve been here as Earth and Cosmos for billions—this ‘We’ is infinitely more entangled than we generally appreciated.
As ‘We Are’ puts it: The Era of I-Over is over. Deep We is calling.
The miracle is: we can always still lean into the raucous conversion of a world abuzz with vitalities. We can invoke our stardust and mycelium citizenships into threshold experiments. The biopoetics of fungi and watershed intimacies, of esoteric amphibianism and whimsical time-banditry with tree people suggest ways to not only join with coyotes stalking the perimeter of chronically-successful/gloriously-failed empires, but playfully put down paw prints into the dirt of a post-imperial butterfly earth.
In the end, my hope is that From Inside These Wild Ones can be a call to re-member and rejoin the animate web of life—welcoming mystery, longing, intimacy, and sensual delight as integral to belonging on/with/as Earth, perhaps sparking new apprenticeships along the way.
These are dispatches from somewhere in that Entanglement.
You can get From Inside These Wild Ones from Amazon, Indiebound, or directly from me signed
From Inside These Wild Ones and Other Foraged Goodies
This summer I released 4 collections of earthy poetry. The first two are books 2 and 3 of the Re-Membering Poetry series. The third, Trust the Ceremony, is one I’ve been excited about for a while, and released 8 years to the day I did my very first wilderness ceremony. The fourth, An Ambitious Silence, is a home for some of the more strange, sometimes mystical, sometimes mysterious poems.
See the summaries below. Check them out, and I’d love to hear how they land for you.
One Bright and Real Caress
One Bright and Real Caress is a celebration of the moment. Of not escaping. Of impermanence. Of death as life partner. With syllables of relentless affirmation, these poems bring an unconditional caress over all the textures of life and our multitudes within. As an invitation to presence and an honoring of the all-too-real struggle to not flee the moment, One Bright and Real Caress welcomes every conceivable crescent mood, slivered and slow, with no aim but to edge out more and more into the whole ceremony and celebration.
One Bright and Real Caress is Book 2 in the Re-Membering Series.
Order the Paperback Here.
Download here as a pdf or get the Ebook directly from Bookshop or Amazon.
From Inside These Wild Ones
From Inside These Wild Ones is a collection of earthy poetry emerging from the author’s experiment of living outside with the seasons and the living sky as his heart-home roof. From bees, bears, and birds to storms, snakes, and silence, these poems honor the animate web of life and our intimate relationship inside it. The poems here are not only reminders of the mystery of our other-than-human kin, but evocations of the animals we are. Van Lenning weaves lyric, humor, and mythopoetic exploration to invite a multispecies, embodied, and soulful participation in the unfolding symphony of life. The beasts within are lurking, listening, yearning to live.
From Inside These Wild Ones is Book 3 in the Re-Membering Poetry Series.
Order the Paperback Here.
Available here as a .pdf or get the Ebook directly from Bookshop or Amazon HERE.
Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony
Arrive just as you are.
Arrive here empty,
arrive here full of all the sick and stuck,
with all the love and longing,
all your genius grief and gratitude
thick as your last tantrum…
So begins the opening poem of Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony, an equally mythopoetic and intimate exploration of personal and collective transformation through the framework of wilderness rite-of-passage and the dance of habit and surrender, breakdown and breakthrough, and the trust that subsidizes it all. Van Lenning uses rich metaphors and personal experiences to bring to life raw vulnerabilities that emerge on the journey toward initiation. Beginning with an invitation to cross the threshold into ceremony (whether that be on the land or the whole of Life) with a simple trust, the poems dive into the uncertainty and often necessary deaths that fuel transformation. With nature as mirror and guide, the poems travel through themes of surrender and the paradox of sacred ritual and messy life. Finally encouraging an embrace of each season of the journey, Trust the Ceremony summons a “Deep Green Trust” that weaves individual renewal with both community and cosmos. If you are a nature and poetry lover, this is the collection for you. May the poems Trust the Ceremony inspire your wild nature hearts and be a small part of The Great Turning.
Order the Paperback Here.
Download here as a pdf or get the Ebook directly from Bookshop or Amazon.
An Ambitious Silence
The trick has always been to be quiet enough to hear the things that need to be heard. Or at least willing to put one’s ear to the ground (or sky or heart) of silence in order to pick up something new/ancient, beyond the all-too-human. It turns out silence is not empty, but rich with raucous conversations. The poems harvested here include a biodiversity of voices: of the more-than-human, alter-egos, inner voices, ancestors, Muse, Mystic, and Mystery. Conversations with archetypes such as The Artisan, The Priestess, Butterfly, the Emperor of Dust, and Tumbleweed Tøm, reveal astonishing perspectives on cosmic unfolding, grief, belonging, presence, and post-imperial imaginings.
Whether maniacal or mysterious, delusional or delicious, An Ambitious Silence offer a symphony of vibrant voices and a multitude of un-author-ized conversations worth leaning into. Order Paperback Here.
Or get the Ebook directly from Amazon.
Books, Breath, and Botanicals Giveaway for Gaza
Like many of you, I rack my brain (& soul) to find ways we can help the people of Gaza who are being mass murdered & starved by apartheid israel with the aid of our government.
There are many ways to be part of the movements for Free Palestine. I am inspired by Sim Kern @sim_bookstagrams_badly, author of the new book Genocide Bad, to do a GIVEAWAY of a personalized & signed paperback copies of my new collections of poetry.
AND I’m teaming up with our friendly local post-capitalist communal rest & grief space/yoga studio A Restful Space (IG@arestfulspace) to add the Breathing for Palestine self-paced program, AND a special ‘Rest and Grieve’ herbal tincture custom made by @wildandwisecsa to the beauty basket.
So LET’S RAISE SOME CASH AND OUR VOICES FOR GAZA with some BOOK, BREATHE, & BOTANY Giveaways.
HOW IT WORKS: For this first round we are uplifting:
1)Water is Life – Gaza: Water truck delivery – 100% of proceeds go directly to supporting frontline relief efforts in Gaza. (Donate on IG @waterislifegaza or their website)
2)Lifeline4Gaza – Help Gaza families in need. Lifeline4Gaza curates mutual aid fundraising campaigns. lifeline4gaza.com
TO ENTER:
1)Donate at least $15, but as much as you are able, at one of the above
2)Send a screenshot of your receipt AND let us know how you used or are using your voice for Palestine this week (e.g. called your reps to demand the entry of food/medical supplies into Gaza and to support the Block the Bombs bill, a hard conversation with a family member, signed a petition, posted about the genocide that is happening, joined a protest, acted to boycott & divest from corporations that profit off genocide or joined a local divestment campaign, or joined in solidarity community. Perhaps do something new or growing edge for you.)
3)Email to FreePalestine@wildnatureheart.com
EVERYONE who participates will get a FREE downloadable .pdf of one of the books of your choice, and on Friday, August 22 I will draw randomly for someone to receive a SIGNED PAPERBACK poetry book of your choice, along with access to BREATHING FOR PALESTINE, and an herbal tincture to support Rest and Grief.
Thank you for doing what you can to help Palestinians. Let’s do this!
New Collection Available: An Ambitious Silence
The trick has always been to be quiet enough to hear the things that need to be heard. Or at least willing to put one’s ear to the ground (or sky or heart) of silence in order to pick up something new/ancient, beyond the all-too-human. It turns out silence is not empty, but rich with raucous conversations. The poems harvested here include a biodiversity of voices: of the more-than-human, alter-egos, inner voices, ancestors, Muse, Mystic, and Mystery. Conversations with archetypes such as The Artisan, The Priestess, Butterfly, the Emperor of Dust, and Tumbleweed Tøm, reveal astonishing perspectives on cosmic unfolding, grief, belonging, presence, and post-imperial imaginings.
Whether maniacal or mysterious, delusional or delicious, An Ambitious Silence offer a symphony of vibrant voices and a multitude of un-author-ized conversations worth leaning into.
Order Here.
Released Sept. 1. Books will be shipped then.
You can also get a digital E-book of An Ambitious Silence sent directly to your device from Amazon.
Ryan Van Lenning, M.A., is author of Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony, Re-Membering: Poems of Earth and Soul, One Bright and Real Caress, From Inside These Wild Ones, and High-Cooing Through the Seasons, a collection of haiku. His new collections Becoming Beautiful Barbarians and Riverever will be released throughout 2025-26. He is the 2019 recipient of Jodi Stutz Poetry Award by Toyon Literary Magazine and his work appears in journals and the books A Walk with Nature: Poetic Encounters That Nourish the Soul and Behind the Mask: 40 Quarantine Poems from Humboldt County. Ryan is founder of Wild Nature Heart, supporting people to re-connect with the wisdom of both inner and outer nature, to live their callings into the world, and to assist in the work of repairing broken belonging during this Great Turning. He is a teacher, ecotherapist, and wilderness rite-of-passage guide and lives among the forests and rivers of Northern California.
Testimonials for previous collection Re-Membering:
“Bless Ryan Van Lenning for listening to the wild voices and bringing back the news for those who have lost their way. Bless him for reminding us of our original love affair with the earth and of what we know deep in our souls. His poems give wise counsel: let go of the debris, remember who you are, do not abandon your luminous thread.” —Lorraine Anderson, editor of Sisters of the Earth and Earth & Eros “Ryan’s poetry speaks deeply and clearly to the awakening to our true interconnected nature, which is the only way we can transform our world.” –Molly Young Brown, Author of Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects (co-authored with Joanna Macy), Editor of Deep Times: A Journal of the Work That Reconnects
“Ryan’s poetry sprouts out of him from moist, fertile soil – painting a lush landscape of sensual and philosophical magic. His poems transport you to a way of living in relationship with the earth that is lovingly intimate. Ryan integrates body, spirit, and social commentary into a vision of how to live a nature-inspired life amidst noise and overrun technology. ” Ariana Candell, LMFT, Founder of The Earthbody Institute
UPCOMING WILD NATURE HEART OFFERINGS
In addition to offering evergreen earth-rooted mentoring and ecotherapy, and custom wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony, I’m thrilled to be able to offer a basketful of programs in the next few months.
Deep Belonging in the Great Turning (begins Oct. 1) was Wild Nature Heart’s first flagship course, foundational deepening in our earth-connectedness and supporting your next, aligned steps. This will be the fourth round, and anchors on what I call the 7 Ps of Belonging (Pace, Place, People, Purpose, Play, Pain, and Possibility). The next round of Earth Intimacies, beginning Sept. 5, will be the third round, this time adding new more-than-human kin with whom we will apprentice, an exploration of soundscapes, and a new session on being what I’m calling “Emergence Aware”, the mirror of being ‘Collapse Aware.’ Write Your Wild River‘s first two rounds were so so sweet, fun, and creative that I’m already eager for cohort that begins October 2. If you’re looking to support your creative awesomness, this is a great container for that.
See more below:
DEEP BELONGING IN THE GREAT TURNING (6 Wednesdays beginning October 1)
Situating our current moment of multiple crises and opportuunity as the Great Turning, Deep Beloning is a 6-week experience for people hearing the call to cultivate their ecospirituality, deepen their journey beyond inherited scripts, and practice belonging to pace, place, and purpose as we intentionally meet this collective initiation of intersecting ecological/social crises and opportunity.
We explore what I call the seven Ps of Belonging (Place, Pace, People, Purpose, Pain, Pleasure, and Possibility). For example, how do we divest from the Colonial Clock and re-connect more deeply to natural cycles (season, moon, sun, deep time) and to the pace of the body? How can we think of our wild purpose ecologically, as a niche in the ecosystem of repair? How to we both not turn away from the wounds of the world, while also allowing our pleasure to be liberatory? (Find out More HERE)
🦋EARTH INTIMACIES (Every other Friday beginning Sept. 5)
Earth Intimacies is a 6-week interactive course dedicated to intentionally re-inhabiting the animate web of life. We will deepen our ecospiritual intimacies by tending sacred relationships with the other-than-human world (including Water, Moon, Lichen, Mycelium, feathered friends, Soundscapes, Emergence, and more), practice cultivating belonging and honoring longings, and proliferate imaginal buds for what is emerging in this Great Turning.
(Find out More HERE)
💦 WRITE YOUR WILD RIVER: A 6-WEEK Poetry & Nature Playshop (Beginning Oct. 2)
This 6-week workshop explores the play/craft of creative writing through an embodied, earth-centered, liberatory lens, and simultaneously, explore our embodied, earthy, multi-faceted selves through the exploration of poetry.
We will create a river of words that tap into Earth as poet and the melody of our whole, multi-faceted, messy, brilliant selves. Each week will focus on a different theme (see below), using open conversation, embodied practice, and visualization as inspiration for creative experimentation. Each week includes generative writing prompts, somatic solicitations, readings of poems, spaciousness for exploring particular energies, and generous mirroring in a relaxed, supportive online environment.
No previous poetry or creative writing experience required. All experiences levels welcome.
Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony
I’m really excited about this one. It is being released 8 years after my own very first wilderness rite of passage program. It feels like coming full circle.
Arrive here just as you are.
Arrive here empty,
arrive here full of all the sick and stuck,
with all the love and longing,
all your genius grief and gratitude
thick as your last tantrum…
So begins the opening poem of Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony, an equally mythopoetic and intimate exploration of personal and collective transformation through the framework of wilderness rite-of-passage and the dance of habit and surrender, breakdown and breakthrough, and the trust that subsidizes it all. Van Lenning uses rich metaphors and personal experiences to bring to life raw vulnerabilities that emerge on the transformational journey. Beginning with an invitation to cross the threshold into ceremony (whether that be on the land or the whole of Life) with a simple trust, the poems dive into the uncertainty and often necessary deaths that fuel shapeshifting. With nature as mirror and guide, the poems travel through themes of surrender and the paradox of sacred ritual and messy life. Finally encouraging an embrace of each season of the journey, Trust the Ceremony summons a “Deep Green Trust” that weaves individual renewal with both community and cosmos.
Release date August 15.
Pre-orders available HERE.
🌀Honoring Joanna Macy – Thank you
You may have heard that earth elder Joanna Macy is in her final days. She is in hospice space surrounded by family and friends. You can find updates at CaringBridge, and leave a message.
I feel moved to honor her and name a few of the many things I have learned from Joanna and her body of work and play, from her teaching, courage, transparency, and passion. Which of course overlap with the perspectives of all true elders:
1)The Hard Stuff – the absolute necessity of acknowledging the difficult and complicated energies and feelings, the sadness and anger and hopelessness and confusion—now sometimes called eco-grief and others—as essential feedback of Earth/Gaia. Honoring our grief is honoring our love. She would say, “It is OK for our Hearts to be broken over the world. What else are hearts for? There’s great intelligence in that.”
I remember the first time seeing Joanna. She was keynote at an ecopsychology conference, and she began by simply being, in that graceful way of presence true elders embody. Then right off she named the grief and fear in the collective that everyone was feeling, but didn’t like to talk about – and suddenly that needed mirror allowed us all to be more human. I was not alone in shedding tears. She said her biggest fear was that we would turn on each other as things collapse. This was pre-covid, before the current fascist ascendency, before this current phase of Palestinian genocide, before the hottest years on record.
Still – up until this very moment she continues to lean into the fullness of our experience, not shying away from feeling what needs to be felt, naming what needs to be named (this week she was wearing a t-shirt with Smokey the Bear saying “Only you can prevent fascism”).
“Truth-telling is like oxygen: it enlivens us. Without it we grow confused and numb. It is also a homecoming, bringing us back to powerful connection.”
2)”What a gift to be alive right now” – How fortunate we are to be alive right now, to experience this disruption, this awkward Collective Initiation of humanity into the next way of being and relating rooted in limits and true belonging, and to lend our talents and broad shoulders to the wheel of the Great Turning. Just as Joanna is now in that liminal threshold moment, that betwixt-and-between space between life and death, so we are living in that liminal moment between the old ways dying and new ways being birthed.
3)Deep Time – Understanding that we are the ancestors of Future Ones and what we do now matters. Knowing that we also come with enormous gifts bequeathed to us by the ones that came before. A Deep Time perspective helps to frame our brief moment here in a larger context, beyond the attention economy and frenetic pace of the OverCulture. For me, deep time practices are absolutely essential for staying rooted and resilient in the face of what is being asked of us.
4)Active Hope – Let’s face it, there’s no shortage of darkness, no lack of things to evoke despair. We all need to feel all is not hopeless bullshit. Joanna was a model for practicing not dwelling in the realms of despair or naive hope. In rooting in deepest values and trying to live in integrity, regardless of consequences. She would say we don’t have enough information or wide enough perception to make either wishful thinking or despair our final home.
I appreciate Joanna Macy’s way of holding Hope as active, something we do, not have: “If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”
5)Gratitude – The Spiral of the Work That Reconnect begins with Gratitude. We say it is the foundation from which everything else flows. Joanna said that “Gratitude is subversive to consumer society. Late capitalism, fated to strive for growth in corporate profits, conditions us to acquire and to keep on feeling insufficient so we keep on acquiring. In such a political economy, gratitude is a revolutionary act.”
There are so many more learnings and lessons, which I’m sure will continue to unfold over time, but I think I’ll end with my own note of gratitude directly to Joanna:
Dear Joanna,
You are in my thoughts, just as you have been in my heart and dreams over the years since I first learned of you and your body of work/play. Some years ago I sent you a copy of my first poetry book. I was surprised and honored when one day I received a postcard from you thanking me and offering words of wisdom.
I once had a dream where you were visiting a class I was teaching- I introduced you, and you said it was nice to see me again and kissed me on the forehead. I put my hands on your shoulder and looked you in the eye and told you how thankful I was for you being here.
So that is what I want to say now:
Thank you for being here. Thank you for being steadfast in your vision and for offering your compassion, insight, grace, and grit to a world in need. The world is a grander and kinder place for you having been in/with/as it. May this next threshold crossing be gentle and all the needed things.
Thank you Joanna!
And thank you all who are living love over fear, who are sharing your gifts and your hearts for the healing of a world in need.
with the iridescent song-loops of thrush and thunder moon through red firs,
Ryan
New Poetry Collections! One Bright and Real Caress & From Inside These Wild Ones
It’s been a polypoetic productive wow of the den time. I’m happy to have both tended emergent spring seedlings and rallied some organizational gusto to get together a few new collections of poetry. I’m particularly thrilled about these two as they’ve wanting to find wings for a while now. If you are a nature and poetry lover, I think you’ll love these collections. Some of them you may even seen here on this blog. May the poems inspire your wild nature hearts and be a small part of The Great Turning.
The first ones released are One Bright and Real Caress and From Inside These Wild Ones. Paperback pre-orders and E-Book copies available now.
One Bright and Real Caress is a celebration of the moment. Of not escaping. Of impermanence. Of death as life partner. With syllables of relentless affirmation, these poems bring an unconditional caress over all the textures of life and our multitudes within. As an invitation to presence and an honoring of the all-too-real struggle to not flee the moment, One Bright and Real Caress welcomes every conceivable crescent mood, slivered and slow, with no aim but to edge out more and more into the whole ceremony and celebration.
One Bright and Real Caress is Book 2 in the Re-Membering Series.
Paperback pre-order available now.
Release date summer solstice, June 20.
AND/Or: Download your digital copy of One Bright and Real Caress now HERE. You can also get a digital e-book sent directly to your device from Amazon.
From Inside These Wild Ones is a collection of earthy poetry emerging from the author’s experiment of living outside with the seasons and the living sky as his heart-home roof. From bees, bears, and birds, to storms, snakes, and silence, these poems honor the animate web of life and our intimate relationship inside it. The poems here are not only reminders of the mystery of our other-than-human kin, but evocations of the animals we are. These 75 poems weave lyric, humor, and mythopoetic exploration to invite a multi-species, embodied, and soulful participation in the unfolding symphony of life. The beasts within are lurking, listening, yearning to live.
From Inside These Wild Ones is Book 3 in the Re-Membering Series.
Paperback pre-order available now.
Release date July, 2025.
AND/OR: Download your digital copy of From Inside These Wild Ones Now as a pdf here.
You can also get the E-book sent directly to your device from Amazon.
The Paperback version of From Inside These Wild Ones will be released July 24, 2025.
Sign up here if you want to be among the first to know when the other new collections An Ambitious Silence, Becoming Beautiful Barbarians, and Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony become available over the rest of 2025.
In the meantime, you can always get the first book in the series: Re-Membering: Poems of Earth and Soul.
with purple irises singing spring,
Ryan, Wild Nature Heart
10 Reasons to Participate in a Wilderness Rite-of-Passage Ceremony
- Ancestral remembering: spending time stripped away of our defenses, and steeped in conversation with the more-than-human world is hardwired in us.
- The meaning of intuition and self-trust will expand exponentially.
- Abundant Spaciousness to really feel what has been paved over by the pace or structure of our day-to-day lives (whether that’s grief, pleasure, anger, vitality, ecstasy, or otherwise).
- To mark a letting go, a celebration, a claiming of gifts, or honoring of a transition.
- To resurrect our natural ritual intelligence: self-generated ceremony on the land is likely and an intuitive way to connect.
- There’s no greater fear than fear of ourselves, which is to say, there’s no greater way to face our fears than to face and embrace ourselves.
- Having our sacred stories being heard and held in a circle of peers and elders is ancient, healing, profound medicine.
- Hearing and holding others’ sacred stories is ancient, healing, and profound medicine.
- To re-enter your life in alignment with what is most alive in you.
- To re-member why you came here.
Crossing the Threshold is a four-month sacred journey, combining expressive arts and nature connection and culminating in an on-the-land Wilderness Rite-of-Passage Ceremony. There’s still time to register—our first gathering is Monday night— when we will begin to gather twice a month online to connect, deepen our intentions, explore the elements, and attune to our inner and outer wilderness landscapes. The program culminates in a 6-day rite-of-passage ceremony on the land, where you will have two-nights out solo on the land and 4 days connecting in earth community, holding space for others and allowing yourself to be witnessed in your authentic story.
Free Range Poetry Stand – Guttural Utterance of Holy Unknowing
After a long rainy winter, happy to put the free range poetry stand up again. It’s the little things. Poetry is one of my trampoline springs—along with friends, gardening, nature’s cycles, music, River, solidarity, teaching, silence, and birdsong—that’s keeping me buoyed in the midst of the tremendous Trouble.
Plus Some cute pacific dust lichen perhaps on the redwood base from the land here. What are your resiliency trampoline springs?
GUTTURAL UTTERANCE OF HOLY UNKNOWING
Be it not a prayer for more.
Forgo a petition or polyrhythmic pleading.
This is not asking for one more damn thing from Earth.
This is a guttural utterance of holy unknowing,
a shuddering body-gate of gratitude.
A permission to feel, disguised as an offering of redemptive non-sense.
A watershed shakedown
of every last resistance.
A contraband clearing out smuggled in
as renegade riverside rhythms.
This is surrender and a cracked-ear heart.
A double rainbow breath birthing grace.
This is an ‘I’m here,’
opening my everything.
___________________________________
Upcoming Programs:
🦋THRESHOLD: EARTH INTIMACIES & THE GREAT TURNING (6 Wednesdays begins May 7)
CROSSING THE THRESHOLD: A four-month sacred journey, combining expressive arts nature connection, culminating in a 6 day Wilderness Rite-of-Passage Ceremony. (5 Monday evenings online May -August; and 6 days on-the-land June 26-July 1)
🐉BECOMING BEAUTIFUL BARBARIANS: A Community of Practice and Inquiry for Igniting Imagination Beyond Empire
(8 Fridays Starting Sept. 5)
10 EARTH DAY-IS-EVERY-MOMENT ACTIONS
🌏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
🌏Become accomplices for indigenous sovereignty, frontline water & earth protectors, Black, Trans, and Palestinian liberation, reparations, relocalized 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
🌏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 (the 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.
Free Info Session for Crossing the Threshold – Sunday, 6-7pm
Join us (Jillynn and Ryan) today (Sunday) form 6pm-7pm PST to learn more about the Crossing the Threshold Wilderness Rite-of-Passage/Expressive Arts Ecotherapy program.
We’d love to meet you, jam on wilderness ceremony, expressive arts Ecotherapy, and answer any questions.
RSVP and get Zoom link here.
Crossing the Threshold is a four-month sacred journey, combining elements of ecotherapy and expressive arts and culminating in a 6 wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony on the land.
Beginning in May, we will gather online to connect, deepen our intentions for our next steps aligned with our purpose, explore the 4 elements, and attune to our inner and outer wilderness landscapes. The program culminates in a 6-day renewal rite-of-passage ceremony on the land, where you will have two-nights out solo on the land and 4 days connecting in earth community, deepening in ceremony, and allowing ourselves to be witnessed in our authentic stories.
Practicing Unpaving – Flowing the Creative Life
n this week’s Write Your Wild River course, a truth landing in me deeper than before regarding what the course is really about:
It’s ostensibly a course about poetry, but it’s really about walking each other home. It’s ostensibly about creative writing, but is really about creating our lives. It’s ostensibly about nature connection and flow, but it’s really about inhabiting the web of life more deeply and re-claiming parts of our wholeness.
Our theme this week was sacred grief and rage, and we are practicing Unpaving as an act of being human. An act of anti-colonial shape-shaping. An act of returning and re-membering.
All this is what fuels all wild nature heart programs.
And yes, we looked at poems by Elizabeth Bishop and adrienne maree brown and talked about the villanelle form and alliteration. And yes, we wrote on what our anger is wanting and how our grief wants to be figured in image and describing where we are from using sense-based memories, images, and textures.
Next week we explore the creative erotic and the slow caress. We’ll embody ecosensuality and write our desire. How can we slowly savor our subject with words? Where in our life can we bring a sensual touch?
But the subtle-not-so-subtle current that underwrites all this is how we are flowing our Rivers into the Greater Sea of who we really are.
Another Write Your Wild River cohort begins Tuesday morning, running for 6 weeks. Check it out if your River wants to meander with other creative tributaries.
🌞What is Emerging?
Equinox Blessings! – What is Emerging?
Spring is emerging.
New Life is emerging.
The symphonies of pacific wren are emerging.
Solidarity is emerging.
Salmonberry flowers are emerging.
Paved-over-grief is emerging.
Free flowing rivers are emerging.
Swamp lanterns are emerging.
Buried rage is emerging.
Unfurling ferns are emerging.
Bison and butterfly nation are emerging.
Collective Liberation is emerging.
Deep listening is emerging.
And Sun always and already shines on a Free Palestine. We just have to catch up.
Which Dr. King Will We Honor?
Which Dr. King will we honor and learn from this year: Will it be the agreeable, safe King that calls for service and nominal equality – or will it be the radical, fierce King who calls for questioning what he called the triple evils of capitalism, racism and militarism?
As we mark Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, we see the ways his dream is ignored and misappropriated, reaffirming how often we will do anything to not feel discomfort. But what about his deeper dream of the “beloved community” that was anti-militarist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and rooted in love?
Modernity includes those pillars of capitalism, militarism, and racism. But it also includes the harmful legacies, now global in scale, that include hyper-individualism, separations of all sorts (including disconnection from nature, spirit, community), binaries of all sorts (including mind-body split & gender), and supremicisms of all sorts, including white body supremacy and human supremacy.
These are systems we both inherited and continue to perpetuate. They are ultimately bankrupt and harmful systems for EVERYONE, chockful of values, habits, and ways of being sourced in intended trauma.
When we allow ourselves to fully know what healing requires, what ecotherapy invites, and what steering our collective ship in this Great Turning could mean in its broadest application, we know in our bones it requires the type of uncompromising questioning of systems that Dr. King practiced. That the most ecological thing we can do is to compost White Modernity’s Empire.
Part of the composting is explicitly naming the systems, dismantling our inherited allegiances, and re-rooting in deeper ecospiritual identities that support the health, integrity, and flourishing of all, respecting the deep relationality at the heart of reality, which is the premise behind everything Wild Nature Heart is here to do.
Whiteness and domination and extractivism are unrelenting, but so are the longings—so beautifully modeled by Dr. King—to dismantle the big lies of separation and supremacy.
To touch the wounds at the root of white colonial modernity is part of our calling. This is a deep ecology calling. This is earth dreaming through us, through our minds, hearts, and bodies. May we open ourselves up to it.
UPCOMING WILD NATURE HEART PROGRAMS
In addition to offering evergreen earth-rooted mentoring and ecotherapy, and custom wilderness rite-of-passage ceremony, I’m thrilled to be able to offer a basketful of programs in the next few months. Deep Belonging in the Great Turning (starting tomorrow, Wednesday) was Wild Nature Heart’s first flagship course, foundational deepening in our earth-connectedness and supporting your next, aligned steps. Autumn’s first Write Your Wild River was so sweet, fun, and creative that I’m already eager for the two cohorts that start in March. The next round of Threshold: Earth Intimacies, starting March 7, will be the third round, this time adding new more-than-human kin with whom we will apprentice, an exploration of soundscapes and scent-scapes, and a new session on being what I’m calling “Emergence Aware”, the mirror of being ‘Collapse Aware.’ Finally, I’m also in the midst of creating something I’m calling Becoming Beautiful Barbarians, a community of practice and inquiry igniting imagination for composting and dreaming beyond Empire, with a mid-2025 launch.
DEEP BELONGING IN THE GREAT TURNING (7 Wednesdays beginning January 15)
A 7-week experience for people hearing the call to cultivate their ecospirituality, deepen their journey beyond inherited scripts, and practice belonging to pace, place, and purpose as we intentionally meet this collective initiation of intersecting ecological/social crises and opportunity.
We explore what I call the seven Ps of Belonging (Place, Pace, People, Purpose, Pain, Pleasure, and Possibility). For example, how do we divest from the Colonial Clock and re-connect more deeply to natural cycles (season, moon, sun, deep time) and to the pace of the body? How can we think of our wild purpose ecologically, as a niche in the ecosystem of repair? How to we both not turn away from the wounds of the world, while also allowing our pleasure to be liberatory? (Find out More HERE)
💦 WRITE YOUR WILD RIVER: A 6-WEEK CREATIVE WRITING & NATURE CONNECTION JOURNEY (Two options: Mondays beginning March 3 or Saturdays beginning March 22)
This 6-week workshop explores the play/craft of creative writing through an embodied, earth-centered, liberatory lens, and simultaneously, explore our embodied, earthy, multi-faceted selves through the exploration of poetry. (Find out More HERE)
🦋THRESHOLD: EARTH INTIMACIES & THE GREAT TURNING (7-week course – Fridays beginning March 7)
THRESHOLD is a 7-week interactive course 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 eco intimacies by tending sacred relationships with the other-than-human world, practice new listenings and honoring longings, and proliferate imaginal buds for what is emerging in this Great Turning.
(Find out More HERE)
🐉 BECOMING BEAUTIFUL BARBARIANS
A community of practice and inquiry igniting imagination for composting and dreaming beyond Empire (start date early 2025 – Receive the Wild Nature Heart newsletter list to stay in the loop)
POLYPOETIC PRODUCTION IN PROCESS
“𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘢𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘦𝘤𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘐𝘵’𝘴 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘦𝘵, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘴.” – 𝘙𝘶𝘮𝘪
It’s been a polypoetic productive wow of the den time. I’m happy to have both tended the delicious darkness & liminal rest and rallied some organizational gusto to get together a few new collections of poetry. Aiming to get a couple out by Earth Day.
I’m most thrilled about ‘An Ambitious Silence’ and ‘Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, Trust the Ceremony’ partly because I wasn’t expecting them to shape up like they did. These are just mock-ups for the covers, they’ll likely shapeshift.
Sign up here if you want to be on the advanced notice list for the new collections are are available.
In the meantime, you can always get Re-Membering: Poems of Earth and Soul.
HIBERNACULUM AND AN APPRENTICESHIP TO SLOW AND STILL
It seems that much of the OverCulture is a conspiracy against slowing down and resting. It sometimes is difficult to sever ourselves from the busyness and distractions epidemic, even in Winter. All the messages seem to say: MORE!
What if we shaped out a sacred pause in our lives, what if we honored our natural seasonal rhythms? Winter can be a womb in which this happens. For me the couple weeks between solstice and new moon is traditionally a sacred pause.
1)A hibernaculum: Latin, “tent for winter quarters” is a place in which a creature seeks refuge, such as a bear using a cave to overwinter.
2)Any case or covering for protecting an organism during the winter
After a flood of doings and creating, We honor the season and the callings of our body and soul to slow down, be still and listen, integrate all the difficult and wonderful and intense experiences of the year, and replenish our powers.
We Commit to An Apprenticeship of Silence, Slowness, and Deep Listening.
We rest, honoring the wisdoms of not-doing.
We feel gratitude.
We honor the losses of the year.
We allow ourselves to mourn.
We acknowledge and celebrate the gifts and harvests of the year.
Rather than leaping into to-do lists, goals, and resolutions, We listen to the voices of the Inner Guide and Muse so we can better be of service to Life and a regenerative culture.
We open all our ears to the dreams that want to fruit in the darkness, like the mushroom bodies emerging from the forest floor.
For some, we might allow a period of time abstaining from food, or speaking, excessive light, social interaction, phone, computer, production/creation, planning, and media.
Or we might create/craft from a place of organic unfurling, finding our own pace with peace poured into it.
May you find your best way to listen to your body and soul wisdom, to carve out your sacred pause, and sink into your seasons.
Artist credits:
1: Sandra Deickmann picture book Leaf, 2017
3: Jessica Boehman, Bedtime Stories, 2013
Support independent artists. Both are on Etsy: SandraDieckmann and HansMyHedgehog
Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day – Darkness
Dear Wild Nature Hearts,
Saturday is this month’s Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Day, when we honor DARKNESS.
I love that it roughly coincides with December’s dark moon (black moon, December 30).🌚
Like so many other aspects of modern life, the OverCulture also paves over the season of slowness and darkness. Yet there’s a reason for the seasons.
There will always be plenty of forces out there that have little respect for the wisdom of the season or the body, tempting us to do more things, be more things, buy more things, keep the lights on. Yet some part of us knows that if we incessantly try to perform summer in winter, or move at the pace of extraction culture, the consequences will be sure to show up as symptom (our body-heart-psyche will speak).
It is liberatory to re-claim our alignment with natural cycles and the pace of our bodies and the dark season. There are many beautiful ways to be with the Dark (see below for invitations). When we sip each season slowly (both inner and outer), we let the season season us. We feel the reflective turn and all the various species of surrender, and let the elemental alchemy do its work.
Funny, we think some flip of an invented calendar somehow overrides wild nature/s cycles or millions of years physiological evolution. In addition to a new moon on Saturday, this week the Solstice gifted us a sacred pause, a still point in the turnings of the world, before the birth of the sun into longer days. These wondrous winter moments call for us to dream anew as we are offered the depth of darkness, rest, and surrender.
Will we accept these precious gifts?
I read that the Inuit and Inupiaq peoples of the far north have a custom in preparation for the whale hunt. With no lamps lit, they sit in darkness, in stillness, and in qarrtsiluni, the state of one that waits for something to happen. One translation of qarrtsiluni:“sitting together in darkness waiting for something to burst” until melodies and words rise like bubbles in the sea as they rise and burst in the air. Such are whales honored with song.
What would it look and feel like if we allowed ourselves to honor the darkness and stillness and await the whale-songs of our lives to burst forth? What would emerge in that fruitful darkness?
As a dispersed web of folks deepening into our own unique landscapes around a particular theme, we are participating in the movement during this Great Turning for the re-enchantment of our lives, re-belonging ourselves to the sacred web of lifewith our gratitude and awe.
The invitation is to participate by honoring Darkness through words, intention, 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:
- Prayer/Blessing
- Practices – 10 Practices For Being With and Honoring Darkness
- Poems
- Resources
May you find your own best way to listen to your body and soul wisdom, to carve out your sacred pause, be with the darkness and sink into your season.
I’d love to hear about your experience and unique ways of connecting with the Dark Season in an intentional way.
Wishing you slow rest in the fruitful darkness,
Director of Creative Earthiness, Ryan
Bear Art Credit: Sandra Dieckmann from the book Leaf
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RE-ENCHANTMENT & GRATITUDE DAYS
Every month we are inviting people to celebrate Re-Enchantment & Gratitude Days, and offer invitations for blessings, practices, and poetry honoring a beloved being or aspect of nature. Next month, we tune into the magic and Wisdom and Treasures of FIRE
THE BIG RHYTHM HOLDS IT ALL
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 to 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…
MYSTERY OF RED
Oh the mystery of red in the world! These darkest weeks of the year evoking the brightest reds. Pomegranates, amanitas, witch’s hat, madrone berries, rose hips, apples, pyracantha, Russulas, maples, oh my! I Had a dream last night I Woke up in a Library & asked librarian for help finding a book on somatic abolitionism that I checked out but can’t find- I wait while he’s helping another patron and I see Red fruit everywhere – I take a red apple and red pear and pomegranate and put it in my backpack.
_____________________________________
The same desire that stirs in the rose
to offer herself in deep summer tones
lures firethorn’s pomes and scarlet sprays
out for a dance in deep autumn’s play
then lands on her lips the color of wine
taking a sip of the season with mine
A touch of the wild conjures the red
to the soft of her skin, pomegranate fed
then rolls in her mouth so ruby and rose
with flickers of tongue like a serpent in pose
so eager to taste, and longing to bite
yearning to sink in the neck of the night
when the seasonal rains finally come
the land and body both are a’hum
when the release of it all finally arrives
all of the daring reds come alive
with the rush of her blood flushing her cheeks
and all of her lips flooding like creeks
beyond their banks in wet wild flow
the land and body alike are aglow
Gliophorus perplexus is a species of agaric fungus in the family Hygrophoraceae Or Hygrocybe conica is a species of agaric (gilled mushroom) in the family Hygrophoraceae. In the UK it has been given the recommended English name of blackening waxcap,[1] since all parts of the basidiocarp (fruit body) blacken with age. In North America it is commonly known as the witch’s hat, conical wax cap or conical slimy cap 
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