Books from the Wild Nature Heart Field

Poetry collections
and companion ecologies
for staying permeable, participatory,
and attuned in the Great Turning.

Forage below for the 10 earthy books available now.
These books emerge from a shared terrain of re-enchantment, ecological intimacy, and the strange work of remaining wonder-lit and full alive during a time of unraveling and renewal.

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A basket of new books is also emerging through THRUM, a cross-pollinating literary organism of interconnected morphs weaving animacy, collective grief, and post-imperial imagination.

Becoming Beautiful Barbarians and Watershed are available for pre-order now.

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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.

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PDF edition
Amazon edition

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. These poems deploy rich metaphors and personal experiences to bring to life raw vulnerabilities that emerge along the 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 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.

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PDF edition
Amazon edition

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.

Book 3 in the Re-Membering Poetry Series.

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PDF edition
Amazon edition

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.

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PDF edition
Amazon edition

Within the Cave Something Pulses

What if we allied ourselves to the energies of the season?
What if we dove into the silent dark and welcomed the wholeness of who we are?
What labyrinth wisdoms await?
What dreams are a fire in the dark?
What if monsters were actually the secret password?
What emerges in your fruitful darkness?

Within the Cave Something Pulses is a collection of chthonic poetry charting a seasonal spelunking of the darkness, a wandering in the labyrinth, and a tender tending the dreamfires that emerge in the fruitful darkness.

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PDF edition
Amazon edition

Then Yeses Come Bubbling 

The creative spirit – it asks for a commitment, ruthless as any angel.
Gorgeous storms get stuck in your teeth. Words are flimsy nets.
But then Yeses come bubbling, Yeses arrive like worms dancing in dirt.

Then Yeses Come Bubbling explores the power and pleasure of creativity and imagination, embracing an uncompromising “Yes”. This “Yes” acts like an ecological process and pact, where the creative spirit urges a commitment and all that is misaligned falls away. The poems are wide-ranging, from a spider’s web as symbol of poetic weaving to the ocean’s relentless waves as metaphor for ongoing creative birth. From odes to Rilke, Oliver, mosquitoes, and makers who confront death, to the playful agency of art resisting control, poetry proves to be a living, breathing entity that reveals and conceals simultaneously.

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Amazon edition

Kiss Me A Huckleberry: 30 Ecosensual Poems

Open your tongue to the taste of the world
Open your skin to the textures of life
Open your ears to the heartbeat of things
Open your nose to the scent on the wind
Open your hands to the play at your door
Open your eyes to the landscape of kin
Open your heart to your true home within

Nature is inherently sensual. Our bodies are one of the surest paths back to our own wildness, our own joy and wholeness. One pawprint at a time, we wander and wonder, smell and feel, reclaiming our sacred embodiment. The poems in Kiss Me a Huckleberry, foraged from the bushes and an open relationship with the world, celebrate the wonder of being sensing creatures in a juicy, colorful, delicious, scented, symphonic, tactile, sentient world.

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Amazon edition

Moon Has A Long Memory

Moon as companion. Moon as lover.
Moon as elder and messenger.
Moon as Turtle as Human Heart.
Night Sky as home and heritage.

Savor this sky full of lunatic poems and reflections that evoke new perspectives on Earth’s ancient companions, popping them on your tongue with moon-cooked mirth and a glad mouth stained purple and free.

From the Kin Collection

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Amazon edition

Re-Membering: Poems of Earth and Soul

The book that began it all. The 75 poems in Re-Membering are an unabashed celebration of the sensuality of wild nature. Redwoods reach without apology towards the sky, and rivers flow with unflagging energy towards the ocean. This collection re-members Ryan’s personal explorations into wild nature, but it also re-collects for all of us a time when our kinship and inter-connectedness with the natural world was self-evident, and invites us to fully re-inhabit and say “Yes!” to our sensual natures, our animal bodies, our playfulness and creativity, connection, mystery, and our instinctive love for this beautiful, sentient Earth.

High-Cooing Through the Seasons – Haiku From the Forest

Like unfurling ferns, the haiku here emerged out of the seasons, during the author’s experience living outside over the course of a year among the forests and along the rivers of Northern California.

Vividly capturing unique moments of experiencing wild nature and the elements, High-Cooing is a seasonal record of being embedded in nature in the nearby faraway, seventeen syllables at a time. At times pensive, at times whimsical, the small poems included here are like little surprise packages that make you say “Oh!” and then smile with recognition.

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FORTHCOMING 2026
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