Description
“There is reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon,
and others dance before it as an ancient friend.”
—James Baldwin
Moon Has a Long Memory is a 13-moon lunatic apprenticeship in living by the cycles of Elder Moon, the land, and your own inner shapeshifting. Across a full year, we gather on the full moons to listen, speak, and be witnessed, and descend into the dark of new moons through simple practices of reflection and renewal. Rooted in presence, practice, and poetry, this is a rhythm to inhabit—a slow learning from Moon and re-membering of the parts of ourselves that have been scattered by speed, noise, and forgetting. Together, we begin to restore a more intimate relationship with pace and place, with ourselves, and with the quiet intelligence of moon wisdom.
Each month becomes its own small journey: a name. a mood. a movement. a learning.
A slow remembering—
we are not merely witnessing Moon
we are being shapeshifted into ourselves
by something that has never forgotten us
HOW IT WORKS
Each lunar cycle unfolds like a breath:
New Moon (self-generated ceremony)
A simple practice of pause, descent, reflection, and naming the moon you are entering.
Full Moon (live facilitated gathering — 90-120 min)
We gather to listen, witness, and create what has come into the light. Each has a suggested theme for exploration, though we will flow where the energy invites.
Between gatherings and dark moons: Waxing and Waning With What Is
Creative prompts and simple invitations to stay in rhythm—continuing to sense, listen, and move in quiet conversation with Moon, your inner tides, and the living world around you.
A shared Signal group space for noticing, reflection, and connection.
Then we begin again.
We quietly divest from colonial-time dominance, and enter Lunatic Rhythm.
waning, waning, waning
into the going under…
then birthing seeds of the new,
waxing, waxing, waxing
into fullness
Each month will invite small emergent practices, but as a way to anchor these capacities in our home and lives, we’ll each keep a Personal Lunar Almanac and craft a Moon Altar.
Woven into the journey is an optional one-on-one conversation or two—a space to check in and listen more closely together
and tend what is unfolding for you within the cycle.
Naming the Moons (optional)
Each month is an invitation to name the moon you are living with and inside. Not from a preset calendar or a tradition not your own—but from your land, your body, your life. For example, I call the month when trillium first emerges in the forest here: Trillium Moon of Unrelenting Sweetness. This month it is Seed Moon of Hopeful Futures, in which I plant seeds and starts in the garden. Over time, a living map emerges. A personal cosmology. A re-membering.
In part emerging from the field of the poetry collection Moon Has a Long Memory (all participants will receive a copy as a part of the course), this apprenticeship invites us back into the rhythms of cycle and return. We will work with poetry, yes—not to interpret, but as doorways and spells of attention, helping us listen more closely to the phases of the moon, the turning of the seasons, and the inner tides moving through us.
Restoring some pace
with peace poured into it
Each month gathering unfolds as a living rhythm:
- arriving into the body, the senses, and the moon we are living inside
- noticing where we’ve drifted or sped ahead—and gently returning to a slower orbit
- meeting what is here—within, around, and between us
- opening to the nature of cycles—hello with goodbye already woven through it
- staying long enough to be touched by what has come (or is coming) into the light
- creative practices and poetry that give shape to lived experience (writing, image, voice)
- integration—letting what has been revealed continue to work on you in the waning phrase
Our Journey:
1: Moon Of Arrival
Theme: What is arriving? What is flowering?
(Sunday, May 31)
2: Moon of Belonging
Theme: What pace, place, and purpose are claiming you?
(Monday, June 29)
3: Moon of Sweetening Fruit
Theme: What is ripening?
(Wednesday, July 29)
4: Moon of Grief and Rage
Theme: What do Water and Fire want?
(Friday, August 28 – partial lunar eclipse)
5: Moon of Abundance/Excess
Theme: What needs pruned? What wants to be circulated?
(Saturday, September 26)
6: Moon of Harvest
Theme: What is ready?
(Monday, Octover 26)
Week 7: Moon of Letting Go
Theme: What is falling away?
(Tuesday, November 24)
Week 8: Moon of Decomposition
Theme: What is breaking down to feed the soil of the next?
(Wednesday, December 23)
9: Moon of Longest Night
Theme: What does darkness offer?
(Friday, January 22)
10: Moon of Tending DreamFires
Theme: What dreams are incubating?
(Saturday, February 20)
11: Moon of Re-Membering
Theme: What’s been forgotten and wants to be put back together?
(Monday, March 22)
12: Moon of Pollination
Theme: What is being pollinated?
(Wednesday, April 21)
13: Moon of Purpose
Theme: What beckons your gifts?
(Thursday, May 20)
What you may notice over time:
- a more intimate relationship with the night sky, the land, and your own inner wilds
- renewed sensory aliveness
- words or images for what has lived just below the surface
- small, steady practices that weave naturally into your life
- a subtle but real shift from observer to participant in the animate web of life
I became the Moon
and showed you half my face
so you could see your own
PRACTICAL DETAILS:
DATES: Full Moons from May 31, 2026 – May 2027 (see below)
TIME: varies by season – 6pm-7:30pm PST in spring
Online | Sliding scale $325 – $520 (translates to $25-$40/month)
(Note: Limited to 8 to ensure intimate and empowering space)
Register here
Or you can also send payment via:
PayPal.me/WildNatureHeart
or VENMO: RyanVanLenning with the note “Moon” and a good email for zoom link.
Arrive as a Constellation
No moon rises alone—it is always held in a sky of relations.
If you feel the call, come with another.
Register together and you’ll each receive $50 off.
Let this be something you remember with someone else.
(enter “moonbuddies” in coupon field at checkout)
Closing Invitation
Participation is yours to shape—you can come to every gathering
or miss and return when you’re ready. The cycle continues, and there is always a place for you within it.
If something in you has been waiting for this, you can begin.
Join the cycle.
You are one of the great lunatic lovers
with one ear pitched on the horizon
the other turned within
the deep well…
—from Moon Has a Long Memory)
My name is Ryan Van Lenning, Founder of Wild Nature Heart, and I am an earth-lover with a deep desire to be of service in the work of re-connection, re-membering, and re-inhabiting the animate web of life.
My life changed when I really started listening and apprenticing to Water and the seasons. I started Wild Nature Heart to support people at a crossroads to re-connect with the wisdom of both inner and outer wild nature, to live their soul callings into the world, and to assist in the work of repairing broken belonging. If I had to summarize our work for this time: Compost Empire and re-surface all it has paved over. I believe each of us has unique gifts that the world needs as we birth new imaginations and ways of being beyond Empire, and I love mirroring people’s stories as they deepen into their wholeness and next aligned steps.
I am a threshold guide and barbarian poet of the Great Turning (author of several collections of poetry, including Re-Membering, From Inside These Wild Ones, One Bright and Real Caress, An Ambitious Silence, Trust the Ceremony, F*ck the Ceremony, and Trust the Ceremony, Then Yeses Come Bubbling, Within the Cave Something Pulses, Moon Has a Long Memory, Kiss Me A Huckleberry, and High-Cooing Through the Seasons: Haiku From the Forest). Two new collections, Becoming Beautiful Barbarians and We Go to the Sea to Scream, will be out in fall 2026. A compost pile disguised as a book and field guide to outgrowing Empire in our bodies and imaginations, Composting the Spell of Empire: 40 Trickster Invitations for the Great Unraveling, will be released in early 2027.
I am trained as a rite-of-passage/wilderness ceremony guide through the School of Lost Borders, certified as an Ecotherapist through The Earthbody Institute, where I teach the Level 1-3 ecotherapy courses, and am a Certified Wilderness First Responder through Foster Calm. Prior to moving to California 18 years ago, I taught Comparative Religion, Philosophy, and Environmental Ethics at Sinclair College in Ohio. I live among the forest and rivers in northern California, ancestral Wiyot and Yurok land.
My current apprenticeship is to fire, composting, and emergence, and I like cinnamon ice cream, fantastic fungi and lovely lichen, and river ottering.
