Description
Can we be here now?
Really be here?
A playshop in staying with what is.
There are a thousand ways we leave our life. You know them: Staying busy. Staying numb. Staying distracted. Staying elsewhere.
Every so often, something interrupts the habit—a yellow-tailed bird lands so near you it takes your breath away. A butterfly lands on your hat on the first warm day. A word a stranger speaks penetrates your absentmindedness. A stubborn grief refuses to be paved over any longer. A persistent Yes! bubbling up you can no longer ignore.
These are moments that opens wider than expected—time dilates, past and future fall away, and you feel it: the possibility of really being here. Not conceptually or spiritually bypassed. But here-now, as sensation and participation.
This playshop is for that.
One Bright and Real Caress is a 5-week experiential journey into presence, where nature connection and creative permeability become doorways into direct contact with the moment and the more-than-human world.
Together we explore the subtle ways we escape, practice meeting life without agenda, deepen intimacy with impermanence, and expand our capacity to say YES! to the full spectrum of being alive.
Through embodied practices, wild writing/expressive arts, and nature-connection invitations in relationship with place, we practice inhabiting our lives.
This is not about becoming better—but about becoming more here and staying with what already is alive. Not perfect presence, but real participation in the messy, fleeting, astonishing ceremony already underway.
In part emerging from the field of the poetry collection One Bright and Real Caress (all participants will receive a copy as a part of the course), this journey invites us back into the simple, radical practice of being here. We will work with poetry, yes. Not to interpret, but as doorways and spells of attention. As invitations to step more fully into the astonishing aliveness of the world.
Each session unfolds as a living rhythm:
- arriving into the body, the senses, and the immediacy of now
- noticing where we’ve drifted or reacted—and gently returning
- meeting the moment, internally and externally, (and each other) without judgment
- opening to the fleeting nature of things—hello with goodbye on the tongue
- staying long enough to be touched by what is here
- creative practices that give language and form to direct experience (writing, art)
- small acts of participation—rather than only observation
- integration through quiet noticing, letting one bright and real caress land
Some sessions will get us outside in our respective places. Some will take us somewhere just as wild, inwardly.
Join if you’re longing to feel more alive, more connected, and more in an intentional conversation
with the world within and around you.
Our Journey:
Week 1: A Thousand Ways We Leave
Theme: Noticing Escape Hatches
Week 2: Hello, World
Theme: Practicing Contact
Week 3: Life’s Partner
Theme: Letting impermanence deepen intimacy
Week 4: The Great Affirmation
Theme: Saying yes to the whole field (including contradictions)
Week 5: This Messy Celebration
Theme: Participating in the ongoing ceremony
In-between sessions: invitations for simple embodiment and nature practices—ways to continue sensing, listening, and exploring with both the inner and the more-than-human world in your everyday surroundings.
As a way to anchor these capacities in our home, we’ll also each craft an ALTAR of BOTH/AND and a YES MIRROR—making visible the vitalities and contradictions that live within and around us.
What you might leave with:
- a deeper capacity to stay with your experience
- a more intimate relationship with the moment
- renewed sensory aliveness
- language for what you feel but couldn’t articulate
- small practices that you weave into daily life
- a subtle but real shift from observer → participant
perhaps if we’re lucky,
we can bring one bright and real caress
to the thing
DATES: 5 Mondays, June 22 – July 20
TIME: 10:00AM- 12:00PM Pacific Time | 12:00PM-2:00PM EST | 6:00PM-8:00PM GMT
Online | Sliding scale $125 – $200
(Note: Limited to 8 to ensure intimate and empowering space)
Register here
Or you can also send payment via:
PayPal.me/WildNatureHeart
VENMO: RyanVanLenning
(note: “One Bright” + your email)
When we belong to the moment
rather than the moment belonging to us
nothing is lost
—from One Bright and Real Caress
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). 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.
