Description
On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” – Arundhati Roy
This is a gathering for people carrying grief, rage, confusion, clarity, and imagination in a time of imperial violence, lies, and psychic exhaustion. Together we’ll write from the body and heart—not to perform despair or draft polite appeals to power, but to metabolize what is happening and let language become a tool of orientation, refusal, and possibility.
Through short somatic grounding, guided prompts, and collective weaving, we’ll practice writing that can hold heat without burning us out, and imagination that reaches beyond the Empire’s nightmares.
No prior writing experience needed—Come as you are. Bring a pen, your body, your truths and confusions, and whatever words are ready to arrive. This is not a grief council (though we will touch into grief/rage), a workshop on “craft,” or a call to productivity. It’s a temporary hearth for words that want to live beyond Empire’s poverty of imagination.
We’ll also leave time to seed ideas for practical solidarity actions.
DATE: Wednesday, May 6
TIME: 5:30-7:30 PM PST
Online | Sliding scale $20-40
(Note: Limited to 8 to invite safety and intimacy. Our time together may go to two hours.)
If this feels like something you’ve been carrying without language or movement, you’re welcome to come surface words and sparks with us in earth community.
Percentage of session exchange will be flowed to mutual aid fundraisers, split between those impacted by ICE violence and Palestinians impacted by IOF violence in Gaza.
Register here, or VENMO: RyanVanLenning with the note “Write Against Empire” and good email for link.
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. 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. 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. I like cinnamon ice cream, fantastic fungi and lovely lichen, and river ottering.
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