Waymarkers: Categories of Inspiration

As I have more opportunities to teach and accompany others on their soul-formation path, I am often asked what are the areas that have most influenced my work and Waymarkers’ offerings. As I was clearing out my office recently, I came upon a writing project and drawing that aimed to get at three primary categories of inspiration and influence. I created this in October 2015 and it is amazing to see how these categories continue to shape and form my thinking and my work! I am also incredibly happy to see that my thinking, theologies, and theories (in short, my praxis) continue to emerge and evolve!

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I am using the concept of a Venn Diagram as represented by a Celtic Trinity Knot to describe my three primary passions (and ways of seeing the Divine at work in the world), their intersections, and ultimately, what they reveal about myself in relationship to the Sacred. Following are my core thoughts related to each trisection.

Placemaking/Theology of Land

Theologian Walter Brueggeman states that “…land be handled always as a gift not to be presumed upon and land be managed as an arena for justice and freedom.” And, it is true that those historically denied justice and freedom, power, place and voice, could see the arena of a wooded landscape as an absolute threat. Walter Brueggeman’s hermeneutic of Israel, provides understanding that, “Israel experienced the bitterness of landlessness, being totally exposed and helpless, victimized by anything that happened to be threatening. However, also as Israel, we take up a new identity vis-a-vis the land. It is important to be very clear about what the land is, how it addresses us, what it expects of us, and how we shall shape our faith and admit our identity in relation to it.

How do communities work on creating meaningful places that invert political and capitalistic powers on behalf of the other and the future?

Our neighborhoods are never singular communities, but are actually a mesh of myriad overlapping networks. We all belong to many different communities, from the diffuse (i.e. a professional association, or an online message board), to the intimate (i.e. a family, or a group of friends). In consideration of the paramount impact of how a landscape informs an individual and how they connect to the other in their community, there is an emerging theory called “Placemaking” that aims to create a balance of uses in public spaces that serve the many communities at once; in this way a landscape can serve as a therapeutic response to the needs of a neighborhood. A single place can’t do everything at once, so “Placemaking” prompts us to look for convenient and clever ways to make limited space serve multiple functions. De Botton and Armstrong (2013) have suggested that by balancing ones need with those of the people by which one lives, one finds their place, literally and figuratively, within a community of neighbors. By inviting the presence of a place to participate in the lives of communities for a common good, there is an acknowledgment of something profound and beyond human-limitations that is unleashed: God is revealed as intimately involved and present within the neighborhood and neighborwood!

Celtic Christianity

The great Celtic teacher John Scotus Eriugena taught that God speaks to us through two sacred texts, two books if you will. One is the book of scripture…the other is the book of creation, vast as the cosmos. Just as the Sacred speaks to us through the written words of scripture, so to does Spirit speak to us through the wild elements of creation. The natural world—the creatures within it and the elements that form it—then are a living sacred text we can learn to read and interpret.

Just as we prayerfully ponder the words of the Bible in Christian practice and as other traditions study their sacred texts, and even as we engage our sacred imagination in the practice of Midrash, so we are invited to listen to the life of creation as an ongoing, living utterance of God. This way of "reading" requires seeing the soil as a sacred story, and realizing that many of the narratives that have been told within the reverential spheres are ones that separate us from the reality of the biosphere.

Influenced by the wisdom tradition of the Old Testament and the mysticsm of John’s Gospel, Celtic spirituality sees creation not simply as a gift, but as a self-giving of God whose image is to be found deep within all living things. Sin may obscure God’s living presence, but never erases it. The divine voice can be heard speaking through all created things.

EcoPsych/EcoTheology

Author and psychologist Bill Plotkin believes that the way towards a collective societal shift towards wholeness and sustainability will be to progress from our current “egocentric societies (materialistic, anthropocentric, competition based, class stratified, violence prone, and unsustainable) to soulcentric ones (imaginative, ecocentric, cooperation based, just, compassionate and sustainable).” Plotkin draws from the collective academy of cultural thought provocateurs ranging from Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to imagine how to cultivate more mature human individuals to inform an evolution into a more mature human society. He believes that nature has always provided and still provides the best template for human maturation. Plotkin unpacks this further:

“…every human being has a unique and mystical relationship to the wild world, and that the conscious discovery and cultivation of that relationship is at the core of true adulthood. In contemporary society, we think of maturity simply in terms of hard work and practical responsibilities. I believe, in contrast, that true adulthood is rooted in transpersonal experience—in a mystic affiliation with nature, experienced as sacred calling—that is then embodied in soul-infused work and mature responsibilities. This mystical affiliation is the very core of maturity, and it is precisely what mainstream Western society has overlooked—or actively suppressed and expelled.”

Western civilization has buried most traces of the mystical roots of maturity, yet this knowledge has been at the heart of every indigenous tradition known. In this light, we see that our self-imposed exile from an honoring relationship with creation has stunted God’s design for human development, and even a proper revelation of God. Creation is imbued with the wisdom and presence of the Sacred, and to stifle and ignore the inherent value of the created order, stifles the very voice of Wisdom in our lives. Our way into the future requires new cultural forms of the old ways of being in relationship with the earth. As urban-dense living becomes the increasing norm for countries around the world, re-imagining how urban greenspaces provides the opportunity for a relationship with the wild world becomes critical. The health of our psyche, and the planet, depends on it.

Center

The challenge of loving and caring for one another well in the 21st century requires one to recover a primordial sense of the vast mystery of God and apply that energy to paying attention to the earth. Our love of neighbor needs to be extended to the greater community of things on this planet and our neighborhood needs to considerably broaden to include our universe as well. Historically anthropocentric views have concerned Christians with the redemption of this world alone, and have disconnected the very nature of a connected, covenantal God with the diversity of his inherently good creation. Nobel Peace Prize two-time nominee Ervin Lazlo (2011) attests that “seeing ourselves as separate from the world fuels selfish and irresponsible tendencies: we are only responsible for ourselves, and not for ‘foreigners,’ ‘competitors,’ and ‘others’” (p. 117). In bringing the care of the earth into the folds of reconciliation, there is acknowledgement that human-centric modern history has caused great harm to marginal people groups, and environmental injustice to a host of living beings on this planet, as well as a severe disconnect from the goodness with which the earth was designed. By engaging in restorative acts of reconciliation with the planet, there is an openness to the endowed goodness of creation and the intention that it was created to participate in the whole person and health of a community.

In returning to a grand sense of awe before the God of the Universe, God’s relationship is placed with humanity into the context of billions and billions of galaxies. This profound placement of the Great Mystery has immediate effects on how we engage and encounter the other and all living things. “The experience of our connection with each other and the universe would inspire solidarity among people and empathy with all life on earth” (Lazlo, 2011, p. 124). Leonardo Boff would call this the “socio-cosmic,” where mountains, plants, rivers, animals, and the atmosphere become the new citizens who share in the human banquet, while humans share in the cosmic banquet. Only then will there be ecological justice and peace on planet earth. In embracing the world. we shall be embracing God.

The Lost Names of God: A Solstice Reflection

I come to this pinnacle of the solar year, this hot and heightened sun, with a posture of vigilance, a stance that might not be all too surprising given our times, but one that is consternating all the same. Already in our Pacific Northwest part of the world, the fires are burning. Smoke cloaks the sun's intensifying rays, amplifying the heat. Seattle's urban streets are buckling under the sweltering strain. Gun violence is already intensifying (the corollary between inescapable urban heat and social tensions is a studied reality). While children may be enacting the summer rituals of swimming and sandal-wearing, there is a sense that the adults are diligently looking over their shoulder, or even up at the smoke-filled sky, discerning when to return to the relative refuge of home.

Not the picture that you might have expected to kick off this quarterly newsletter offering, I'm sure. And not one that I necessarily want to write about either, and yet.... And yet, it speaks to the grief that I know I am not alone in experiencing as each consecutive season brings with it more suffering change, so markedly different than the perception of the assured rhythmic seasonal changes in which I grew up. And yet, even that which I knew was its own iteration of shifting environmental degradation that had become its own version of an accepted and normative existence. This psychological and sociological phenomenon is termed shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), which is increasingly recognized as one of the fundamental obstacles to addressing a wide range of today’s global environmental issues. When one forgets over the course of a couple years, decades, or generation what once was, or who once was, it becomes near impossible to advocate for those places, people, or other remarkable forms of existence. Do you remember the Passenger Pigeon? Probably not, and if you know about its one time form of life, its likely you don't stand around missing it.

We are a forgetful and fickle species, us humans, and if we continue to not remember, we will end up forgetting what has been lost. But even in our forgetfulness, there is something deeper still that remains, a cellular memory that longs for what once was; a longing for a home that no longer exists.

While working at the University of Newcastle in Australia, ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht coined a word that seeks to describe this feeling. 'Solastalgia’ – a gladstone of the words ‘solace’ and ‘nostalgia’ – is used not just in academia but more widely, in clinical psychology and health policy in Australia, as well as by US researchers looking into the effects of wildfires in California. It describes the feeling of distress associated with environmental change close to your home, and speaks to growing unease around what this loss portends for the future of all life on our planet. 

The magnitude, rate, and extent of the changes that humans have made to the Earth’s more-than-human world are hard to grasp. What is easier to grasp is the idea that it has always been this way. And yet, we find that we are awaiting the fist summer sight of the Monarch butterfly flitting through the wasting away Sword ferns, but the waiting is endless; or we realize that the ache in our eyes is do to the relentless searching for the nesting pair of Red tail hawk that have been in the Big leaf maple down the hill for twenty years...but they are no longer there. The solace found within the dynamic constancies of one's environment is waning as the "lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change to one's 'sense of place' and existential well-being is increasing" (Glenn Albrecht Murdoch, 2010).

The human caused degradation to our home planet is causing massive species extinction. Indeed, we are within the Anthropocene Extinction, or the sixth mass extinction, which is one of the most significant events in the history of the Earth. Every day there are unique and particular life forms that are closing their eyes to the hope of a future. And with each eye lid shuttering, I would maintain that we are losing embodiments of the sacred. Every species that becomes extinct is a lost name, and form, of God.

Ecotheologian Sallie MacFague's seminal work has been around our metaphoric language and symbols used to describe and define the divine. In our era of global heating and climate catastrophe, she urges us away from metaphors that describe God as separate from the world and creation--words and resulting paradigms related to monarchy, kingdoms, hierarchies, dominions, etc. Instead, she advocates for the mindset shifting metaphor of seeing the Earth as the Body of God. Sit with that for a moment. The Earth: The Body of God. How does this land with you? If we lived within this worldview, how would it change how we are presenced upon this planet? This understands the world, and its host of wild and wonder-filled life, as sacred, every aspect and being a numinous element. So when the Passenger Pigeon, Monarch, and Red tailed hawk no longer exist in the air, or when the Salish Sea resident Orca population rings the death knoll at the brink of their extinction, we are literally witnessing a diocide, the killing of God.

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What do you do when you lose something? You ponder its whereabouts, and then go out to look for it, and sometimes you end up recovering that which was lost in places that surprise you. We have lost the knowing that the earth is sacred, that we are surrounded by hallowed presences who bear witness to our lives, as well as express their own inherent divine qualities. Grief is a handmaiden to loss. Studies show that within the realm of environmental grief and anxiety, practicing nature-based rituals and ceremony can help one be resilient in these grief-filled seasons, and be a way to respond to feelings like solestagia.

Seek through the practice of ceremony. Find a recovered and reconnected way of understanding that the holy is Here. And hope beyond hope, may your ceremonial search yield the surprise of the divine ground of being that is within your particular place.

May something within this Summer season whisper to you, beseech and beguile you, rooting you deeper into the places you call home. Or perhaps you haven't yet found your way home, and this is why you are here. May you be invited into a ceremonious way of living that seeks to recover the sacred within the wild.

Waymarkers' mission is to bear witness and act as a guide to your journey, to your rooting and to your rising, and to your pilgrimage journey of belonging to this wonder-filled and wild world. May the wisdom-seeds that were planted this past Spring be about the critical work of differentiation and particularity. May that they become the wild and precious fruit that only you can bear and bring to the world. May something in the potent summer heat and long, light days ripen in you your purpose and your belonging. May that the sun, present and demanding, remind you that it is time to become; for it is now time to allow Summer's heat to transform the seed into an offering. And in this work, may you observe and be guided by waymarkers~ones from the wild who will accompany and apprentice you, reminding you of the way back to the belonging we have within the sacred reality that we live within an ensouled world.

Cultivate the Wisdom Within the Wild: Biomimicry as a Spiritual Practice

Boehman, Jessica. Bedtime Stories. 2013.

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” -Joseph Campbell

We are approaching the threshold of Winter, and these days that come before that elemental edge are known as Advent, a sacred time of the year when rituals attune ourselves to the growing darkness and when hope is kindled by the coming of light.

But before the light is the darkness—a darkness that is the deep color of sunless earth. All life is being drawn into the depths of soil, a migration of descent that is both a lull and a longing. Life is slowing down, quieting, and entering caves and underground caverns wherein sleepy darkness will be the only thing that will satiate this elemental pull.

And yet isn’t it ironic that the farther the Western mind moves from celebrating this season and the upcoming solstice for its earthen guidance and wisdom, the brighter the holiday lights become; the louder the market cries for over-consumption; the more frenetic the pace and demand of over-worked holiday cheer? This is a way that is contrary to the descent the more-than-human world engages as they wait for the light.

Every Advent I see new methods, books, and calendars that aim to connect ourselves to the meaning of this season. These seem to exist at the margins, hardly able to compete with the trumpeting chaos of holiday calendars and over-played carols. And while I admittedly do attempt to engage these new titles or traditions as a way to center and slow down the pace, I find that rarely do the intentions last as there is little grounding and rooting into the reality of what my body longs to do—this longing to go inwards and follow the others with fur and four-feet, to find the kind and nourishing dark within my inner-self.

Truly, the light that breaks with promise on the heels of the Winter Solstice only has power because of the darkness through which we have just come. But how can we truly know the Light if we’ve been kept from going into the Dark?

This Advent I want to do something different, or more aptly, something deeper. I want to look to what Nature is doing, how the wild is behaving, how Earth is quieting and model something of a spiritual practice of it. Instead of buying another book to guide my Advent season, I want those with rhizomes and heartwood, those whose voices rise to moon-howl, those who curl confidently within their fur to counsel my quest for holy days that leave me with a renewed sense of faith, hope, and love. I want Nature to be my scout this season towards an ancient nativity, showing me how to rest like roots; when to withdraw like wolves; and when need for warmth demands a festive fire with family and friends.

These days before the brink of Winter will be ones where I lean into and look deeper into the principles of biomimicry, an idea that by imitating models, systems and elements of nature we might discover ways to solve complex human problems. Frankly, there is no way anyone can engage the news and social media and not see the human and ecological grief and suffering that is happening all over this world. And I believe that Albert Einstein was absolutely correct when he said:

We can't solve problems by using the same thinking we used to create them.

Our anthropocentric attempts to solve our human-engineered problems need to be reoriented—rewilded to the rest of the whole from which biotic life is bound. If the Winter Dark is the time when the natural world renews itself for the regenerative life-burst of Spring, how do we expect to do the same if our Winter looks no different than the frenetic force that pressures the Western world to be lit year round?

We know we are intimately connected to earth-systems. Our bodies get sick when our planet is sick. Our ability to flourish is fastened to the potential for all life to thrive. We have awoken to this reality in the eleventh hour of climate chaos. Janine M. Benyus, author of the profound and popular book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (1997) says this, “We are awake now, and the question is how do we stay awake to the living world?” I would say, it will take practice—disciplined regular and repeated rhythms or patterns of behavior that bring about this awoken state of perception. Following are the nine basic principles of biomimicry that come from Janine M. Benyus’ work:

Nature runs on sunlight

Nature uses only the energy it needs

Nature fits form to function

Nature recycles everything

Nature rewards cooperation

Nature banks on diversity

Nature demands local expertise

Nature curbs excesses from within

Nature taps the power of limits

How different are these than the common consumptive energy of this season? And how different would the holidays be if we engaged them from a spiritual practice of biomimicry? My sense is that we would be incredibly awake to the sacred and wild world in ways that would transform how we experience these threshold days of this season. We would come to find that we have enough. We are enough. And from this place, we will be able to open up and sink deep into this beautiful dark and rooted place.

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Advent Practice

Instead of spiritual practices that that lead us away from the dark, demanding a journey towards the light as if it wasn’t already within us, let’s re-engage rituals that place us here, that designate the dark earth as holy ground, sacred soil within which we rediscover the life that has always been within and with-out all things. Over the course of Advent, engage each of the nine elements as an invitation into a personal and spiritual practice.

• Take 2-3 days to reflect and respond to each principle and imagine ways in which you can bring that principle into practice. Begin by simply reframing each principle with the personal pronoun, “I.” For example, “I run on sunlight.” “I use only the energy I need,” etc.

• How does this statement feel to you? Is it true? Does it invite a response of longing or desire for a different way of being? How does this challenge you in this season? It becomes very interesting to think of these principles through the lens of holiday gift-giving, and even holiday activities and festivities; these foundational aspects of the natural world don’t work within a world of capitalistic consumerism, over-consumption, and narrow religious views.

• Let’s take this reframing into our inner-world, our soulscape. Are you able to restate the basic principles of biomimicry as a spiritual or soulful practice? Does your spiritual tradition or practice reward cooperation? Does it demand local expertise? If yes, how? If not, how are you being invited to a biomimetic lens of your faith?

• What rituals can be created to honor the sacred rhythms within the principles of biomimicry? Perhaps you bring in a cup full of dark humus earth into your home and create an Advent altar with it, pairing it with a candle. Do you already have an Advent wreath for your family table? Place the cup of earth at the center! This creates an earthen awareness for darkness and connects to the question: “What do I need to stay grounded through this season?” In our family we gradually begin turning off electric lamps or lights in our house and replace them with candlelight so that our eyes can begin to re-sensitize to the dark; by the time we are at the Winter Solstice we have only candle light within our home and boy can you feel the dark! This is a dark that is hard to come by in the city as light shines year round in the night from street lights, cars, businesses, exterior house and condo lights, etc. I also like this move towards the candle light as I find that we move more slowly in the house when only candles are lit. This honors what our bodies want to do naturally in this season, instead of the push to rush towards the coming light.

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“Seeds grow in the dark—so do we.
Let’s stop making such a virtue out of the light.
Let's turn toward what’s in the shadows and breathe it in,
breathe it here, meeting it face-to-face until we realize
with more than mind that what we are seeing
is none other than us in endarkened disguise.
Seeds grow in the dark—so do we. 
Let’s not be blinded by light
Let’s unwrap the night 
Building a faith too deep to be spoken 
A recognition too central to be broken 
Until even the darkest of days can light our way.” 
― Robert Augustus Masters

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Spring Rewilding Retreat: Rising Up Rooted Like Trees

In May I went away on my personal Spring Rewilding Retreat out east in the lowland forests of the Cascade Mountain range. This was a set-apart time to lean into Rainer Maria Rilke's wisdom when he said,

“If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.”

What wisdom, what sacred intelligence lay rooted within the soil and with all of the forest community? What guidance might I receive from Creator through the meant-for-ness of this place? This is what I sought after as I made ready for time away in the woods. 

Its important to note that this practice is not just all prayers and serene postures; it is just as much about play! So, with this invitation to play in mind, I found a little treehouse I could book and play I did! Simply climbing up into the holding and nesting branches of the tree that held my lodging reminded me of my child-self. Equal to the wisdom sought in the interconnections of the Spring season; Eastern cardinal direction; and the element of Fire (correspondences which find their alignment within the ancient Celtic tradition), was the curiosity of my child-guide. I have discovered that this internalized version of my girlhood-self has become a guiding voice that speaks to me in the way that she so longed to be spoken to so many years ago. It is her that says, "Climb that tree! It will be fun and you are strong and brave and can do it!" She is also the one that deeply remembers the transformative power of the woods, for she is the one who drank the nourishing milk of the faerie tales and myths and reminds me of their powers. So, I followed her when she excitedly invited me into the transformative power of the trees with the rallying cry, "Into the woods!"

For three days I was immersed within the folds of the forest. I stayed within a little treehouse at Tree House Point. Unbeknownst to me, there is quite a following of this place due to its popularity gained through a reality television series on tree houses. So, when I was asked at registration if I was there because I was a fan of the TV show, I said no, "I'm here on a rewilding retreat!" I think we all were refreshed by new perspectives! In spite of its niche popularity and fan base, this was the perfect location to lean into the glory and magnificence of this particular bioregion.

“The corresponding symbologies that are in play during this Spring season are ones that invite one into their birth and their becoming. Ancient Celtic wisdom associated creativity and new life with Springtime, East and Fire.”

These themes of emergence are strong within the sacred meanings within these associations and invite one into a soulful journey that leaves the hearth and home of the Winter Quadrant; this quadrant is an invitation into the powerful transformational qualities of the forest, the location where all the nature symbols become embodied. This is the landscape where conversion occurs and those childhood faerie stories began to work their magic on me once again. Within their mossy and tendrilled tales were characters who were transformed by the woods and all who they encountered there. I was in need of renewal, the imaginal, the creative force that sparks up new life. Within this forest I would find the flame of sacred inspiration! 

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My treehouse was aptly called "Nest," and here I felt held up high above the forest floor, able to watch and witness life from the overstory. Birds beckoned from within the walls of my small woodland dwelling and without; I was eye to eye with blue jay, robin, wren, and chickadee. Within these walls (and throughout the Spring season) I read, and such glorious writers and works align with this bioregion! John Muir, David Haskell's The Song of Trees, Sean M. Conrey's The Book of Trees, Dr. Qing Li's Forest Bathing (the Japanese art and science of shinrin-yoku), Richard Power's The Overstory, and Peter Wohlleben's amazing work, The Secret Life of Trees all acting as my guides, coming alongside the deep indigenous wisdom that understood the sacredness of trees, affirming their place within cosmologies, with the emerging science that shows how truly intelligent and sentient these beings are. This To the Best of Our Knowledge podcast on The Secret Language of Trees was also a delight I    listened to several times. Other writers were more akin to a soul-guide for me, leading me into my inner-terrain and teaching me how my soulscape would grow from encounters with grief, especially when confronted with ecocidal evidence of colonialization and conquering mentalities and histories. Bill Plotkin, Francis Weller and Mary Reynolds Thompson all offered language to infuse the this landscape with sacred meaning and soulful growth. From this arbored place of learning, reading, and writing I would emerge; descending to the adventure that awaited on the forest floor as I followed the metaphoric crumbs through the woods towards my longing and belonging

“In the forest much is sensed and not always seen.”

— Mary Reynolds Thompson

I took long walks in the woods, these wanderings inviting solitude and aloneness. This time was completely different than being lonely or alienated from everything else. This was a time to allow my senses to tune in to the relationships that surrounded all of me fostering connection. For beneath me was the vast networks of mycelia, roots reaching to form familial connections that pass nourishment, information, and care along. Above me were the family trees: branches and trunks that told of storied and wise mothers, offspring, and the deep desire to be and behold. And all around me was the feeling of literally being transfused with veriditas, the greening power of God. This bioregion began working its deep and rooted truths on me. Within the wooded canopy you stay with questions, not the quick answers. Its not about racing through the trees to a finish line for there is no straight forward way in the woods. These timbered halls echo with the meaning of the journey, offering circuitous paths and passages, the wandering the value, the walking revealing universal truths. An authentic life will not travel the well-worn road traveled by many. Here a different worth is weighed. Eco-spirituality writer Mary Reynolds Thompson talks bout how the forest teaches that "No longer is  expediency, efficiency, and uniformity most prized." Rather, here in the the wild our soul awakens to the creative impulse and power that resides within the Spirit of a place, "a place that thrums and thrives with creativity, authenticity, and diversity." 

Once one begins the journey of wild soul discovery, there is a distinct divergence from popular paths; the trailhead allures and assures of something more, something deeper, something transformative. An authentic life leads to the woods and one's metaphorical red cape and basket of goods for Granny become the very things that ensure radical change. 

Beside all of this vibrancy and evidence of new life there appeared a shadow-side. There was a demand to remember the past that cut and clawed, crushing the indigenous life that flourished here for thousands of years before white European settlers laid their severe and severing claim. Beside every second generation old growth tree was the old growth one that was cut down, viewed only for its value as a resource; seen not as something sacred, but as a storehouse of wealth and power. I felt deep sorrow for the ancient groves that no longer stood and grief for the leveled and logged life, felled by the axe and saw. Hear me well, I did not move through these woods with disdained judgment and pious partisanship. No, this was a tension I held and attempted to stay in. A tension held between two poles, one hand holding the pole of indigenous wisdom and traditions, and the other the pole of Western modernity and capitalist claims of unlimited growth. Between these two places, within this tension, is the high seat of Spirit, that holy presence that can look to the past with discernment and empathic wisdom and to the future with a hope for flourishing and regenerativity. By staying present to both the past and the possibility, I felt I was able to tap into the place, growing roots that tapped into listening to the sacred and holy intelligence of this forestscape, leaning into the historic complexity of the recent history here too. My hope became an enflamed imagination for what this second growth forest could be if allowed to grow undisturbed for 200 years, allowing the tree canopy to grow and increasing in biodiversity. The nurse logs and decaying stumps, while evidence of a slaying, also are the nourishing sites for life!

I traveled through the forest valley, created and carved by the ancient presence of the lower Snoqualmie River, which cascades in a flurry of 276 feet of sacred force known as the Snoqualmie Falls. Snoqualmie Falls is a nationally significant cultural site of great spiritual importance to the Snoqualmie Tribe, whose people traditionally inhabited this valley, hunting wildlife and collecting plants and fish. For the Snoqualmie Tribe (sdukʷalbixʷ), the significance of Snoqualmie Falls can be understood through the cosmological legend of Moon the Transformer. The story was recorded by anthropologist Arthur C. Ballard (1876-1962) in the early 19th century, as related to him by Snoqualmie Charile (sia'txted) (b. ca. 1850). This story was formed from this place, the earth manifesting into language and legend in unique particularity. Confronting the violent history of conquering colonialism comes unbidden as the commercializing of this sacred falls into a utility and recreational source cannot be ignored. This is complex and intersectional, I understand. However, what happens when we strip away the sacredness of the Earth is a removal of personhood, the essence that gives a being rights, voice, and story. I'm not advocating for appropriation of indigenous stories; I am asking that we learn from these stories that percolated up from this landscape. Listening to the numinous within native tales is to give the land its tongue again, and then it is our work to listen and learn from her language. 

“Remember the earth whose skin you are...”

— Joy Harjo

We weren't placed on the earth, we emerged out of the earth. Indigenous cosmologies, creation origin stories, emphasize the interrelatedness between our natality and the nourishing and numinous topographies of Earth. The Hebrew Bible creation story within Genesis chapter two is no different. Even in this indigenous Christian myth there is an explicit connection to humanity being formed of the earth: "then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being" (Genesis 2:7 New Revised Standard Version). This is not mere dust, this is humus, the nutrient rich dark soil created when leaf litter (duft) covers a forest floor, creating a thick layer of humus. In addition to the plant material in leaf litter, humus is composed of decaying animals, such as insects, and other organisms, such as mushrooms. These ancient myths capture something of vital importance: the landscape is our ancestor, our kin. Mary Reynolds Thompson says it this way, "Four billion years of Earth's wisdom are embedded in your cells. It is time to awaken to the whole magnificent geography of your soul."

We are formed out of the earth and our bodily composition mirrors the interrelatedness. Not only do our physical forms find mirroring traits and characteristics of the earth, but we discover that these topographies image something of our soul too. Ecotheologian and cultural historian Thomas Berry says, "Beyond our genetic coding, we need to go to the earth, as the source from when we came, and ask for her guidance, for the earth carries the psychic structure as well as the physical form of every living being upon the planet." (Dream of the Earth, 195). There is a psycho-spiritual connection we feel in various landscapes. This resonance informs where we are actually from (our own indigenous heritage); what may be the location of our current soul formation; and it may also inform an inner-landscape that is our actual soulscape, our inner nature that mirrors features of the outer world, or outer nature. Within this sacred and soulful ground is where we and Earth meet, expressing ourselves to one another and offering amplification for one another as well. The forest not only teaches me not only about itself, but even more about me. There is an inherent connection between not only our physical bodies and the earth, but also our psyches. These bioregions restore lost or exiled aspects of ourselves and in the rediscovery of ourselves, in our re-membing of ourselves to Living Earth and the great community of things who make up life on this planet, we begin to participate in restoring the earth as well.

I have discovered that while all Earth's sacred landscapes speak to and through me, I resonate most with the woods. I find I long for the shelter of the woods over the comfort of other bioregions. Within the towering timber I find myself deeply at home, able to express myself in my meant-for-ness. The forest is not just external or extrinsic although I literally love to be in the woods. It is also archetypal. The forest is a place of being lost, finding one's way, roots, emerging strength, creative and nourishing energy, and sometimes (most times) it involves the process of even being found. I have come alongside Dante in the famous opening lines of his "Divine Comedy":                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

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“In the middle of the journey of my life,
I found myself in a dark wood;
for the straight way was lost”

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Forest Rewilding Practices 

Within the 140 pages of the Waymarkers Rewilding Workbook, you will find many invitations to prayers, practices, rites and rituals that will assist in your tuning into the natural world. This sacred setting is no less than our soul's resonance with the natural rhythms and seasonal movements found within the natural world. I find that as every new quadrant of the Rewilding Wheel begins, I am more than ready to learn and lean into the lessons contained within the corresponding bioregion. This Spring I delighted in all things Fire, Forest, and Flowering. It truly felt like the embers of the anima mundi were catching the tinder of the forest duft, sparking my creative imagination and inspiring me to walk into the metaphorical woods, wandering into the mythopoetic text of transformation. There have been many new ideas that have been birthed in this season, sacred life being formed that will begin to take on shape in the requisite work and production time of the Summer quadrant of the Rewilding Wheel. I look forward to sharing these in the season to come!

Following are a few of the personal practices I engaged with to deepen the forest mood in me, and cultivate a daily awareness of how this particular landscape expresses the Holy and becomes a sacred messenger as well. 

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With the sacred symbolism of Fire within this Eastern Springtime quadrant, I wanted to play with fire this season. I engaged the challenge of learning how to make fire with a bow-drill, an ancient fire-starting method that is more about relationship and rhythm than ever even getting a fire started. Again, even in this act, I was learning about how this season and bioregion is about holding the question not rushing towards the answer. My son, an eager and natural carver, willingly assisted me with the creation of the bow-drill. We are grateful to the good folk at Taproot Magazine who provided a very helpful and meaningful tutorial on this practice.  

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A thread that binds together the energy of the Fire and the Forest is found within the idea of inspiration. Forests help the world breath, and they have the capacity to inspire us as well, a word that comes from the Latin spiritus-breath. We use our breath to bring an ember to life and to live as a flame. We talk about a spark lighting up our imagination. Both the imagination and inspiration are the fertile ground in which new ideas emerge, a forest floor full of seed life and nourishing root systems, awaiting the light of the most primal life force, the sun, to awaken it and it bring it into form. Within the forest we witness the universal truth that we rise only when rooted. 

By bringing these seasonal and nature symbologies together into a bioregion, the Rewilding Wheel, the sacred circuit that guides these practices, aims to reroot oneself back into the rhythms, wisdom, and patterns that create this planet and our own flesh, feelings and ways to connect to the Sacred. 

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This past season I loved the sensual experience of cedar. By infusing my lava stone amber necklace every morning with cedar essential oil, I was offering myself the blessings of the trees. This scent carried itself with me all day so no matter where I was, I had an unconscious connection and access to the health benefits of being within the forest. I would even add a drop to my face cream ensuring that I was anointed with this woodland oil!

I also would light a tea candle in my essential oil diffuser (this copper oil diffuser is the one I use daily for my morning rituals), adding cedawood oil while facing East, saying prayers of gratitude for the emergence of a new day and for that great big flaming fire ball that is the origin of all life. It really became a favorite time of the day to gather in my senses and orient them to this season and bioregion and attune my senses to how God speaks through these elements. 

When I  placing the oil within the beads of my necklace or my oil diffuser, I    would offering up this simple prayer:

Creator God who makes yourself known through the tall and resilient strength of the cedar tree, bless to me this day. May my life be like medicine to those who are hurting, nourishment to those who are hungry, and warmth to those who may need shelter and clothing. May I grow rooted in your wisdom, like the cedar grows rooted in the soil, so that I too may rise within your strength. Amen. 

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Drinking delicious cups of fir tip or source tea became another meaningful ritual this past Spring. Bright lime green and tender needles burst with new life and amazing nutrients, truly what my body appeared to be desiring after the cold and dark winter. This cup of liquid vitamin C and electrolytes was medicine for the Coast Salish peoples, and is still enjoyed today for its vibrant characteristics. There are many ways to enjoy fresh fir or spruce tips, but truly mine was in a steaming cup of water with lime and my dad's honey. I am fortunate that I'm able to forage these tips locally within my homescape, and I hope that you too can engage in this practice that demands a knowing relationship with your forest friends. Please do forage responsibly and honorably; do no harvest tips from trees that have been sprayed or treated with herbicides and honorably harvest with a deep sense of gratitude and reciprocity. Take the time to introduce yourself to the tree and express gratitude for the gift of food and medicine she is providing.

You can prepare a hot tea by taking a handful of spring tips per 3-4 cups of boiled water.  Cover and let steep about 10 minutes. Add lime (or even a stick of cinnamon!) and honey to taste. 

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The Wilderness Will Return You Home

This morning I sang an ancient song that reminded me that the tree's of the field clap their hands and that the hills break forth with singing. Today's lectionary reading from Isaiah 55 invited an empire-orientation to remember the wilderness and to return. For the ancient Hebrew people, there was a critical connection between who they were and where they were. In the wild was a place of wholeness and belonging. Is the wilderness still calling to us? Are the forests clapping (or burning?) and mountains singing (or moaning?) for us to return and re-member our selves and understanding of the sacred? 

Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing accord to their own sorts of order. This is the is-ness of a place; where what one is intended to be, is. In ecology we speak of “wild systems.” when an ecosystem is fully functioning, poet and writer Gary Snyder says that “all the members are present at the assembly.” 

To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. 

Rewilding is a term that is used in ecological circles to describe the processes of large-scale conservation efforts aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and core wilderness areas. This is a way of restoring and returning a landscape to its natural, uncultivated state with the reintroduction of species—both plant and animal—that have been driven out or exterminated based on human behavior. I have been about this ecological restoration work in Seattle’s urban forests since 2007. Restoring the forest is one thing, can this practice also lead to human restoration? 

There is a movement that seeks to apply similar rewilding principles to human beings. And in this approach the definition of wilderness, wildness, wilding, or rewilding spans a spectrum with the most general definition seeing rewilding as a process that takes us out of our human-centric selves and into an on-going ecological relationship with the natural world and becoming respectful co-inhabitants of a place.

Rewilding then becomes a process of becoming whole once again. 

I apply this ecological, conservation term and framework to the soul-scape, understanding that the human spirit has been largely domesticated and hemmed in by various religious traditions and teachings, as well as commercial and capitalistic belief structures. These traditional systems affirm humanity as the apex of creation at the cost of the rest of creation. As a result we have cultivated a disconnection, to the point of a collective amnesia, from how place forms and shapes us culturally, personally, and spiritually. Our empire orientation has caused us to forget the wilderness; we have forgotten the revelatory voice and sacred song of creation.

We are being called back to the wilderness to become whole with the Sequoias, with the pines, finding our completion in the patterns of the seasons and songs of the mountains.   

The Silence Breakers: Mother Earth Says #METOO

Cosmic Birth by Mary Southard

Humans ignore the deep inherent value of the natural world and our interconnectedness to it.  We exploit the planet for her resources without acknowledgment of the deep and lasting cost.  The payment for this extensive damage to ecosystems shows up in human lives to the extent that a peaceful enjoyment of life has been threatened and/or injury to life will be caused.  Author and theologian Shelly Rambo calls this trauma: “Trauma is described as an encounter with death…a radical event[s] that shatter all that one knows about the world and all the familiar ways of operating within it.”  Trauma to the earth moreover, vis-à-vis ecocide and environmental injustice, manifests through the bodies of women; more specifically, through the suffering exploitation of marginalized women with long-term impacts on their health and wellness. To defy systems of eco-violence is to hope for a future that recognizes the sacredness of the earth through the inclusion of women within this sacred sphere.  

She has been groped, penetrated, maimed, and raped millions of times; reduced to nothing more than a vacuous object that will provide fleeting pleasure, and meet the relentless, gaping demand for greed.  She is left sick with fouled veins; cut off appendages; diseased cultures; and empty cavities—only to be leered at again, and ceaselessly violated.  

She is Gaia.  She is God. 

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To turn humanity towards a new global outcome, we need new stories and myths of imagining God.

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Scientists like Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock have brought our attention to the fact that the earth is a living organism, a concept that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as noosphere or, the thinking earth.  Teilhard de Chardin’s thought would mesh well with the Gaia hypothesis.  First articulated by the British atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, the Gaia hypothesis, simply put, suggests that the earth is a self-regulating, self-sustaining entity, which continually adjusts its environment to support life.  Though a scientific theory, the Gaia hypothesis has captured the minds of philosophers and theologians demanding developing reflection and challenging long-held religious beliefs.  The personification of earth as a female has enabled us to see her in her strength and softness.  The Gaia thesis, in likening the earth to a self-regulating mammal, supports the idea that she may have organs that are especially important, such as the rain forest and wetlands, which are more vital to the global environment than are other parts of the system.  This fertile embodiment of the earth invites us to reorient our common perspectives of ecological disaster as physical trauma to Gaia; molesting, cutting, mutiliating, and oppressing her for the resources she is demanded to give. 

For Christian ecological thinkers, the biblical God and Gaia are not at odds; rightly understood, they are on terms of friendliness, if not commixing.  Eco-feminist and theologian Sallie McFague provides a critical model of God, an imaginative perspective that embodies God as Planet Earth.  While an admitted metaphor, McFague wonders how our behaviors toward the earth changes if it is imagined as self-expressive of God, if it is a “sacrament”—the outward and visible presence of body—of God, the very expression of God’s being? 

Is it possible for the human population to see the world as a body that must be carefully tended, that must be nurtured, protected, guided, loved, and befriended as valuable in itself?  For like us, it is an expression of God—and as necessary to the continuation of a vibrant and flourishing life. 

McFague strongly believes that were this metaphor for God to enter deep into our collective consciousness as thoroughly as the dominating, triumphalist has entered, it would result in a profoundly different way of being in the world.  There would be no way of seeing the earth as devoid of God, and God vacant from the earth. 

Eco-theologian Mark Wallace states, “Insofar as the Earth Spirit lives with us in and through the created world, then God as Spirit suffers loss and pain whenever the biotic order is despoiled through human arrogance.”  The human becomes both the manifesting symptom of the suffering of the earth, as well as the perpetrator.  The evil in the world occurs in and to God’s body: the pain that those parts of creation affected by evil feel God also feels and feels bodily.  All pain to all creatures (and I would include trees, mountains, streams and oceans to this category as well) is felt immediately and bodily by God. 

God experiences at God’s deepest core the toll, torment and trauma of a body under attack.  Nor is Gaia silent in her suffering but uses a different language to speak the unsayable; her deep pain manifests in the bodies of those most akin to her. 

McFague maintains that viewing the world as the body of God means seeing all bodies as the body of God; however, she calls us to look at the bodies that are neglected in our society, to look at the bodies that we render invisible; a particular body that is either objectified or intentionally made invisible: the black woman’s body.  When we look to the bodies made invisible by systematic oppression, we see a demonstration of what has been done to the planet.  

There is a broad recognition that human well-being is dependent on the well-being of the land, that the destruction of a healthy environment will necessarily affect human dignity.  There is also the realization that the problems the poor experience on a daily basis are essentially environmental problems.  Women often bear the brunt of coping with these environmental problems.  As soil deteriorates, women have to work longer hours in backbreaking toil to harvest food from barren soil.  In deforested rural communities, girls and women expend increasing energy and time to collect firewood.  Women are often forced to work in environmentally hazardous conditions for low wages.  Kwok Pui-lan, an eco-womanist theologian, breaks down these problems as a result of imperialist greed and competition; corporations monopolize basic resources such as water, which disproportionately affects women and their families. 

Indian physicist and ecologist Vandana Shiva claims that Western development is essentially maldevelopment in that it reproduces and perpetuates capitalistic patriarchy on a global scale, which relies on the structures of exploitation and degradation of nature, the exclusion and exploitation of women, and the erosion of their cultures.  She further documents women’s significant roles in the food chain and their critical contributions as slyviculturalists, agriculturists, and traditional natural scientists.  She writes: “The new insight provided by rural women in the Third World is that women and nature are associated, not in passivity but in creativity and in the maintenance of life.”  This insight requires us to move beyond  generalized notions of women, nature and culture.  While this connection is a critical start to imperative conversations within the ecofeminist movement—

There is a requisite need to evolve the understanding towards an exchange that addresses the actual bodies of women who have experienced conquest, colonization and corruption in the global market. 

Kwok Pui-lan talks about how the colored female body has been consigned to signify nature in demeaning and ambiguous ways.  She writes, “If we theorize about women and nature from the broken bodies of women of color, we can see the relationship between women and nature is much more complex, ambiguous, and multidimensional than is often assumed.”

The demand to look closely and carefully at the lives of women of color and ethics has created a theological inquiry called “womanist.”  Coined by Alice Walker, womanist theology calls forth the moral imperative to honor African and African American women’s connection with the earth (and invites specific attention to all women of color as well); specifically, Walker has investigated the similarities between structural systems of oppression that dehumanize women and dominate the planet.  “Earth itself,” admonishes Walker, “has become the nigger of the world.”  But the Earth, she goes on to say, will assuredly undo us if we don’t learn to care for it, revere it, even worship it.  Walker warns: “While the Earth is poisoned, everything it supports is poisoned.  While the Earth is enslaved, none of us is free….While it is ‘treated like dirt,’ so are we.” 

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The connections between the earth-body and human-body continuum draws critical attention to the illnesses made manifest both in women’s bodies and the earth’s body.

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Narratives the world over confirm this connection.  

Katsi Cook, a Mohawk and midwife, argues that attacks on nature are also attacks on Native women’s bodies, and by extension, attacks on the bodies of Native children.  Toxins, which are released into the earth through industrial waste, pesticides, pollution, and weapons for war, are generally taken into the female body and stored in fat, and during pregnancy and lactation, women’s fat is metabolized, exposing fetuses and newborns, at their most vulnerable stages of development, to these chemicals.  Radiation poisoning, another environmental toxic byproduct of nuclear development, may be linked to the astronomical rates of lupus, an immune system disorder, among Nez Perce women living near the Columbia River in Washington State.  Wastes from the Hanford Nuclear Reactor, which began production of weapons-grade plutonium in 1943, were improperly disposed of in the river, from which the large amount of fish consumed by this community were taken.  Female tribal members have reported suffering from lupus, miscarriages, broken bones, endometriosis and life-threatening infections.  Termed “downwinders,” residents have reflected on the devastating impacts of  non-consensual radiation contamination as another form of sexual violence. 

Painful, dangerous events have created open wounds in females from the Two-Thirds-World.  Here is where Shelly Rambo’s definition of the wound as trauma is helpful.  She writes,

“For those who survive trauma, the experience of trauma can be likened to death.  But the reality is that death has not ended; instead, it persists. The experience of survival is one in which life, as it once was, cannot be retrieved.” 

This “middle” place is horrifically played out by the indigenous women of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.  After World War II, the U.S. exploded a bomb that was 1,300 times more destructive than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; this test was the first of 66 nuclear tests conducted in the Marshall Islands.  The people from the island of Rongelap were directly in the radioactive fallout, which covered their beaches, homes, gardens, and skin with burning, white powder for weeks.  The women of Rongelap’s cervical cancer mortality is 60 times greater than in the mainland U.S., breast cancer rates are five times greater, miscarriage rates are tremendously high, and babies born are often without skeletal structure;  the current life-span of a Marshallese women is age 50.  “Death is not concluded,” states Rambo, “instead, it continues on in forms of life that may not be recognized as such.  Life is reconfigured as the excess of death, as what remains.”  The experience of traumatic suffering is intensified by the invisibility and unspeakable nature of violence.  The Marshallese women did not have words for the kind of reproductive abnormalities that were a result of the fallout; their trauma was silenced by a lack of ancestral understanding and cultural shame.  The violence done to the earth through wanton and deliberate warfare development was, and continues to this day, manifested in the bodies of these women with profound, devastating consequences.

As long as women’s bodies are showing trauma related to violent ecocide and anthropocentric colonization, the raping Gaia of her resources continues.  As Bessel van der Kolk has stated in his seminal work by the same title, “The body keeps score at the deepest level of the organism.”  The psychical trauma inflicted on Gaia-or more precisely the memory of trauma-acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that still at its work.  Like a splinter that causes an infection, it is the body’s response to the foreign object that becomes the problem more than the object itself. 

The effects of ecocide on the women’s body is likened to that of the initial trauma being done to the earth, and the memory of that trauma shows up in the lives of women for generations.  To ignore and silence this critical connection between Mother Earth and the human mothers on this planet will continue to have dire effects. 

States van der Kolk, “Denial of the consequences of trauma can wear havoc with the social fabric of society….Culture shapes the expression of traumatic stress.”  Our planet is showing the denial of these consequences through a myriad of ways: climate change, Fast Fashion, agri-business, and species loss to name just a few.  Rambo would see these consumptive cultural patterns as a statement of trauma.  She states, “Trauma is an encounter with death and with life. At the intersection of death and life, a cry emerges.”  There exists a global cry demanding witness to uncontainable suffering.  To see the ecocidal actions that humanity has taken against the world during the Industrial Age as trauma, and the life of humanity continuing in the face of this social and economic organization, then the body of the woman becomes the deep and desperate cry of the earth. 

Where does hope lie for a planetary population that both perpetrates and bears the trauma done to Earth?  How do we transform the shared material substances of our interrelated bodies from mutual toxicity to the brilliance of stars?  Rosemary Radford Ruether maintains that we need new psalms and meditations to make our collective kinship vivid in our communal and personal devotions.  These modern expressions need not be original however; a recognition and recovery of indigenous practices that honors the feminine may offer a way in to this much needed mutuality. 

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Women carry the wound of Gaia in their bodies, and it is from this wound that a voice demands witness: “witness death and witness the possibility of life arising from it.” 

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Many Third World and indigenous women believe that their own traditions give this voice, where the natural is not separated from the cultural and spiritual, can offer enormous contributions to saving ourselves and our planet.  The value lies not only in the long-practiced traditions of creation-honoring cultures, but in the actual ecological location  Humans are a uniquely positioned agent in the earth’s ecological matrix. 

Our particular places, our womanist lenses, allow us to see the personal saving presence of God in relationship to biotic communities, and provides a starting place for how we can contribute to reversing the global ecocrisis of Gaia, the Body of God, our Home Planet. 

The preamble to the Earth Charter echoes with hopeful possibility if we so choose to see the world as a truly holy place.  May we stand at this critical place—this place of such weighty wounds—and respond to the voice from the wound with a profound turning towards a future that honors Earth as God’s Body. 

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“We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, 
a time when humanity must choose its future…. 

To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth Community with a common destiny.”

— Earth Charter

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Bibilography

Conrade, Ernst Charity Majiza, Jim Cochrane, Welile T. Sigabi, Victor Molobi, and David Field.     “Seeing Eco-Justice in the South African Context.” In Earth Habitat: Eco-Injustice and the Church’s Response. Edited by Dieter Hessel and Larry Rasmussen, 135-157. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2001.

Grey, Mary. “Cosmic Communion: A Contemporary Reflection on the Eucharistic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin.” Ecotheology 10, no. 2 (August 2005): 165-180.

Harris, Melanie L. “Alice Walker and the Emergence of Ecowomanist Spirituality.” In Spirit and     Nature: The Study of Christian Spirituality in a Time of Ecological Urgency. Edited by Timothy Hessel-Robinson and Ray Maria McNamara, 220-236. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011.

McFague, Sallie . The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1993.  

- - -, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1987.  

Pui-lan, Kwok. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005. 

Rambo, Shelly. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. San Fransisco, CA: HarperCollinsPublishers: 1992.  

Scharper, Stephen B. “The Gaia Hypothesis: Implications for a Christian Political Theology of the Environment.” Cross Currents 44, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 207-221.

Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. London: Zed Books, 1989.  

Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Spencer, Daniel T. “The Liberation of Gaia.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 47, no. 1-2 (1993): 91-102.

United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. Earth Charter. UNESCO headquarters in Paris: March 2000.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.

Walker, Alice. Living by the Word. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Books, 1988. 

Wallace, Mark I. “The Green Face of God: Christianity in an Age of Ecocide.” Cross Currents 50, no. 3 (Fall 2000: 310-331.

Rewilding & Journeying with Nature: A Conversation with Pilgrim Podcast

I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with friend and fellow-guide, Lacy Clark Ellman, host of Pilgrim Podcast about our shared appreciation for seeing life through a pilgrim's lens and how the natural world avails itself to us as a sacred guide as we make our journey. In our conversation I share my thoughts around rewilding as a spiritual practice and a process of remembering our meant for interconnectedness with all of creation. If you are curious about the Rewilding Retreats I facilitate, I invite you to take a seat! Pour yourself a cup of tea and listen in for an hour. There is a sacred voice on the ancient side of remembrance that awaits you and is calling you forward toward the wild edges of your life!

>>LISTEN HERE!<<