The Song of the Sea: Reflections on a Selke Soul-Skin Rewilding Retreat

The sun was just warming the sky with the first blush of pink and purple; the sounds of daybreak resonated over the threshold of land and sea. While I was starting the fire for a beach front morning matins, I heard the song—sonorous notes rippling over the waves coming from a lone kayak put out to sea. And then, the bobbing heads of seals emerged through the waves, encircling the modern coracle, receiving the morning melody that called to them and affirming the enchantment of the moment. It was as if the myths were awakening, or more likely, that we were awakening to the myths. For as our gathered group told and retold an ancient tale of shape-shifting seals, attunement began to occur—a tuning of the senses to the song of the more-than-human world happening all around us.

Mythtelling assumes that the stories already exist in nature, waiting to be overheard by humans who will listen for them…a myth is the power of a place, speaking. -Sean Kane

The collective energies of the Autumn (season), West (cardinal direction), and Water (element) land themselves in the work of the watersheds and seas within the coordinates of the Rewilding Wheel. In the westward quadrant of this wheel we gravitate towards bodies of water, an elemental way of binding back to ourselves. In this place we fully explore our becoming as water reflects the nature of the soul. It symbolizes the principle of “as above, so below, as within, so without.” Spiritual traditions teach that everything in the outer world is a reflection of our inner world, which provides a sobering invitation when looking at how our water sources are being mistreated. However, our spiritual growth around the wheel provides us with a sense of vision and imagination now that we are in our westward posture. We can draw deeply upon Source, as if from a deep well, and imagine how our waters should be treated, honored, and respected. Woman are particularly empowered in this quadrant as our bodies are profoundly tied to water literally and metaphorically.

As water flows from the mountaintops, through the forests and fields, and ultimately to the sea, this becomes a bioregional expression of fullness, of completion. Here the water shows us what it is meant to become through its appearance as Winter’s snow, Spring’s rain and snow-melt rivers, Summer’s wellsprings, and then the final meeting with the oceanic body. This journey bears echoes of our own psycho-spiritual formation as we too make our own journey through the seasons—bringing us West towards our own fullness and mellowed maturity. This is an invitation into an enchanted way of living—we see a reflection of ourselves within our bioregion as we re-learn to speak the language of seasons, of the sea, and even of the Selkie.

These interconnected themes and energies inspired the Autumn Rewilding Retreat, a weekend away on the Salish Sea where the Celtic myth of the Selkie was explored as way of reclaiming aspects of ourselves that were lost or dismembered along the way, and rediscovering core aspects of our True Self that are critical to an authentic way of belonging within our world. This shape-shifting story is one that honors the process that one goes through to become and belong fully to themselves as well as to the wild and sacred world. And so this retreat engaged this story as a way to recovering the “skin we are meant to be in.”

The particular location of this retreat provided a variety of sacred spaces. We created a “Sea Sanctuary” where individuals were invited to engage the collective energies of the Rewilding Wheel through prayers and practices that clarified how these elemental aspects of life itself are connected to our human lives as well. Prayer sticks created from Hedgewood herbs and plants were gifts that linked the elements together—earth, fire, air and water were all in tandem as praying participants were invited to light the prayer stick while standing in the sea. This is a powerful tradition of speaking your prayerful intentions into the water. The practice of praying immersed in water was one of the more extreme ascetic traits popular amongst Celtic saints. It is said that even Columba on the Isle of Iona would wade deep into the sea to pray for hours upon a time. Consider how water conducts energy and is very transformable. It changes depending on what the offering or intention is. In the Lakota way of prayer and worldview, Mni Wiconi means water is life and water is alive. Water has consciousness. Water has personhood. Water is eternal as our planet is a closed planet. This element of water has always been. Praying in the water intensified your prayer. Literally water evaporates so that water that has just been transformed by your words, your intentions, your energy, travels into clouds, which then travel the world. Your prayers can come down in the form of rain on the other side of the world. So your prayer and your intention you are sending may come down as snow in the Andes, or rain in the Amazon. You are sharing the consciousness of your prayer with the consciousness of the planet through praying within the water.

“May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has, streaming through
widening channels
into the open sea.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke

Weaving is another form of prayerful intention that shows up in myths from around the world; the weaver is often associated with the feminine and crone and shows up as a symbol of the Present who holds the threads of Past and Future within her omniscient knowing. With this mythopoetic understanding in mind, we created a sea-loom where retreat participants could co-weave a soul-skin, an expression of hopes, desires, and prayers for the reclamation of their meant-for-selves. The woven work took the whole weekend to create and then this “soul-skin” was sent out to sea on the last day, representing our prayers for reclaiming our re-woven self.

When one begins to recover the dismembered or buried feminine, one taps into a wellspring of creativity. This creativity is often conveyed archetypally through foundational creating often through the act of weaving. In Native American traditions you can find stories of Grandmother Spider who weaves creation and stories into being. In the Greek tradition it is Gaia who creates the cosmos. In Celtic tales you have the Old Woman of the World who spins and weaves the continuity of time. Through participating in this ancient practice, there was a sense that we were not only weaving ourselves back together, but we were weaving ourselves back into our very place. Much of our sense of dismemberment and soul-loss is a result of not being deeply rooted and connected to the spirit of our place.

Rewilding Retreats aim to provide nourishing foods that reflect the energies of the seasons as well as provide a pallet that reminds us of where we are, the foods that actually help form and shape our bodies through their biochemistry. This retreat was no different with the meals offering seasonal sustenance through apples, nuts, squash blossoms, rosemary and elderberry syrups. Most fun was the sea inspired smoothie bowls that were created every morning with the use of an extract of spirulina, a fresh-water algae that carries water notes and an amazing dose of B12.

In many respects, eating well is an invitation into dwelling well. We can be in a place and not know where we are or how to be there. We can also come to forsake or degrade places because we do not appreciate how vital they in fact are. Growing and eating the unique foods found in specific bioregions enables us to inhabit the places of our lives with a more detailed understanding and empathy. Ecotheologian Norman Wirzba states, “Food creates a profound connection to a place. To fail to know places in detail, and the wisdom that has collectively been learned there, is to lose the possibility of detailed understanding. Failing to understand, human action will grow to be out of step with, and perhaps even destructively contrary to, the processes of life that feed personal life”(1). The food served at these retreats hope to create this sense of reciprocity and sacred balance that is critical for all life to flourish in our bioregion.

The elements that were aligned for this Rewilding Retreat weekend created a portal for the Sacred to be seen and experienced in profound and powerful ways. There was a sense of sacred enchantment present as we played and practiced at the sea’s threshold. While we were praying matins one morning, a group of seals came almost right up to the shore, staying at the water’s edge throughout our liturgy! Mythologist, psychotherapist, and writer Sharon Blackie says this of how local knowing and detailed understanding creates connections within the seen and unseen world: “Enchanted living embraces a wider world, and acknowledges the value of respect and interdependence between richly different cultures—but it does so from the perspective of a deep grounding in its own locality, and in the unique bioregion which supports it” (2). This then is the process of rewilding—the practice of awareness and reconnection to the cultures (both human and more-than-human), the niches, the ecosystems, which we occupy, and re-membering ourselves to the sacred stories these places speak. This is the great work of reweaving ourselves back into our places, belonging once again not only to our True Self, but within the wild world that has given us rise.

Selkie Drawing by retreat participant Sarah Bylsma (2018)

“I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing…Silence…Waves…
—Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?”
—Juan Ramón Jiménez

(1) Norman Wirzba, Food & Faith: A Theology of Eating (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 40.
(2) Sharon Blackie, The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic in Everyday Living (Tewkesbury UK: September Publishing, 2018), 214.

A Remembered Celtic Consciousness

One of the greatest teachers in the Celtic world, John Scotus Eriugena in ninth-century Ireland, taught that Christ is our memory. In Christ we remember how we are designed to be in relationship with the cosmos, humanity and the more than human world. However, we suffer from the “soul’s forgetfulness,” he says as our anthropocentric religions hierarchical structure push to the side our communion with creation. 

Christ then comes to reawaken us to our true nature, how we are meant to be, a meant-for-ness that is interconnected with the more-than-human world.

This deep remembering brings us back into an integral relationship with the whole assembly of the natural world. 

This past January, I went to Healdsburg, California to the sun-soaked, grape-growing soils of Bishop's Ranch to learn from theologian, author, and Celtic scholar John Philip Newell in the context of his newly forming School of Celtic Consciousness. While I have studied and practiced in the Celtic way for over twenty years, learning directly from this prophetic voice caused even deeper parts of my soul to awaken to the profound truth this tradition carries. 

The vision of the Celtic School of Consciousness is three-part and interrelated. There is an intentional direction to seek the sacred wisdom that comes through the Celtic spirituality stream. The hope is to provide relational access to this stream through collective spiritual practices that remind us of our interconnectedness through interfaith relationship and dialogue. Lastly, the vision of the school meets its mission in how its working to translate the rediscovered wisdom and spiritual practice within this Celtic tradition into compassionate and meaningful action. The vision and mission for this school makes it extremely exciting and relevant for our current times. 

I talk often about an eco-centered spirituality, and our need to move away from Western informed theologies and doctrines that are ego-centric, ways that maintain a separate and self-focused understanding of the divine presence. My experience of John Philip's teachings, and the Celtic spiritual tradition as a whole, is the inherent understanding of our interrelated being. There is sacredness within all of nature, including human nature; and to perpetuate mindsets that affirm otherwise will continue the degradation that we are seeing globally on this planet. In his book, The Sacred Universe, theologian and cosmologist, Thomas Berry writes that we must aim at

“overcoming our human and religious alienation from the larger, more comprehensive sacred community of the natural world...Our challenge is to move from a purely human-oriented or personal-salvation focus in our religious concerns to one that embraces the universe in all its forms.  This will require an immense shift in orientation.”

The gift of the Celtic Christian spiritual stream is that of its broad and inclusive embrace of the whole and its ability to shift one's orientation to include that of the integral and sacred subjectivity of everything in creation. 

By understanding an inspirited natural world, we move into the categories of resistance. The wisdom within this way of seeing demands a way of presencing ourselves on this planet that is in solidarity with the other. When we move into a role of solidarity with the other, we move in opposition to those that would power-over, in a word, we move in resistance against Empire. It was very interesting to be reminded of how the Celtic Mission was born on the wild-edges of Empire and grew its distinctive characteristics in response to the Roman Empire's power-overing posture. The Celtic way still invites this contrary opposition today in that the more we identify with the more-than-human world, the more we understand that Divine Presence is here, surrounding us and within us, the more likely we will resist political policies that see the wild as a resource to dominate.

The Celtic way emerged on the edges of the 5th century; however, its value doesn't stay in the past. A modern Celtic prophet whose life had profound impact on the body politic as well as shifting awareness to our need for the more than human world was John Muir (1838-1914), the Scottish-born, American naturalist whose writings and advocacy led to the preservation of Yosemite and other national parks, and, through his founding of the Sierra Club, helped ignite the modern environmental movement. Muir understood that when we are solely engaged in human relationships without emersion in the natural world, we lose the right relationship with nature. This understanding expanded beyond a proper accord with the outside world, but understood that this affair was needed to properly understand God. Muir's Celtic consciousness inherently understood this interrelationship that was articulated by Eriugena, 

"Christ wears "two shoes" in the world: Scripture and nature. Both are necessary to understand the Lord, and at no stage can creation be seen as a separation of things from God."

I love Muir's iteration of this truth, "The universe is a Bible that will one day be read by all." The whole of the natural world is a sacred script that we must remember to read and listen to again. This "Wildness is a necessity," stated Muir, for a deeper kind of knowing.

This was the kind of truth that I had been personally engaged with for years. I have been involved in a decades-long forest restoration project that fundamentally believed in making the urban wild more accessible to increase the potential of exposure and experience with wonder and awe. However; in spite of this stewardship work, and recent encounters and engagements with Native indigenous elders, a question began to gnaw at the edges of my work. Could I, one who has benefited from the supremacy of her settler heritage, truly read the text of my natural surroundings; could I hear the Spirit of Place? Through the wisdom of the Celtic tradition, could I gain access to the sacred presence that was imminent in the lands where I made my home?

I was able to have lunch with John Philip where I could ask him this question, truly hoping for a way to emerge through the rugged and murky soul-terrain this question had brought me. He said, 

"We each have access to the world soul, to the heartbeat of the sacred within the earth, to this subterranean stream of God. That doesn’t disregard the particular stream of how indigenous cultures have translated that voice in particular places. It does invite us to do the work of learning how to listen."

The Celtic way doesn't provide a way through; it provides a way to the spirit of a place. It provides the insight into understanding an inspirited natural world, and then it demands that in this remembered relationship of solidarity, we speak truth to the powers that would subdue and dominate it. This demands that we, that I, acknowledged my Whiteness, my complicity with Empire, and the ways that I turned a blind-eye to when an other was objectified into a resource serving solely Power's ends. 

The way into Celtic Consciousness is an invitation to a journey that will take one to high and sacred wild places, but also will require interfaith relationships, including those with the land, so that together we can work towards compassionate activism on behalf of the other and a flourishing future. 

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These are pictures I took of stained glass windows with the Chapel of St. George. Created by glass artist Irmi Steding, the windows follow the theme of the song-prayer of St. Francis, the Canticle of the Sun.

Pilgrimage Awakens the Soul

“Isn’t it time that your drifting was consecrated into pilgrimage?  You have a mission.  You are needed.  The road that leads to nowhere has to be abandoned…. It is a road for joyful pilgrims intent on the recovery of passion. ”

— Alan Jones

Pilgrimage. What is it about this word that causes one’s emotions to stand on guard-both compelled and curiously cautious at the same time? Indeed, it is a loaded word, packed with ages of political and parochial themes. Even with the historical entrapping of this concept, there is a much more ancient restlessness that is deep within our collective consciousness to be on the move and to engage questions and the Answer in the rites of passage process. Movement and travel is fundamental to the human experience. A general arc from hunter/gatherer societies to today’s human populations underscores that there is an inherent desire to move. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Hebrew God is often portrayed as a traveler showing up to deliver divine guidance. The journey upon which the traveler embarks subsequently becomes sacred as well.  This holy hegira underlays the constant travels and wanderings of many ancient Celtic Christians.  Restlessness was in their blood as was the notion that it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive.  This lens of hope presented a perspective that the road was a rite; that the path provided prescient knowledge and insight to their journey towards divine revelation. 

This is the stuff of rites and rituals. This is about growing to the edge of life as we know it and discovering that there is a world beyond that wild hedgerow that is drawing us into its feathers, fronds, and fur. Getting up and moving to the parameters of our life, to the absolute edges, is where we re-engage our senses and re-awaken our souls to our sacred meant-for-ness. 

I believe that what agitates people when they first engage the concept of pilgrimage is that it literally unsettles them. The domesticity that ties us down to the perceptions of our lives begins to untie and unravel as this seeker-path begins its work of instigating a longing and a calling to go beyond, to move through, to expand and re-discover the divine in this asperous, ancient process that involves an epic, wild exchange with the natural world. When you first hear of pilgrimage, whether it is the perspective or a place, it is as if something gets lodged within the soul like an irksome stone or that sense of evasive knowing of a lost thing that you just can’t quite remember…that sense stays with a now restless-you, and will call to you your entire life until The Longing and The Call has been courageously met and engaged with a knapsack in hand and boots on the feet, knowing that the road is a rite, the thing that will bring us to an authentic center and sense of the sacred.

Easter: The Place of Our Resurrection

Raphael's The Transfiguration (1520)

This Easter evening we resurrection-believing types are likely sitting down, basking in the power of today's symbolism, while licking the stolen-from-our-kids'-Easter-basket chocolate off our fingers and pondering what to do with all those hard boiled eggs.  Our Lenten journeys over, we are quickly back to sipping on our coffees, wine or whathaveyou's, secretly grateful that that discipline practice is over and we can return back to ordinary life.

And here is where the ever ironic and paradoxical-pilgrimage ways of the Greatest Journey ever made continues to resound and clang, making that Lenten home-coming not as comfortable as we anticipated and certainly not what we thought it would seem.  For the journey made by Jesus through Gethsemane to Golgotha didn't end in darkness and death.  This tormented trek didn't return a man unchanged from his travails.  No, this most sacred of all journeys ended in transformation, restoration and resurrection!  Nothing in the universe would ever be the same again because God set out on the greatest venture ever beheld, journeying towards an end that really has only been The Beginning.

We set out on the pilgrim-path traveling towards transformation.  All bets are in that indeed, this ancient mode of sacred migration will connect us to the divine and that we will return changed.  And it most certainly does!  For no one who has ever encountered the Holy remains the same, so how can we expect to arrive home, pull up the ottoman, pop open a beer and exhale, "Whew!  Glad that is over! ...Now, what's on TV?...."  Pilgrimage just doesn't work that way.  For you see, from the earliest recordings in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we witness a universal life force that is always on the move.  Jehovah was a pilgrim-God, always walking, always moving, always going out towards the edges of society and calling to the least of these.  Author Charles Foster in A Sacred Journey (2010, Thomas Nelson), says it fantastically, "[God traveled] in a box slung over the shoulders of refugees and worshipped in a tent."

Pilgrimage is wandering after this nomad-loving God and seeking after a divine-kingdom whose powers are established on the periphery.  And if we take up our cross and follow Him to these places, how can we expect to return home, content to put our walking stick in the closet and our souvenirs on the mantel?  We were made to walk, hence our amazingly designed bipedal bodies.  When we sit for too long, bad things happen, there is really no denying it.  We develop physical issues that lead to chronic pain and poor health habits.  We start to engage the world through screens instead of through touch, resulting in an apathy that is hardly characteristic of Jesus' radical pilgrimage through Palestine.  We get cozy and comfortable and no longer long for a quest that will transform and reform us.  Content, we are happy to scroll through our iPad finding hints of God's presence there.

Understandably, our technology indeed offers new and unique ways of engaging the world, and yes, even bearing witness to testimonies of God's presence throughout the earth.  However, there is something fundamentally changed that occurs when journeying after God outside, when the created elements are participating in the blessings and bumps that are experienced on the road.  In the Celtic tradition, peregrinatio (Latin for "pilgrimage") takes on a special meaning as it refers to a different kind pilgrimage.  Instead of setting out to walk to a specific holy site or destination, the ancient Celtic monks would undertake a maritime excursion to find their "place of resurrection," which is a place to which God is calling the wanderer to settle, serve and await death.  The boats used at the time were called coracles, which were small vessels made of animal skins stretched across a wooden frame and sealed with pitch.  These early Celtic saints would set off in a coracle without  oars, trusting the wind and current to guide them to arrive where they are being called to go.  They would literally cast themselves adrift to sea for the love of God, following only the direction the wind would take them.  In this ancient practice of peregrination, the natural world was a critical element to the journey.  The wind and waves interacted with and informed the wayfaring, ever obedient to the will of God.

These journeys were acts of complete trust and faith in God, and resulted in new monastic establishments, some of which would define the Celtic Christian world (Iona and Lindisfarne being great examples).  The place of resurrection was one in which absolute assurance in God would become the new normal; this certitude would become the ordinary time in which these pilgrims now lived.  And death, let's say death to self, would come in the form of no more comfortable couches on which to recline until the next call came.  No, the cross was borne and convenience was exchanged for connection with God through creation.

Our Lenten journey need not be over.  Our Easter celebrations should not be checked off the list of this month's activities.  Because we set out to experience grace in the pilgrimage conditions of Lent, we were changed.  And because we are changed, so will be our home-places.  These environs of patterned thoughts, behaviors and lifestyle should be affected by the grace we experienced on the road, thereby causing even these familiar modes of being to be radically impacted, so much so that home no longer looks or feels the same.  So much so that we discover that we are hoping more, living more, desiring for difference more.

Our pilgrimage didn't end on Friday, nor does it conclude today in a dyed, candy coated frenzy.  Today, because of the Resurrection, we are lit up with our Easter-people reality!  And this awe, this grace initiates another inner prompting, to again leave behind the familiar (because indeed, it takes mere minutes for something to become familiar), to again engage the cyclical patterns of pilgrimage, and go where the Spirit now leads to continue to walk to the place of our resurrection!