The Rewilding Wheel: Turning Towards Transformation

The Rewilding Wheel is a sacred circuit that seeks to locate the wisdom of universal nature symbols within one’s particular homescape for the purpose of spiritual formation. By locating the psychospiritual patterns found within the natural world to a particular place, the ancient wisdom inherent in the cardinal directions and elements takes on a practical shape and invites a focused seasonal practice. In this way, the Rewilding Wheelis unique as it invites a sacred process of remembering and recovering relationships within various ecosystems throughout your landscape.

I constructed the Rewilding Wheel as a model--as opposed to a theory--with the primary design objective to fashion a sacred bioregional approach to a seasonally-enmeshed spiritual practice. Creating this wheel was, in many ways, similar to stacking many variable wheels one on top of the other, and slowly turning them into alignments that would get at this intention of landing the seemingly ethereal energy in a landscape. This idea of sacred bioregionalism invites us to discern the “spirit of our place" and lean into the deep wisdom that lives within the land.

I sat down with Lisa, a member of the Rewilding Community and a practitioner of the Rewilding Wheel. Lisa is a faithful partner, mother, and owner of her own dog-walking business. I was curious to hear from her how this particular life has fostered soul formation and connection to the Sacred Wild. A women of practiced intention and an already established relationship with nature and animals, Lisa appeared to me to already have her wild connection established. It has been a joy to witness her further tap rooting through this particular life wheel. Read on to hear from her about how the Rewilding Wheel has impacted her life.  

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Interview with Rewildling Community member Lisa and Rewilding Community Guide Mary DeJong

Question: How has the Rewilding Wheel cultivated a more ensouled approach to your life?

Lisa’s Answer: The Rewilding Wheel has helped me to connect with the seasonality of my life in the rhythm of my days, months and years. It is a good metaphorical reminder of the times of rest and incubation that I need to give myself so that I continually grow, evolve and birth new parts of myself, while staying rooted in who I am.

Question: What are some of the practices that you have gained through this life wheel that have inspired your spiritual life?

Lisa’s Answer: I have a deeper connection with the land since joining the Rewilding Community. I now understand the importance of land acknowledgement, and have a relationship with the plants and non-humans in my own garden that feels more interconnected and respectful. I especially like the practice of creating nature mandalas, which invites me to refine my attention and notice more detail in the world around me. I’ve learned from Mary to do simple things that awaken my senses, like making a morning tea from plants in the garden and spending a few minutes each morning breathing in, tasting, and being in conversation with the life around me. I’ve become more aware of the lunar cycle, and find that embodied connection both comforting and stimulating. I’ve also brought the Rewilding wheel into my crafting hobby, and am creating a needle felted/embroidered version of the wheel, which is a fun and rewarding way to engage my creativity with my practices.

Question: In what ways has the Rewilding Community provided you with meaning and connection during our global pandemic?

Lisa’s Answer: The online community has been a source of comfort and relationship, often bringing beautiful images and ideas forward and offering the opportunity to connect with those on a similar journey. I enjoy the monthly online gatherings and find them to be a nourishing ritual. Mary has also introduced me to many teachers of whom I was unaware, poets, philosophers and storytellers who I have begun to listen to and learn from. I’ve included members of my family in my new practices, and know that the experience is deepening our connection with one another and helping to keep us all grounded and kind during hard times.

Question: The Rewilding Wheel unique aspect is its approach to sacred bioregionalism-how we attune to the spirit of our place. Do you have a favorite bioregion that has emerged through your engagement with the wheel? What have you learned through that locatedness?

Lisa’s Answer: My region of deepest connection is the forest. I spend a lot of time in the forest, and had been feeling that I wasn’t fully present there, wasn’t fully appreciating what the forest held. Rewilding practices have increased my awareness. I move differently in the forest, with greater intention and care. The forest holds both darkness and light, and I’m at home in that filtered, dappled light. Trees are also important for me, and I have so much to learn from them. I’m particularly interested in the mycorrhizal network and the interconnection of a forest community, which helps me feel my own interconnection.

Question: Anything else you might want to share?

Lisa’s Answer: I’ve been seeking connection with a largeness beyond me since I was a child. I’ve never found a religious or spiritual  home that felt right to me, except in wilderness. The practices of the Rewilding wheel helps me to connect with that largeness, and helps me to feel a part of a “we” that is expansive and meaningful. We are all stardust, all a part of one another, and this community and set of practices holds that for me.

Thank you, Lisa, for sharing of your Rewilding Wheel journey! If YOU are interested in deepening your relationship to your place—your homescape—join the journey! Learn more about the Rewilding Wheel Community HERE.

Rewilding Wheel altar at a rewilding retreat

Rewilding wheel nature mandala created by lisa at a rewilding retreat

Forest nature mandala at a personal rewilding retreat in the north cascade mountains

The Rewilding Wheel can be practiced at home and doesn’t require any supplies, brick and mortar locations, or human guides. More than ever, as we are needing to stay close to home for the sake of health and wellness for our communities, deepening into the spiritual nature of our local landscapes has value. Within the more-than-human world you can be intimate, close, profoundly present. Join the journey and deepen your relationship with the Sacred Wild!

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.

God on a Wing: Winter Rewilding Nature Altar

Our family keeps a nature altar, a way to not only bring the out-doors in, but to also attune our senses to the phases of the seasons, the beauty of the natural world, and as a portal to the deep wisdom that resides in the wild. This sacred space has taken up various iterations in the years we have done this practice. When the household was generally filled with very little people, these silks were piled high with sticks and stones; every item outside was a treasure and little hands begged that every one was brought indoors. To an uneducated heart, this space would have looked like a random pile of rocks, but to us it was our Ebenezer. Our collection of nature was our stone of help—a waymarker that provided direction and clarity to our sacred belonging to and with the Earth community. This pile dynamically grew through the year, representing so many different journeys and encounters with awe and wonder.

Now that half of my children have their toes in teen-hood, this space is taking up more thoughtfulness and creativity. Furthermore, we are using this altar to mark our seasonal journey through the Rewilding Wheel. This has given a bit more focus and direction, and invites our family to pay attention to particular theophanies (God-showings) within the natural world.

The Rewilding Wheel is a sacred circuit that seeks to locate the wisdom of universal nature symbols with one’s particular homescape and spiritual formation. By locating the psychospiritual patterns found within the natural world to a particular place, the ancient wisdom inherent in the cardinal directions and elements takes on a practical shape and invites a focused seasonal practice. In this way, the Rewilding Wheel is unique as it invites a sacred process of remembering and recovering relationships within various ecosystems throughout your bioregion. This is a practice of sacred bioregionalism—where the particularity of our place educates our soul and brings us closer to Spirit that resides there as well.

The Rewilding Wheel was developed to be an integration of critical aspects of the cycles and seasons of nature that would bring one into a deep sense of belonging within their particular bio-regions. This is a move from an ego-centric posture on the planet to an eco-centric one where one’s whole identity is rooted and interconnected with all of creation. This posture requires sensory participation and deep paying attention to the phenomena that is going on about one in their surrounding landscapes.

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

-Simone Weil

For those of you practicing this sacred circuit, we know that the season of Winter is associated with the cardinal direction of North, the element of Air, and the bioregion of the Mountain or High Place. This is a time of deep darkness that is held in tension with the lightness of breath, bound to the found-wisdom that is associated with mountain tops and high places. A symbol for this season is that of the bird, a being who rides the wind currents and alights in high places with ease. This is the season of the work of the Spirit, who breathes inspiration and insight into our souls.

This wheel invites seeing the Sacred with sensuality, an embodiment through the elements that gives form and shape to that which has been traditionally transcendent. The Spirit is air. The Judaeo Christian cosmology tells a story of when God breathes air into the lungs of the first human being (“then the Lord God formed adam from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and adam became a living being”; Genesis 2:7). The Hebrew word for this primordial breath of life (ruach, or pneuma in Greek) also means Spirit. God’s Spirit is God’s breath, signaling the sub stratosphere itself. All that we and all other beings need for survival, is the animating power of the Sacred in our midst—God swirling and whirling around us, making all things live. The research and study of ecotheologian Mark Wallace in his book When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World (2018) looks at how the Spirit is generally figured as a winged animal, a bird. His claim is that within this tradition is an animistic understanding of God, that the divine actually is visible, enfleshed, incarnate even through the more-than-human world. This idea of a winged bird God is something I am meditating on and allowing to work on me in this Winter season. Pair this holy avian form with the mystery of the mountains during these dark and dormant months, and my goodness! There is a treasure trove of wisdom into which to huddle.

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We have been putting together our Winter Nature Altar slowly following Epiphany last week and the closing of the Christmas season. Guiding this practice are the thematic elements found within the Rewilding Wheel. We have all been making these stone feathers—what a fun way to play with the form of mountain and air!—and wanted to share this seasonal altar craft with you.

I’m grateful to the artist Marisa Redondo for this inspiration within the pages of Nature Art Workshop (Quarto Publishing Group, 2018). This was the seasonal wild-craft offered to registrants of the Winter Rewilding Retreat as well. Such beautiful stone feathers were created!

This simple stone design reminds us of the primordial presence of the mountains and high places in our bioregion, and how this location is often associated with wise-people and sages. Pairing it with the intricate beauty of the feather is a mediation on God as a feathered bird and the belief that all beings, including more-than-human animals, are imbued with divine presence.

Feather Stones

1. Go outside and find a rock that seems to speak to you. Ask the rock permission to take it home. This is a great reason to intentionally go out to the mountains or local high place to find a rock or stone!

2. Gather your materials: stones, craft paints, matte varnish, paint brushes and paint pallet. We chose white, light blue, light green and a gorgeous gold (a precious element found deep within mountains!) for our paints and love the use of wax paper for our palette. While you work, listen for birdsong outside your window, or the sound of the wind in the trees. See this as a sacred presence around you while you create this item for your seasonal altar.

3. Apply a thin and even layer of varnish to your rock. Once dry, paint a thin line centered on your rock with a small round paintbrush.

4. Paint a feather tuft outline around the centerline.

5. Paint V-shaped lines to divide the feather into sections.

6. Fill the tip of your feather with fine lines.

7. Create a triangular shape within the feather by painting two lines in each section.

8. Fill the area outside the triangles with fine, feather-like lines.

9. Add dots or embellishments along triangular border.

White-Eyes

BY MARY OLIVER

In winter

    all the singing is in

         the tops of the trees

             where the wind-bird

with its white eyes

    shoves and pushes

         among the branches.

             Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,

    but he's restless—

         he has an idea,

             and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings

    as long as he stays awake.

         But his big, round music, after all,

             is too breathy to last.

So, it's over.

    In the pine-crown

         he makes his nest,

             he's done all he can.

I don't know the name of this bird,

    I only imagine his glittering beak

         tucked in a white wing

             while the clouds—

which he has summoned

    from the north—

         which he has taught

             to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall

    into the world below

         like stars, or the feathers

               of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,

    that is asleep now, and silent—

         that has turned itself

             into snow.

My Rewilding Year

The past four seasons have been an intentional journey of re-membering—rewilding—myself to my bioregion and to the landscapes that create my home. This has been a year of sacred eco-awakening, a reconnecting to an integral communion with the sacred wild. Through a practice with the Rewilding Wheel, I have intentionally sought after relationships and wisdom inherent in the energetic associations between seasons, directions, and elements within a particular bioregion. The scientific world would describe a bioregion as a region defined by characteristics of the natural environment. I like poet and environmental writer Gary Snyder’s understanding of a bioregional consciousness much better—a bioregion is a “spirit of a place.”

When one is actively engaged in relationship with their local landscapes, there is a profound connection to the spirit of that place.

This is beyond the scope of relational recreation (although recreation and play are critical aspects of relational development). I am talking about sensing into a place so deeply that you encounter the Sacred, almost like the experience of digging for a well and finding the wellspring. Soon after beginning this practice of attunement and bioregional apprenticeship, I began to form a core question that stayed with me the whole round of the year. Essentially, I had to recover the answer to the intersectional question of whether I had access to the spirit of a place. As a white woman with settler ancestry, did I have admission to the depths of spirit that resided within my bioregion? Could I dig deep, root deep, and find the Sacred Well-spring that I sensed was present in the very ecosystem of my homescape?

Last January I was in conversation with Celtic scholar and theologian John Philip Newell about this search for the spirit of a place. In response to the question I carried he replied with a perspective that was enormously helpful and wise. He said that “the Spirit of God is like a subterranean stream that percolates up in particularity.” John Philip would understand that one’s bioregion is evidence of this divine particularity and further evidenced by the vast diversity of human and more-than-human life that emerges from particular bioregions. Furthermore, and in answer to my question, he said yes, I have access to that Spirit, for it is the same Spirit that I have come to know in a particular way through my faith tradition, but this invites an engagement with local understandings, stories, and myths that understand the Sacred through again, the particularity of a bioregion.

Good answer, right? Indeed yes and that wisdom carried me around the wheel and through the seasons. And then I had the opportunity to bring this question to another wise elder. You might remember that I spent a few days this past summer at Eloheh Farm with Randy and Edith Woodley. Over the most hospitable cup of never-ending coffee one morning, Randy asked me directly why I had come to see him, why I had come to the land he co-sustained. I brought my question about accessing the depth of a spirit of a place and my thoughts around sacred-bioregionalism.

I was preparing for a dissertation of wisdom that would take days to talk around and through. I received it, but in a word and with the promise that this will take the whole of my life to unpack. Permission.

Permission. Had I asked permission to have that access? Had I asked permission from the land, from the bioregion into the spirit of its place? Had I asked the original inhabitants of the land permission to tap into this deep and sacred soil? Permission.

Permission is the fundamental posture of a practice of sacred-bioregionalism, and it is one that is counter and contrary to the Western mind. It is a humble and vulnerable posture as it assumes that the other has the right to answer, and perhaps contrary to your hope. It is a question that is opposed to the self-entitled position of steward, a role and effort heralded by the Western (especially Christian) mind; a steward doesn’t ask permission but one who is in solidarity does. What would happen if we asked the resident orca whales of the Salish Sea permission to dam the rivers for hydropower, depriving them of the salmon needed for their survival? What if we asked the large marine mammals in the Atlantic permission to allow seismic blasting for oil surveys? What do you think they would say? And how would their response cause you to act and advocate differently? This is the kind of permission-asking that will not only result in the requisite posture shifts to attune to one’s bioregion, to commune with the spirit of a place, but will ensure that the Sacred within and with-out this holy world can continue to speak in full depth into a flourishing future.

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish in the sea inform you.”
-Job 12:7-10

Spring | East | Fire | Forest

Summer | South | Earth | Field/garden

Autumn | west | water | Watershed/sea

Winter | North | Air | Mountain