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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Restoring the Land. Restoring Ourselves.

Photo credit: Tom Reese 

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

-Muriel Rukeyser

The shocking staccato of a lone M60 unloads into the forest filling the air.  A strange-bird-like call answers in response. Tucked amongst the overwhelming English Ivy towers and sharp Himalayan Blackberry walls, strewn mattresses are habitat to both syringes and streetwalkers.  The foul odor of feces and rotten food mixes with the residual tang of fornication and fear, layered upon decades of human-dumped garbage and debris. Stolen goods are hidden and found, rerouted through the overgrown invasive underbrush to avoid being spotted. And the bird-like call screeches through the branches and leaves once more. Perched on a muddy knoll with back to the trees and facing the structured, regulated life of the city, sits a lone figure clothed in threadbare layers of mismatched sweaters and socks sending sonorous signals through the air. These are distinct from the now-silent warbles and trills that should be present in this urban forest; these particular shrieks offer an alerting call for those illicitly trading in sex and drugs.  

Stay out of these woods, was the explicit message. These woods are scary, bad, and degraded; and we don’t belong there. So fear-filled is this forest that neighboring immigrants and refugees are known to make gestures to ward off the evil eye when they walk on crumbling sidewalks beside the trees’ shadows. So avoided is this forest that neighbors living on opposite sides of the wall-like greenspace maintain veils of social and racial distinction and separation, and go to great lengths to drive around the woods to access neighboring community assets. A fugue-state surrounds this forest; neighbors have chosen to file their fear away into a state of forgetfulness, neglecting this natural world and creating a chasm between the people and a place that could serve to create harmonious, interconnected community. 

This is the story of Seattle’s Cheasty Greenspace as it was when my husband and I moved next door to it in 2004. And this was the land that began to call out to me, imploring that I begin to reimagine how this particular place could be restored with a renewed story; how reconciliation with this land held a key to the unity of our community. As I witnessed the hotbed of activity flowing to and through these woods, I wondered how these trees could be experienced without dominant feeling of fear and separateness. For every stolen vehicle that was left in front of my house, for every ton of garbage and waste that was dumped upon the forest floor, for every red-eyed dealer that understood this landscape could cover his traded addiction, I began to be curious if we could imagine something profoundly different for this space.

It was as if the woods began to whisper to me, to call out to me, to summon me to restore an ancient story—one where the dignity of the land and the people were intimately interconnected, where the natural world thrived, and all living things flourished together in harmonious inter-relationship.

This urban wild whispered to me of a wholeness, of a restored ecosystem, that could be achieved through equal parts of forest and human restoration. I began to realize that this particular forestscape was a contributing part to the equation that left so many people wondering about the physical and social health disparity of our community—human and more-than-human alike.  

 Seattle’s Rainier Valley, racially and economically diverse, and historically underserved, has the highest chronic health and crime rates in the city. This area is also an identified “Open Space Gap Area,” meaning a community with no access to open green spaces within a half mile of residences. The irony of a neighborhood where children’s lives are at risk of vehicular hit-and-runs, and gun-shots fill the air more than bird-song, while a massive 43 acres of forest sits within the very midst of this community is glaringly obvious. The inherent connection between holistic human health and the state of this forest demanded my attention. The state of this forest and its ecological well-being began to offer itself as an accompanying answer to the chronic questions around oppression and poverty in our community. The trees offered insight into the well woven roots of injustice and environmental degradation, and how an interrelated relationship with them could inform a sense of being deeply at home both in our particular neighborhood, and subsequently, on our planet. By rewilding this particular place of Living Earth, we would be essentially rewilding ourselves as well.

Ecotheologian and ethicist Larry Rasmussen powerfully posits that “We are not so much at home on earth, as we are home as earth.” The integrity of the natural world renders our most basic and fundamental task: to live in such ways that ensure a flourishing and regenerative life for all of the created world and for all future generations within it. So how we live in our particular places matters as we are meant to be in deep interrelationship with the whole assembly of creation. And how we live in our particular places very much determines whether ecosystems within a bioregion will thrive. Rewilding becomes the process by which we support and live into healthy and whole ongoing relationships within the natural world; I would venture that rewilding becomes a process of returning to a state of belonging, to a state of home. However, we cannot begin to talk about rewilding the Earth, or our particular places, until we begin to rewild our understanding of God. When we begin to engage this sort of divine wholeness, we begin the critical task of rewilding ourselves as well. I believe that through rewilding our bioregional ecosystems, we begin the transformative work of rewilding the image of God. 

Western Trillium within Rattlesnake Ridege (qʷalbc to dx̌aclbac)

We carry wildness within. This inner-landscape (what I would call a soulscape) has historically been accessed by stories and myths, and sacred rites and encounters with Mystery. Western civilization has told stories of human separation from the natural world, built upon traditional interpretations of foundational Judaeo Christian scriptures that places humanity hierarchically at the top of the great chain of being, and essentially, God’s vice-regents on earth.  Interpretations of scripture such as this has resulted in humanity seeing the natural world as secondary to ourselves, and reducing it to a resource, its value in its commodification and contribution to a Western way of living. This has also resulted in the mental framework that has allowed humanity to extract, denude, deforest, and destruct Earth and her living systems. And, it has resulted in humanity’s own sense of homelessess. 

 If we are to truly rewild the Earth, we must rewild ourselves and how we see humanity as the image bearer of the Divine; we must bring our sacred stories and our soulscapes back into full and whole relationship with the more-than-human world. Like the presence of the interlacing petals of the Western Trillium (Trillium ovatum), which only grows in restored and rewilded forestscapes, we must see ourselves within an inter-animating relationship with the whole assembly of creation.

When we too are rewilded, then our work of ecological restoration within our local bioregions becomes the Great Work of integral becoming and belonging as home as earth.

Discerning The Call That Knocks on Your Door

At some point in your life, you begin to wonder if this is really all it has to offer, or perhaps there is a sense that you have gotten off track and are on a completely different road than you ever thought you would travel. Perhaps life has become tinged with a sense of smallness, a meaningless mundanity; access to the parts of you that still beat with wild wings and startle with wonder at the sound of mystery or at the stars in the sky seem locked away without a key. Or perhaps you have sought after the spiritual life, desiring an ascent that will take you high above and away from the pain and suffering of this world. But no matter how set apart you become, you still feel the snares of sorrow. And perhaps you may already be wise to the game of the conventional life, knowing that intentionality and centeredness is counter to the crazy consumption of our culture.  

And yet, there seems to be something calling to you from a deeper place, calling to you like the trees’ blood of which Rilke writes, to “sink back into the source of everything,” to “to out into your heart as onto a vast plain.”

You’ve recognized that there is a journey you must take that will take you down into the sacred, subterranean lands of your soulscape, a journey that will give you that key to recover the wild and precious parts of you.

The Call knocks on the status quo of your life, and stays knocking until you answer and open the door, surrendering to the invitation to cross the threshold, leave the home you know, and go on your own way towards that desire that showed up, cloaked as curiosity and questions. This knock at your door is an invitation to find the lost and scattered pieces of yourself.

Print by John Bauer 

Questions that I am often asked are, “How do I know if this is really The Call knocking on my door?”  “How do I know if this just isn’t a mood or a distraction from my responsibilities?” There are, fortunately, ways to tell. The great mythologist Joseph Campell who did extensive work around the idea of the monomyth, or the hero’s journey, notes four experiential qualities that accompany The Call.

First, if it is a true call, you will know that responding to it is, in fact, not an avoidance of responsibility, but rather a facing of something difficult; something unknown and frightening is summoning you. Ecopsychologist, author and wilderness guide, Bill Plotkin, describes this as “a compelling need to walk into the mouth of a whale, or out into the night and into a storm.” This isn’t an easy vacation away from your life. This isn't a trip to forget your cares. This is a profound sense that your one true life will only be found, be recovered, in the wilderness, and your survival now depends on the departure. 

Second, Campbell reminds us of the paradox that there is something strangely recognizable about this unknown journey. You have a deep sense of belonging to the journey and the wild edges to where it is taking you; you feel an uprising of ancient memories, the woven fabric of kin and familiarity, that covers you like a favorite cloak. This strange and sacred summons was made for you.

Third, you have an astonishing and incomprehensible sense that the season of life you have been living is suddenly over, whether you want it to or not. In the great myths and legends, this often is when the protagonist is chosen of the journey, instead of she choosing it. Recently I have been doing some personal work with the Slavic folk lore stories of the Baba Yaga. In one such tale, a born-of-a-bear giant named Ivan engages in a transformational journey with the Yaga. In this story there is the adventure that he chooses; however, his heroic transformation doesn’t occur until the part where the descent, The Call, chooses him. 

Fourth, The Call is almost always unexpected, and often unwanted. This is a disruption to life as you have known it, and who needs that when life is already busy, overwhelming and chaotic? However, this is a summons from the soul; a demanding can’t-shake-you command from your future self that you need this for your soul-survival and future flourishing.

Plotkin offers a fifth way to discern if The Call is a genuine. He asks that you imagine not acting on it and then noticing how you feel. “Imagine you are going to ignore The Call, or even laugh it off. How does that feel? Do you detect a building dread, a huge sadness, a guilt that comes from refusing a sacred invitation?” What if you don’t answer the door, or better yet, answer it and after saying, “No thank you,” close it, refusing the needs of your future self?  Another way to determine the validity of the call would be to say, “yes” and begin to take those first furtive steps onto the path that begins to suddenly manifest before each tentatively placed step. With each step that is taken, a sense of assurance is gained, a feeling of rightness grows.

If it is a true call, you may feel like your going out is actually a return towards your true home for the very first time. 

By Kay NiELSON "East of the sun and west of the moon" 1914

Know this though: while The Call’s knocking may never stop, you will become deaf to its solicitation over time. It is essential that you act on The Call as soon as you are ready as the window of opportunity may not remain open for long. It is a sacred aligning of serendipitous circumstance when you are at a place to both hear the knock, and open the door to it. You, however, must make the choice to walk out the door. 

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself makes no promises. 
It is only a door.
~Adrienne Rich

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Rainier Maria Rilke, from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 95-96.

Joseph Campell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), 55, 58. 

David Whyte, from “Sweet Darkness,” in The House of Belonging (Langely, WA: Many Rivers Press, 1997), 23. 

Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2003), 57-58.

Spring Equinox Mandala

Today is the Vernal Equinox! Spring is officially here and the deep shadows the climbing sun creates affirms this. Today we will see equal light and equal dark, and from here until the Fall Equinox will see an increase in sunlight. 

This is also the day which turns the Rewilding Wheel from Winter Quadrant practices that played with the associations between the Winter season, the element of Air, the cardinal direction North, the spiritual traditions that connected to the sage-qualities of the high places, and the wisdom soul work of the crone. Now, we move Eastward, the place of the rising sun and the kindred element of fire. The Spring Quadrant works with the symbols of Spring, new life, creativity, imagination. This is the season of birth and transformation. The Rewilding Wheel does something different with these universal indigenous symbologies. This sacred circuit lands the prayers and practices associated with these correspondences in a particular locale with the intention of attuning to the spirit of a place. In our Pacific Northwest bioregion, the spirit of this quadrant lands us in low land forests. Within the mythopoetic world, the forest is the place we enter to be transformed, and it is often the lantern, or flame, that guides us through these dark and transformational places to a the grounded sense of Self Knowing. 

Here is to the turn of seasons! Here is to the turn of the Rewilding Wheel! I’m excited for this new attunement and the spiritual practices and disciplines that align with this quadrant.

I co-created this mandala today as a spiritual practice to attune to the new season and see anew how the plant world was emerging on this vernal day. As I noted, this Spring season will place my delight and discipline within forest and woodland landscapes. I thought it was completely appropriate then that this mandala is presenting along with shadows cast from a still-southern arcing sun through the fringe forest that is our back yard. 

Plant Friends who co-created this mandala with me:

Daffodil—in honor of my son River’s birthday which follows quickly after the Spring Equinox; I tell him every year the daffodil’s are blooming to trumpet their celebration of his birth)

Rosemary and Forget-Me-Not—these sweet blooms both carry the theme of remembrance. As I was in my garden today, there was the machine-and-wheeled presence of trucks, cranes, and drills in the fringe habitat of our neighborhood woods. Three centurion trees were felled for more development. I sit in the tension as I witness the removal of habitat and tree beings to accommodate the relentless growth of our city. These flowers seemed to implore me to not forgot the faithful lives of these trees and continue this important work of deep remembering.

Equinox Eggs—lovely eggs laid by our lovely hens. Eggs are symbolic in this season of the return of vibrant life after a long and cold winter. 

Snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus)—Snowberry grows throughout our neighbor-wood as well as on the slopes around our home. Plants have extensive root systems and are used to stabilize soils on banks and slopes. Cut some of the branches and tie them together to be used as a broom (fun activity for kids after they help pick up the branches during a late winter prune!). Into natural deodorant? The crushed berries have been rubbed into the armpits as an antiperspirant!

Grand Fir—these fresh Grand fir tips are delicious as a tea or infused to create a simple sugar! Young tips are harvested when they are limey green and tender. These ones were harvested from our neighbor-woods and represent the move towards a deeper engagement with forestscapes in the Spring quadrant of the Rewilding Wheel.  Pinch off the new growth here and there – making sure to not to gather too much in one place and being sure to harvest with gratitude.  

White Icicle flowering current (Ribes sanguineum)—Profusely adorned by hanging clusters of white flowers in early spring followed by blue-black berries in summer. Superb as a hedge and indeed is present in the living fence (i.e. hedge) we have created between our home and our neighbors. Wildlife are attracted to the summer fruit so planting this in your yard increases your habitat potential. Deciduous.

Indian Plum or osoberry (Oemleria)—this too is a harbinger of spring but within the cool of the low woodland forest. With the first vibrant lime green leaves to unfurl in late Winter, Indian Plum boasts a delicate white flower before anything else blooms. If you can catch them before the birds do, the fruit is edible, albeit bitter. Indigenous native tribes ate the fruit fresh, dried, or cooked. 

Forsythia—bright yellow harbingers of spring. These are lovely planted as a border or hedge and make lovely cuttings to bring into your home, office, or school. 

Pussy willow (Salix)—My children love collecting the catkins and using them in their play. Plant a grove and cut some every year for crafts. Willows are pliant and strong and make beautiful wreaths and chairs and tables and trellis--the only limit is your imagination!

Evergold Variegated Japanese Sedge—our backyard paths are lined with this sedge, which prefers the moist soil that is fed by the seasonal spring in our neighbor-wood. Birds enjoy the coverage the long leaves provide. 

Sword fern—these fiddleheads emerge in the early spring and are delicious fried up with olive oil and garlic. Harvest carefully and never take too many from one plant as these unfurl to become the sword fern’s fronds. My totem, sword ferns have shown up to me in revelatory ways in times when I have most needed divine presence. 

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Listening in Place as Practice & Poetry-A Workshop with David Whyte

On Saturday, March 3 I had the opportunity to do a workshop with the cultural luminary, David Whyte through The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology's Alumni Lecture Series. Following are some of the thoughts and themes that came through our sharing, interaction, and play.

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When we listen deeply to the places that create our homescapes, our bioregions, we learn the stories of the land and create an imagination for how to mutually belong within these places. This practice of listening becomes a ritual in that it connects us to the great belonging within the community of creation, and also invites the Spirit to break in afresh, posturing us forward toward possibilities of a flourishing future. These are acts of remembrance and re-membering, practices that remind us of our interrelationship with the more-than-human world and bring us back into membership within this assembly. 

The practice of listening in place will ultimately draw forth sorrow and lament, especially when one begins to attune to the silence of the beings (biodiversity) that are no longer there. How do we respond when the natural world no longer functions with resilience, when the bird’s song is still and the forests no longer refresh after the fires?

Where is the habitat of hope when the ice melts, the seas rise, and the forests burn? Can we find it in the silence? Will the still small voice call from within the wilderness, calling us to lean deeper into the silence and there find our true belonging?  

Ecotheologian and ethicist Larry Rasmussen says it this way,

“We are not so much at home on earth, as we are home as earth.”

The integrity of the natural world renders our most basic and fundamental task: to live in such ways that ensure a flourishing and regenerative life for all of the created world and for all future generations within it. So how we live in our particular places does matter as we are meant to be in deep relationship with the whole assembly of creation. David Whyte's poetry guided us into an imagination for this relationship, a kind of dialogue with the natural world and the particularity of place that transforms one's soul. He spoke of this growing sense of interrelationship as a journey, a pilgrimage that would ultimately lead one to and through the most fundamental questions of life. 

For me, my practice of of listening to my place has brought me to and through a question and process of acknowledging how my understanding of stewardship was based on superiority. My decades long urban forest restoration work hit a false floor; for me to continue to learn from this land, I had to engage in not just restoration, but personal deconstruction. And so I began the work of learning how my Whiteness granted me the privilege of choice to move to the Rainier Valley, and allowed my access to systems to change land policy. I had to confront the reality that white supremacy allowed me to be a steward of this land. And that even the theological idea of stewardship was one based on hierarchy, dominion, and power. I learned about how the oppression of the earth and the oppression of people are two sides of the same coin—you will not have liberation of one without the liberation of the other. My practice led me into important times of learning from tribal elders, who taught me that the land speaks. They showed me how they listen to the land. I began to realize that my understanding of stewardship had actually caused me to become deaf to the sacred soils of my particular place. 

Stewarding this forest would only allow so much access to the spirit of this place. I had to begin the work, the practice of perceiving and participating within my bioregion. Bioregionalism is what environmental activist and poet Gary Snyder calls the “Spirit of Place.” To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is a whole. I began to reconstruct my understanding of Cheasty through a whole perspective, leaning into the wisdom and teaching inherent in the land. It is this process of listening into a place, or perception and participation of a place, that will reveal sacred stories and ultimately encourage a move towards solidarity and a deep sense of belonging within our bioregion. Bioregional awareness teaches us in specific ways.

Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place and it must be grounded in information and experience. Learning about the forest through the lens of sacred and storied ecology has not only taught me about the land, it has taught me how to be human and a member of an ecological community.

The lessons of the forest are those humanity need most right now. 

Within this practice of knowing, we can find our habitat of hope. A habitat of hope acknowledges the suffering that Western stewardship has wielded that has resulted in the silencing and extinction of species, and it invites a new way of seeing, a new way of being that is in solidarity with the natural world. It is Aldo Leopold’s think like a mountain. I’ve found it as I’ve begun to think like a forest. It is looking at the landscape through the lenses of foundational power, intersectional engagement, and revelatory awareness so to bring us into a profound sense of home and belonging as the earth.

 Through this workshop, David and I attempted to bring these lessons to the participants. We brought in elements from my homescape, lowland urban forest plants that were honorably harvested for workshop attendees to co-create nature mandalas, an activity that encourages a way of meeting and knowing the natural world that invites communion and revelatory understanding. The 13th century Japanese Buddhist priest, write, poet, and philosopher Dōgen once said,

“When you find your place where you are, practice occurs.” 

The mandala, which is ancient Sanskrit for “circle,” is a symbolic circular design that portrays balance, symmetry, and wholeness. Mandalas are found in almost every culture, and can serve as a sacred reminder of the path we seek to walk. My nature mandalas, which I co-create monthly, are a continuing practice of learning the land—connecting to the plant and tree life that make up my homescape, learning from them of the medicine and food they offer, leaning into their seasonal stories, remembering our interrelatedness and meant-for-ness. This is a practice of forming what theologian Steven Bouma-Prediger calls an ecological perception of place. That is, a practice to get to know your ecology by becoming familiar over time with as many components of your ecology as you can. In other words, this is a practice of learning to listen and attune to storied and sacred land.

 And so this workshop was one that brought us through the terrain of our imagination, a journey that led us to participate with the sacredness that is within the wild world that exists all around us. It was a time of inviting a profound shift in how we understand ourselves in relationship with the environment that values it for its inherent integrity and particular revelatory qualities.

I am deeply grateful to The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology for inviting me into this opportunity to share of my experience and learning, and to David for his willingness to share space with me in this context. May we all be inspired to engage this deep work of practicing listening in place! 

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Are you curious about co-creating nature mandalas as a spiritual practice? Read more about this way of learning with the land here! 

Winter Rewilding Retreat-The Enchantments

In February I went away for my personal Winter Rewilding Retreat up in the North Cascades. Here, in a cave-turned-cabin, I engaged prayers and practices that reconnected me to the deep and sacred symbolisms associated with Winter, North and Air, locating them in the bioregion of mountains and high places. From this place I sought the mythopoetic wisdom of the sage, the elder, the crone. Temperatures dipped into single digits so I kept the cave’s wood burning stove burning, not so unlike the fires around which wise ones gathered to tell their stories of what the wild had taught them. 

Rewilding is an ecological term that defines the process of bringing a habitat back into flourishing wholeness. It is a restorative philosophy that reintroduces native forests, flora and fauna to denuded landscapes with the hope for a flourishing ecosystem that is regenerative.

Applied to our interior lives, our “soulscapes,” rewilding then becomes a practice of integrating our souls back into the soil of our bioregion and the regenerative spirituality of nature. This is a coming to know the sum of an area's forces, what poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder calls the "spirit of a place." This is a developing of a bioregional awareness, allowing a place to instruct and inform us in specific ways. While there will always be archetypal wisdom within the universal qualities of a geography, the particularities of a place is critical. This is how we become of a place once again. This is a practice, a process, that remembers ourselves back into belonging here and into the sacred wisdom within the rhythms of the natural world. 

Each Rewilding Retreat focuses in on the sacred nature symbolism associated with the particular season, the corresponding cardinal direction and element, and the psycho-spiritual development that aligns as well. Within this collection of meaning, I can find divine inspiration in particular places.

This winter I went north to the Northern Cascades, mountains that are dear to my heart and heritage. My maternal great-great grandparents settled the town of Index, Washington. This mountainous corridor has headlands that bear the names of my forebears, so driving through them, and having them as my vistas, is like being amongst my ancestors. And while there are certainly favorite and seasoned stories from this side of my family, I am increasingly grateful for the perspectives of these peaks; their vantage point offers timeless truths that transcend the narrow views of pioneers of past days. I feel the mountains speaking their yet older names, and offering stories that aren't bound in leathered journals, but instead are writ in stone, pine, and headwater. And so I journeyed to a cave-like cabin at the feet of The Enchantments. In a small lean-to built into the side of an ancient pile of boulders, I engaged my anchorite-self, praying, reading, and writing in response to the wind, this high place, and the fires that kept this alpine hermitage warm. I felt a renewed sense of kinship with the great 11th century visionary and mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Legends of her life claim that her particular anchorage was cut into a hillside. Living within and tending to the earth produced a heightened sensorial attunement to and a unique understanding of the other-than-human world. This embodied experience of the interrelatedness of the whole of creation gave her insight into nature’s immanent creativity and rhythms.

These rhythms surrounded me in my alpine hut. Just outside of my worn wooden door cascaded a crystal clear, potable, water fall, undoubtedly part of the headwaters of Icicle Creek, the Skykomish and Snohomish Rivers, and the many tributaries and lakes in the Cascade lowlands. This deluge was amplified by the percussive booms of falling ice; the upper falls would ice over completely in the almost sub-zero night temperatures, and as soon as the sun glanced on the face of the falls, cracks would course through the coverage and descend upon the boulders just above the cabin. I climbed up there one morning after the sun had fully risen and was in awe of this steady cracking and breaking. Several times I had to jump further back and away from the emerging water fall as the ice fell away from its nocturnal covering to avoid getting hit by several feet of broken ice. These sounds reminded me of how very alive these high places are. For here is where all life begins; where water begins its journey in both form and function. Here is where it begins its journey to provide life to generations to come. 

“As long as I live, I'll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I'll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”
-John Muir

The heart of the world, the animus mundi, comes through with revelatory particularity depending on where we are. And where we are is constructed of various elements and associations within the natural world. In any given location, the spirit of a place is revealing herself through the given season, our physical cardinal orientation (Are you facing North? Are you facing South? Can you attune to the differences?), the elements, and solar and lunar phases. This collection of associations all play together in profound and powerful ways when they are located in a geographic location that marries these correspondences. And so, the Rewilding Wheel would spin these various nature symbols and land them, plant them, root them in a place where quarter long engagement can be practiced to develop a stronger sense of locatedness. The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset is often quoted as saying, “Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are.” In today's amnesiac society this telling is an increasingly lost art form. People no longer know where they are as technological advancements and modern careers would say that in a global, social-media market place, being from one place doesn't matter. There are many contributing factors and outcomes related to this broad stroke generalization. What I am learning through my own rewilding year is that what is also lost is a particular understanding of God.

When we live transcendentally, so lives our understanding of God, and we lose sight of the sacramentality of our local soil.

What Annie Dillard called "the scandal of particularity," John Duns Scotus termed "thisness" (haecceity). This thisness understands that God creates and resides within particularity. There is something particular in how Divine Presence is experienced and manifested in the Pacific Northwest, as in any other location on earth. Our important work is to attune to our places and immerse ourselves in a particular way of knowing that honors how the subterranean stream of God has percolated through and become particularized in a place. This is how we connect to the animus mundi, the spirit of a place. 

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I spent a  warm and cozy late afternoon, reading, praying, and writing. Ironically, during this retreat (and most of all of February) I was dealing with a prolonged case of laryngitis. I literally couldn't speak. This physical ailment added a depth of meaning to this rewilding retreat as the themes within the Winter season include that of silence, the kind of quiet that comes from a life well lived and a wisdom that now chooses words with careful selection. Within this quadrant of the Rewilding Wheel, I look at the characteristics of the crone (a female elder whose name has been abused over the course of history) and how her wisdom is crystalized to that of a seed. So while this is the season of dormancy and stillness, the spring-time rhythm of seed-growth echoes backwards to me, even while I sit quiet in a stone enclosure.  I invited the natural world to be my voice and prophetic prose to be my prayers. As the sound of a waterfall sings right outside the window, Brother Muir is a perfect companion for this mountain retreat:

“Nature as a poet...becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains—beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.”

Everything about this ancient alpine place speaks with wisdom: the craggy peaks, the granite boulders, the ice-ensconced falls, the celestial orbs. There is a hot tub that is filled and fed by the fall's water; to heat this tub one must build a small fire within an immersed metal box and tend to its flames. Slowly and steadily the water is heated to body-nourishing temperatures. Every action and chore around this cabin carries with it deep meaning and metaphor. Even the fire-tending for the hot tub speaks to me and asks me to meditate on that which I keep burning within me to maintain warmth, health, and wellness. Slowly, I am beginning to read the sacred text that is creation. I feel like my faith has grown feathers and my hope, horns.

These Relwilding Retreats are a way to begin the practice of this deep landscape-listening, this learning from the sacred thrumming that exists within our particular bioregion.

This is the practice of seeking out the story-soaked soil of our homescapes so that we not only begin to truly know where we are, but of equal importance, who we are.

These sacred stories will evade us as long as we ignore where we are, as long as we disregard our bioregion and its histories. A Crow elder has said: “You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough—even white people—the spirits will begin to speak to them. Its the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.” When we remember and return to the land that fosters us and informs our faith, we are practicing a form of spiritual rewilding. This rewilding of our soul's terrain invites an attunement to the subtleties of the the sacred that exist within our particular places. 

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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.

beWILDerment: Coming Home to Our Creativity through Nature

When spring arrives, my Pacific Northwest backyard becomes abloom with more than verdant greens and dazzling flowers. In addition to the stunning red rhododendron, the pollinator-calling pink of the flowering current, and the white-plated blooms of the dogwood, child-built fairy houses begin to appear. Rules of new games get called out like bird song. At the base of our birch trees my children spontaneously create colorful teas and soups out of herbs from our kitchen garden to heal imaginary ailments. Sage, thyme, oregano, chamomile, and parsley get stirred up; simmered upon blocks of wood, which are the children’s imaginary stove burners; and served to one another and a present parent in remnant cups upon mismatched saucers. Sticks and stones are found and become the elements with which they build new creative forms; mandala-like designs circle around their feet, emanating out from the locus of their imagination. Remnant chalk pieces sought out and mixed with stagnant pools of rainwater become a pudgy paint that is used to bring additional hues to tree trunks and tables. Painted rainbows appear randomly throughout the garden upon stones, stalks, and steps. Engaging with the natural world becomes the essence of imaginative play.

Being within the enchanted edges of the more wilder places is a foundational element to the children’s way of knowing, understanding, and interacting with the natural world that manifests in their ability for creative self-expression and sense of belonging to the world. 

The associations between the child’s impulse to imagine and create and their experience of awe and wonder within the natural world are upheld within their earliest praxis of life. It is helpful to wade a bit, and briefly, into the waters of the work of British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Winnicott on the transitional sphere and the transitional object (1958, 1971) to illuminate the importance of these connections between how the engaged form of a play-thing becomes that which sparks new and imagined forms. Winnicott’s transitional concepts refer to the role of play in infancy and early childhood and explicitly designate playing as the praxis of illusion, or the practice of imagination. The toddler who hugs her doll (i.e., her transitional object) enters by this act temporarily into a special world (i.e., transitional sphere) in which special rules prevail. Says Paul. W. Pruyser, this is when the child and key members within the child’s world “contrive to suspend for a moment the common hard-nosed judgments that distinguish private fantasy from public reality, creating a novel intermediate zone between these tow which is commonly called the world of play and make-believe” (Pruyser, 1976). It is in this suspension of domesticated codes of conduct that the child’s wild imagination is unleashed.

The realm of her imagination becomes a soulscape of enchantment where the unhinged whispers from another world invite her into a sensory existence, manifesting as creativity, ingenuity, and inspirited artistry. Not only does she draw wings, she has them; not only does she design with sticks; she is the tree. From within the creative play emerges a child’s sense of their interconnection and communion with the whole of creation. 

In The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, Edith Cobb understood that a person’s “capacity to go out and beyond the self derives from the plasticity of response to environment in childhood.” And she continued,“Memories of awakening to the existence of some potential, aroused by early experiences of self and world, are scattered through the literature of scientific and aesthetic invention. Autobiographies repeatedly refer to the cause of this awakening as an acute sensory response to the natural world.” Artist-types, a category to which I believe we all belong in our truest form, seem to all be able to attribute their connection to the creative with a profound and prolonged experience in nature. Thomas Berry referred to this as one’s primary referent, a relationship gained through a particular occurrence in a particular place. This is an awakening that sets one’s imagination on fire for the possibilities of a flourishing future for all.

Creativity grows its roots in the land, not so unlike the most beautiful of trees. 

Recent studies indicate that Cobb was on to something of profound importance. For instance, a 2006 Danish study found that outdoor kindergartens were better than indoor schools at stimulating children’s creativity. The researchers reported that 58 percent of children who were in close touch with nature often invented new games compared with just 16 percent of indoor kindergarten children did. A 2017 letter signed by leaders of Scotland's health, education and natural heritage bodies, backing a new Scottish “Away & Play” campaign, states: “If we are to grow and develop as a healthy and happy society, as well nurture the next generation of creative and innovative thinkers that will power our economy in the future, it is vital that children are encouraged to play outside – to build dens, to climb trees, to be free to turn a stick in to a magic wand and create their own world to play in.” This is a play that is good for the brain and good for the imagination. Within this wild realm, children gain an embodied confidence in their individually expressed creativity. Away from the ordered confines of straight lines, linear time and the rigidity of binary thinking, the imagination lets loose its wonder like the wind that sets wingèd ones to flight. 

American nonfiction author and journalist Richard Louv states in his award winning book, Last Child in the Woods, “Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.” While the end-goal of providing the child safe and welcoming access to the natural world shouldn’t necessarily be environmentalism, it is a holistic outcome of a young one’s life lived in the company of the more-than-human world. The child instinctively knows that nature isn’t an object to subdue, but a subject, a kin, a trusted play-mate that invites her into a co-creative participation.

Muddy paths, twigs and sticks, stones and salamanders are the journey companions into beWILDerment. In this place we trust the child to become both lost and found within their imagination, to become re-wilded and re-membered through how they create out of this imagination-rich porous soulscape.

This is rewilding as a process of remembering: remembering that we carry wildness within; remembering that we are related to other plants and animals who inhabit Earth with us; remembering that we are on a common journey upon our common home with the whole of creation. When we lose our sense of belonging to the world, our lives can feel empty and meaningless, with our sense of creativity stunted. This hollow feeling is a result of a disconnection from the nature to which we have forgotten we belong. Mythologist and psychologist Sharon Blackie states, “…when we lose our relationship with the land and the other creatures around us, then in the deepest sense, we lose ourselves.” Consequently, when we recover our relationship with the land, when our soul-life is nurtured by it, we find our interrelated belonging. A deep sense of creative responsibility and solidarity is awakened and becomes our primary posture on the planet. 

The outward creative expressions of the child—like the chalk-tinged Maple leaves, moss-roofed fairy houses, and birch twig tracery I find throughout my garden, are then not only artistic styles, but ways that bespoke a sense of belonging the child intuitively embodies. As guardians of these young souls, and in participation and protection of our planet, it behooves and benefits us all to let the child into bewildering landscapes and let them create their unique way, their imaginative-found path, within it.

God’s Grandeur within the World House: A Liberated Vision for Our Common Home

Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Ecological conversations place us in political arenas, fundamentally because power resides in land. An environmental ethic began to take shape in the consciousness-raising 1960's as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work began to expand the focus of his civil rights movement to extend to economic human rights throughout the world. The laws of economics and ecology are one and the same, each derived from a fundamental principal of sustainable habitat, or household for all life. The intersection of King’s economic human rights intersected the environment (ecology) in the understanding that our planetary household requires space and the means for a flourishing life for all living things.  Environmental ethicist and theologian Larry Rasmussen argues that, “Without adequate hospitable habitat, nothing lives.”

Dr. King understood the work that was required of us all to live together in peace in our “inherited large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together."

This beloved community, this “world house” must be integrally and harmoniously connected with the earth community, for the earth is every creature’s home. 

This sense of an interrelated home planet (oikoumene) invited new interpretations of Christian stewardship and dominion, and countered theologies that would see humanity as perpetually disconnected sojourners finding solace and home in heaven alone. Pope Francis’ encyclical letter, Laudato Si’ On Care for Our Common Home, famously represents the movement the Church’s social and moral teachings are taking in response to the human causes of the ecological crisis. With a deep lean towards the consensus of sciences, the liberal Christian environmental movement was born, which created political agency and demand for regulations and policies that would protect the whole of life. 

Whereas an ecologically focused interpretation of biblical scripture landed liberal streams of the Christian faith at home on Earth, faith in the Apocalypse has been another powerful driving force in American politics, especially for Christian-right views. This belief underscores Capitalism and empowers climate deniers, because ultimately for Christian fundamentalists, a future on our planet is irrelevant because within an apocalyptic lens, the Earth has no future. Environmental destruction is not only disregarded, but welcomed—even hastened—as a sign of the coming Apocalypse. This particular hermeneutic finds anchoring in the author of Hebrews words, “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” Couple a theology of being heavenly bound with a world that is going to be destroyed by hellish brimstone, then what is there to save? Indeed, conservation becomes a moot point especially when subduing the earth is translated as resource consumption for capitalistic and colonizing culture, and is more in line with the End of Times.  To be fair, the theological lens of stewardship was used by evangelicals to address environmental problems. 

Problematic to a theology of stewardship is that what it lacks in mutuality, it makes up in capitalism and colonization without limits. 

It was also co-opted by the conservative evangelicals, including many leaders of the Religious Right. In 1999 the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty gathered clergy, theologians, economists, environmental scientists and policy experts in Cornwall, CT to develop a “Judeo-Christian” understanding of stewardship to be applied to environmental policy. The Cornwall Declaration of Environmental Stewardship, which came out of this gathering, promotes a “strong anthropocentrism, a commitment to libertarian, free market economics, and a deep mistrust for mainstream science…and that the human person is the most valuable resource on earth.”

The Cornwall Alliance calls the environmental movement “radical” and claims “this so-called green dragon is seducing your children in our classrooms,” while “millions [are] falling prey to its spiritual deception.” Peter Heltzel argues, “It is clear that the Cornwall Declaration is more than a call to environmental stewardship; it was a vigorous apologia for free market capitalism.” The agenda behind the straw-man, or shall we say,  straw-dragon, of environmentalism was deeply embedded in the consumption-driven spirit of capitalism.  Emphasizing the close relationship between evangelical and capitalism, William Connolly writes, “The right leg of the evangelical movement is joined at the hip to the left leg of the capitalist juggernaut.” Because of these deep connections between nationalistic evangelical monotheism and capitalistic consumerism and colonzation, attempts at evangelical environmentalism often perpetuate a theology of capitalistic conquest and white dominion even amidst its best attempts to respond as stewards and care for creation.

photo by Jason Drury 

The connections to land subjugation, people oppression, capital gain, and a monotheistic god have far deeper roots than modern conflations. According to Hebrew Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, the ancient Israelites produced the first enduring monotheism—the belief in a single god. The difference between Israelite monotheism and the pagan religions of that era was not simply a “matter of arithmetic: one God rather than many…. Pagan religion personified [nature’s] forces, ascribed a will to them, and called them gods.” In contrast, ancient Israel, for the first time in the history of human symbolic consciousness, conceived of a god above and beyond the now-desacralized forces of nature. This shift left land and its inhabitants vulnerable.  Joshua 17:14-15, which is set in the context of two chapters of land distribution to the house of Joseph, has Joshua instructing his followers to bará (cut) down the trees in the forested high country to make more room for their expansive colonization. The Revised Standard Version translates bará as “clear”: “And Joshua said to them, ‘If you are a numerous people, go up to the forest, and there clear ground for yourselves in the land of the Perizzites and Rephaim, since the hill country of Ephraim is too narrow for you.” Commentaries on this passage are in agreement that there was an ancient stand of extensive forest in this region, and that Joshua was encouraging the House of Joshua to turn their complaints into action and enlarge their borders by taking matters into their own hands by dispossessing the original inhabitants of the country by cutting down the trees for their own advantage; partly for the building of more cities and towns, and partly for preparing the land for the use of pasture. Land was a resource to be used to both grow a nation state as well as to conquer people; it was no longer home to the imminent divine.    

This separation had great significance in the forming of the Western Christian mind. Biblical writers imagined that humans occupied a more exalted position in the natural order than the nature-based pagan religions conceived. Humans, sinful though they are accord to this world-view, occupy “a position on earth comparable to that of God in the universe.” Church father Paul of Tarsus perpetuated this Hebrew concept of human primacy over the natural world into the early Christian church. In Paul’s letter to the Romans, he wrote that God had abandoned pagans because they “worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25). This reinforced a theology of complete transcendence from the created world, and to venerate nature in any way would lead to a pantheistic Christian culture in which, theologian Paul Tillich noted, “the term pantheist is a ‘heresy’ label of the worst kind.” Herein laid the normative foundation for most of American Protestantism and Catholicism until the 1960s, one that was a human-centric and desacralized valuation of the natural world. An environmental movement that would see the other-than-natural world as having independent and inherent value apart from the human would be suspect and against the evangelical will of a deistic God. 

The contemptuous mundi tradition delivers important moral consequences. Mark Wallace states, “If nature is not a sacred place, but a potential site for idolatry, then it is properly regarded as the domain of human beings, who because of their superior reason, have been designated by God to be God’s vicegerents over the entire created order.” Much of the evangelical critique in response to this seemingly scripturally sanctioned theme is that it lands itself squarely in the framework of pantheism or panentheism (i.e. God is the tree vs. God is in the tree).

A biblical, eco-centric model that supports Divine imminence and insistence that humans are not the center of the universe is a radical departure from our most fixed notions. 

The life and work of the French mystic and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin is an example of this sort of radical voice, who in Hopkin’s phrase, understood the “world as charged with the grandeur of God.” Teilhard had a profound understanding of the sacramentality of the cosmos, as both the signifier of the Divine and a location of divine action and energy.

Sacramentality is a way of seeing the cosmos as a holy arena in which the things of the earth are not only signifiers of divine love but in some sense are active participants in the Divine; the material world is the instrument through which God comes. 

To this end, Teilhard delighted in progressive science and wrote prolifically around his scientific specialties of paleontology, geology, philosophy, and theology.  His great contribution, amongst others, was as a Christian thinker in the field of evolutionary science, which altered the scope in which the Western world traditionally viewed the human. His study of humanity’s place within Deep Time allowed him to critique the predominant use of redemption oriented theology and return to a more functional creation theology where the sacramental subjectivity of the universe is embraced. Every single living being was sacred—all en-souled bodies, the soil and the stars!

Teilhard’s contribution to sacred evolutionary cosmology was profound, and in many ways provides the inroad to how the Church can move collectively beyond our historical divisions towards a posture that sees and serves the wounds of our planet through the lens of sacred personhood and poverty. The existence of poverty is a social cause the universal Church embraces. Key to the Latin American liberation theology movement of the 1960s and 1970s was that the agency of the poor gained a voice and it was they that demanded the structural analysis and change to restore their rights. Ecoliberation theologian Leonardo Boff, who was heavily influenced by Teilhard and Martin Luther King, Jr., claimed that the not only was the earth sacred, but it was now to be counted amongst the poor as it too has been systematically under assault from the plundering of development as practiced by capitalistic societies. This move towards environmental justice challenges both liberal and evangelical Christians to actively respond to the physical suffering and ecological vulnerabilities of poor communities.

Can the Church unify around this paradigm shift of not only seeing how the planet’s poor people are impacted by climate change, but that this environmental crisis is occurring because of an irrupted and impoverished planet?

Perhaps, but this positions the protagonist agent as the dominant culture in a hierarchical manner that doesn’t fully restore rights or dignity to the planet itself. Is it possible for the Earth herself to give expression of her sufferings and her hopes, and demand the systems that allowed for environmental destruction to be addressed?   

Whanganui River

In early 2017, the Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India were granted the same status as a person, much like the protective status given to humans and corporations. These bodies of land and water now have their own legal, living identity, “with all the corresponding right, duties and liabilities of a legal person.” To pollute or damage these rivers will be legally equivalent to harming a person. No longer constrained as a resource humanity could exploit, re-source, or manage, this move recognized the sacred design of mutuality between planetary systems and people. In this revolutionary judicial law, these bodies of water have been given personhood. They are no longer simply a resource to be subdued, used, and dominated for the sake of humanity. They have inherent value simply for their being. This idea of the personhood of planetary features isn’t entirely new. 

    In 1972 legal scholar Christopher D. Stone argued in his famous essay, “Should Trees Have Standing?”, that rivers and trees and other “objects” of nature do have rights, and these should be protected by granting legal standing to guardians of these voiceless entities of nature, much as the rights of children are protected by legal guardians designated for this purpose.  Stone’s argument struck a chord with U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. That same year, Justice Douglas wrote a dissent in the case of Sierra Club v. Morton, in which he argued for the conferral of standing upon natural entities so that legitimate legal claims could be made for their preservation. The river, Douglas wrote, “is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—the fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.” 

Fifty years on the Christmas Eve preceding his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood in his pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and told the congregation that in order to achieve peace on earth, “we must develop a world perspective,” a vision for the entire planet. “Yes,” he said, “as nations and individuals, we are interdependent.” He continued on with a statement that could easily have been proclaimed Wangari Maathai or today’s #NODPL water protectors, Dr. King stated,

“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated.” 

The earth is beginning to have a voice through this acknowledged personhood that will demand its inherent right to liberated life. This is the voice of the poor, the voice of the oppressed, the voice of the absent. The earth’s voice can now be included in the critical formula in how to serve the poor that has been advocated for by liberation theologians: “the preferential treatment of the poor.” This does not mean that we have the option to be committed to the poor; rather, this expressed primacy of the poor in Scripture is rooted in the unmerited love of God.  This is the kind of renewed theology of creation that Tielhard imagined, and one that responds adequately to the anthropocentric supremacy in Christianity, together with biblically rooted commitment to justice for the poor and vulnerable ones. To an extent, the ecological crisis, and in particular, the climate change crisis within it, have given rise to this earth-centered spirituality that sees all created things-rivers, forests, oceans, and all the creatures therein-charged with the grandeur of God. “This is our faith,” Dr. King told his church on that December morning. “As we continue to hope for peace on earth,” he went on, “let us know that in the process we have cosmic companionship.”

This is our hope: a sacred world house, a collective planetary home in which together we advocate for the rights to life and a flourishing future for all.  

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Bibliography 

Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997.

Brueggemann, Walter.  The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith  (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002). 

Brunner, Daniel L., Jennifer L. Butler, and A.J. Swoboda. Introducing Evangelical Ecotheology: Foundations in Scripture, Theology, History, and Praxis. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker         Academic, 2014. 

Cappel, Jerry. “Deeper Green Churches.” Sewanee Theological Review 58, no. 1 (2014), 139-161. 

Connolly, William. “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine.” Political Theory 33, no. 6 (December 2005): 869-886.

Cornwall Alliance. “Resisting the Green Dragon.” YouTube video, October 15, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGEOFipx70U.

Douglas, William O. Nature’s Justice. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2000.

Fischer, Kathleen. “Christian Spirituality in a Time of Ecological Awareness.” Theology Today 67 no. 2 (July 2010), 169-181. 

Glacken, CJ. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from AncientTimes to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1967.

Gutiérrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988.

Heltzel, Peter. “The World House: Prophetic Protestantism and the Struggle for Environmental Justice.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 63, no. 1-2 (2010), 26-41. http://            usqr.utsnyc.edu/article/the-world-house-prophetic-protestantism-and-the-struggle-for-environmental-justice/.

Kerber, Guillermo. “Caring for Creation and Striving for Climate Justice: Implications for Mission and Spirituality.” International Review of Mission 99, no. 391 (November 2010),     219-229. doi: 10.1111/j.1758-6631.2010.00045.x.

King, Martin Luther Jr. Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community. Boston: Beacon, 1968.

Knights, Philip. “The Whole Earth My Alter: A Sacramental Trajectory for Ecological Mission.” Mission Studies 25 no. 1 (2008), 56-72. doi: 10.1163/157338308X293918.

Rasmussen, Larry. Earth Community Earth Ethics. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998.

Scherer, Glenn. “Christian-Right Views are Swaying Politicians and Threatening the Environment.” Grist, October 28, 2004. http://grist.org/article/scherer-christian/.

Stone, Christoper D. Should Trees Have Standing: Law, Morality, and the Environment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. “The Mass of the World,” in The Hymn of the Universe. London: Collins, 1965.

Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Volume I. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

Victor, Philip J. “This River Has the Same Legal Status as a Person.” CNN, March 16, 2017. http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/15/asia/river-personhood-trnd/.

Wallace, Mark I. “The Wild Bird Who Heals: Recovering the Spirit in Nature.” Theology Today 50, no. 1 (April 1993), 13-28. 

Zeleha, Bernard Daley and Andrew Szasz. “Why Conservative Christians Don’t Believe in Climate Change.” Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences 71 no. 5 (September 2015), 19-30. doi:        10.1177/0096340215599789.

Waiting in the Whispering Dark by Sarah Steinke

To be awake in the dark is to be alert in a wholly other way. We’ve just passed through the darkest night of the year and anticipate but do not yet know the growing light. This season of night is one of deep vulnerability, where the mind of daily tasks and to-do lists eventually gives way to something more lunar, less solar; here, we find a hush that blankets our daytime sensibilities with something like the acoustics of snow and allows what’s quiet during the day to become loud. This is the only time I hear my husband’s breathing. And I’m reminded that in the dark, we hear what has been with us all along.

Night is also anxious making, fear provoking—we’ve all known nightmares—and what if the ache that's slowed us down and brought us here is bottomless? What if we hear the monsters that since childhood have lurked under the beds, who whisper, "Look at what you’ve done, and there is no forgiveness," or "It's all too broken, and there's no fixing it.”

We’ve all heard these whispers. They come when we’re most vulnerable. But these aren’t the only whispers. There’s something even more true here in the dark.

The Canadian poet Lorna Crozier, in paraphrasing Nietzsche, said people do not like to be alone as they are afraid that something will be whispered in their ears; by contrast, artists wait with fierce attentiveness for that whisper. The truth is, we all are artists, we all are makers. And we all have reasons to doubt this. Partly because we’ve been told in our waking lives by too many people that what we make doesn’t really matter.

This is a lie. And partly because it’s frankly easier to consume rather than create. Because the act of creating calls us to confront our own dread, and our own dreaded hope. But woven into the cloth of our very being is this—we are made to create, no doubt about it.

You are a maker. And you have what it takes—whether you make poetry or paper snowflakes, clear clutter or ivy, sing the most haunting music or longing howl, maybe you draw or dance or color or entrain with the ocean, maybe you dig with your hands in the earth, or work at teaching your children that we all are neighbors, even the trees. Whatever draws you nearer to life, do it. It matters.

This is poiesis, making something that is not yet. Every time we live out our poiesis, we grow our capacity to listen, to see, to know that wholeness includes and incorporates the dark.

Emmanuel. God is with us. Maybe even especially in the dark. Crozier says that every work of art begins and ends with silence. Can we bare the silence? Can we lean into the dark? For it’s here that we see how even the smallest light pierces. Shine.

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Wonder resides in places of quickening, those moments where new life is first felt, and where words often fall short. And wonder, for Sarah, is what compels her to stay and listen. And then to enter more fully, senses alert. As a yoga instructor and poet, she finds these are both practices of quickening. She believes the longer we tolerate this place beyond words, the more deft we become to movement—allowing what needs to drop to the ground to drop, and allowing shape to what needs to take shape. Sarah’s yoga and writing practices reflect her commitment to the poetry of the ordinary, and she invites others to awareness and connection, the places of quickening in their own lives.

Sarah’s teaching has had the benefit of much practice—over twenty years of writing and editing experience, and ten years of yoga practice. She is a RYT 200 certified yoga instructor who received her MFA in poetry from UW. She currently teaches yoga classes in a local studio in Silverdale and corporate sessions in Seattle. Her work has appeared in the Laurel Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Crab Creek Review, the Other Journal, the Southern California Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Words Could Not Make It More True, was published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. Find out more about Sarah at her website. 

Sarah will be guiding daily yoga sessions on the North Beach of Iona, Scotland for the 2018 Waymarkers Iona Pilgrimage. If you would like to engage your personal poiesis and with a guide who will assist you in listening to your own quickening,        register for the Iona Pilgrimage today!  

The Rewilding Wheel: Turning Towards the Dark

Today is the Solstice Eve, the night before the shortest day and longest night of the year. This time of the year is rich with deep symbolic meaning and has been celebrated for its spiritual and physical realties for thousands of years. As humans in the northern hemisphere, we are invited to identify with the natural world and embody the impact of the lengthening night and deepening dark. And I'll say that as one who identifies as a Celtic Christian, the solstices have taken on increasing importance, and not a value that conflicts with my Christian hermeneutic. I see these cosmic movements as ones from which we can listen and learn much of universal truths and ways of being. 

My personal Rewilding Wheel practice as been an attempt at just that: an intentional way to listen and learn from the sacred within the natural world and that which is within the cosmic design and order. This past autumn I have been engaging the nature symbology associated with the cardinal direction East and the element of water. These associations are based on the universal wisdom of indigenous traditions. The Rewilding Wheel brings these pairings to a particular place, one's on bioregion.

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Locatedness informs the practices and postures that reconnect one to their local landscapes and remind of how the elements, the directions, the seasons are all our greatest teachers, and in the words of Thomas Merton, " [They] make us as stable as the land we live in."

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A sacred Solstice liturgy held out time together on the beach as we bade farewell to the Autumn season now past, filled with gratitude for the experience of this quadrant and looking forward to what wisdom the Winter will bring. We lit lanterns and headed into the woods, just north of the beach, a symbolic act that embraced the darkness and acknowledged the journey of transformation yet before us (woods are always symbols of transformation in myths and legends). When we returned home, we kept all our electric lights off, lighting only candles as a way of further embracing the shadows, and night-shades. Our family intuitively kept to one room--the kitchen, the hearth place of our home--where we did hand work, made soup, and told stories. I was struck how the ancient ways still move about in our bones, needing only the darkness and the flame to manifest them.

This past Autumn Equinox I initiated my Rewilding Wheel year on this beach that looks west over the Salish Sea. To this beach I returned at twilight today with my daughter to participate in rituals that would connect us to the importance of the darkness, and while not rushing too quickly through the night, and turn us towards the soon-to-be-coming Light. We cheered as the sun set behind the back of Vashon Island. We broke blessed rosemary biscuits (rosemary is a wonderful winter herb you can still harvest fresh!), and drank tea together.

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Rewilding as an Act of Remembering

Author, mary dejong, heading west from the mainland across the salish sea on the autumn equinox

When we lose our sense of belonging to the world, our lives can feel empty and meaningless. This hollow feeling is a result of a disconnection from the nature to which we have forgotten we belong. Too many stories and cosmologies have distanced humanity from the very earth from which they were created. Mythologist and psychologist Sharon Blackie states, “…when we lose our relationship with the land and the other creatures around us, then in the deepest sense, we lose ourselves.” Consequently, when we recover our relationship with the land, when our soul-life is nurtured by it, we find our interrelated belonging. A deep sense of responsibility and solidarity is awakened and becomes our primary posture on the planet.

How do we get to this place? The answer resides in ancient categories of thought and perception. 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.

The archetypal framework for this kind of journey is meaningfully conveyed through the ancient practice of pilgrimage, which an embodied quest for the soul, a deep seeking after the self. The rewilding of our inner-soulscapes is a pilgrimage journey of finding ourselves back into a whole relationship with the wilderness. It is a re-framing of a story that told us the cultivated garden is where we should grow, instead of the wild yonder beyond the gate. What is out there in the hinterlands? What story of interrelatedness has been waiting for us beyond the tales that told us to stay put? 

I see rewilding as a process of remembering: remembering that we carry wildness within; remembering that we are related to other plants and animals who inhabit Earth with us; remembering that we are on a common journey upon our common home with the whole of creation.

Rewilding eschews the forward-facing imagination of the frontier, where rugged individualism and plundering dominance are trumpeted. This is a return to the wild, a reconnection to the worshipping assembly of the wild world with whom we belong. Wildness depends on an internal balance for security, its own ecological harmony dependent upon its codependent synergy. We cannot live balanced, whole, and integrated lives if humanity continues to view itself above and over the natural world, attributing value insomuch as it is a resource to support and advance humanity. 

Rewilding wheel retreat weekend on lummi island, wa

While I have loved well my garden and all the growth that has occurred through the process of cultivation and design, I have found in recent years a deep and demanding need to leave the order of the garden, to see it as a threshold inviting me beyond to the forested fringes or the wisdom found within wild waters. I have desired prayers and practices, rites and rituals that would remind my bones that I am related and dependent upon beaver, bluff, and bird, and how their faring becomes a litmus for my own wholeness and wellness. This kind of wholeness, which balances on an ecosystem approach, can only be gained by a journey that takes one deep into the woods, through fields, tracing watersheds to the sea, and climbing up to the high climes of the mountains.

This is a deep dive into the wilderness where storied landscapes offer up wizened myths spoken in the ancient tongue of creation, but which can only be opened with a clever claw, heard with a moth-en'd ear , and spoken with a raven's craw-craw.

And so I responded to the call of the wild and began a journey this past Autumn Equinox that would lead through lands and legends, reminding me of how numinous nature is, that each wave upon the water's surface was a sacred script, writ large with the wisdom of the One who created the assembly of belonging. I began a journey that would take me around my bioregion, reconnecting me to the revelation that rests inherently within these landscapes and watersheds, reminding me of the great community of life of which I am a part.  

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 the lands upon which one lives.

westward facing Labyrinth on Lummi island. Just beyond the LABYRINTH and the fringe forest is the salish sea.

The Rewilding Wheel is a sacred circuit that seeks to locate the wisdom of universal nature symbols within 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 one's local landscapes. 

The Rewilding Wheel becomes then a way to begin the practice of rewilding our inner soul-scapes through the intentional relationship with the wild landscapes of our bioregion and seeking sacred wisdom through the rhythmic patterns that exist in the seasons, elements and cardinal directions.  This becomes a life-orientation journey, a circular path through which the sacred can speak within the various associations of nature symbology and archetypal human development within our very own locatedness.

Being Rooted: Where Hope Turns Into Knowledge

The deepening darkness of this season demands an answer for how we hope. Where do we find the winged imagination for a perception of lengthening light? For what have you hoped, and where is that placed? Is hope amorphous, without shape and form, or does it take on the color of a local landscape? I believe that much of hope is rooted in an intrinsic understanding that, “We are, where we are.”  “I am where I am.”  Simple sounding, yes, but this is really quite profound and lays the foundational groundwork for a rewilding vision of re-membering our hope, our selves, back into the deep and wise mysteries that are made evident through the cycles of our precious planet and our cosmic neighborhood. This kind of re-membering requires a connection with and within the natural world; to be exposed to, and experience, the integral ecology of which we are a part. 

This is the process of developing an understanding that our particular place helps us know who we are, where we are, and to an extent, why we are. And this particular place-or bioregion- becomes what historian and theologian Thomas Berry called a primary referent. It becomes the lens through which we make decisions on behalf of our community. It provides a critical placement through which all of life is lived, including institutions, establishments, communities and neighborhoods.  

Berry identifies this concept of a primary referent through the story of when he was twelve years old his family moved to the edge of town. Down from the new home was a small creek and there across the creek was a meadow. He writes in his essay, “The Meadow Across the Creek": 

“It was an early afternoon in May when I first looked down over the scene and saw the meadow. The field was covered with lilies rising above the thick grass. A magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to explain my life at a more profound level than almost any other experience I can remember.

It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in an otherwise clear sky. It was not something conscious that happened just then. I went on about my life as any young person might do. Perhaps it was not simply this moment that made such a deep impression upon me. Perhaps it was a sensitivity that was developed throughout my childhood. Yet, as the years pass, this moment returns to me, and whenever I think about my basic life attitude and the whole trend of my mind and the causes that I have given my efforts to, I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life.”

This early experience, what Berry refers to as a primary referent, became his normative lens. Whatever preserved and enhanced this meadow in its natural, biodiverse cycles was good; what was opposed to this meadow or negated it was not good. His life orientation was that simple and pervasive. It applied in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion and whatever.

The more a person is invited to be in the presence of, and reflect upon, the infinite number of interrelated activities and relationships occurring in our natural environments, the more mysterious it all becomes; the more meaning a person finds in the early flowering of the Indian Plum, the more awestruck a person might be in simply walking within and through the simple patch of Cheasty Greenspace's urban forest.  It is none of the majesty of Mt. Rainier or Mt. Olympus, none of the immensity of the Salish Sea; yet in the Cheasty woods, a greenspace that has been transformed into a greenPLACE, the magnificence of life as celebration and connection is manifested and witnessed. 

Space becomes place that has the capacity to be remembered and to evoke attention and care.

And so the slow and laborious work of changing the narrative of this particular stand of trees from one of separation into connection began. There was a deeply held hope that this land could be where children are. The place of children—where the play, where they inhabit, where they are—is one of the most potent indicators of how urban life is conceived and practiced. But there was also deep hope that as a result of coming alongside of these woods in solidarity, the children of our neighborhood would know this urban forest as their primary referent; that the interrelated health and well-being of this place would inform their own wellness and the general health of the city. Communion with the woods would be their own rewilding. 

And now, before the weather turns, the children know in what seasonal direction it is going because of signs in the forest.  They know when a red tailed hawk is about, as they’ve learned the signaling raucous calls of the crows; they then can turn their face upwards in time to witness the soaring, awe-inspiring flight and hear its exhilirating screech.  They know the unique sound of the wind in various trees. They get anxious if life gets too busy and they cannot escape into this local hinterland to play and be.  They removed blackberry and ivy.  And as they began to dig up the invasive roots, they began to plant their own.  Hundreds upon hundreds of trees have been planted alongside their sense of belonging. They now have feelings that spur action anticipating how governmental deregulation may impact the seasonal spring that flows through Cheasty’s snowberry meadow.  Mahatma Gandhi once said, “What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”   

Because they know this place, because they now can identify so thoroughly with it, they know themselves and their web of interrelated relationships more fully. French mystic Simone Weil once said,

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

They are, where they are.  We are, where we are.  You are, where you are.

This embedded relationship with a wilderness place is where hope resides. From here is where the imagination springs. An imagination that sees the connection between the health of a place and the health of a person, of a people, of a neighborhood. Here we come to know again the patterns and rhythms of the natural world, foundational ways of being. An remembered vision for how the health of an urban forest participates and forms the health of its surrounding biosphere-its ecology, its biodiversity, of which humanity is a part, cracks the light of hope into these winter-solsticing days.   

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REFLECTION

What is your meadow experience?  Reflect on a place that perhaps is your primary referent. It would be a place that at one time provided a profound sense of awe and wonder, and in some significant way, formed who you are. You became apart of this place as much as it became a part of you. 

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.   

Humble Treasures: Bringing the Outdoors In

For the last year I have been documenting my daughter's intuitive practice of collecting treasures from the natural world. Her pockets, satchels, backpacks, and now what I've learned, even her school cubby, are always lined and stacked with leaves, pebbles, sticks, or petals. She sees the more-than-human world with clarity and attention. Walking with her in the woods might take double the time as she fetches and gathers in response to impressions to collect and adopt she receives from the plant-world. She has very little membrane of separation between herself and the outside world and understands that she belongs to this otherworld as much as it belongs to her. My daughter doesn't see her impulsive behavior so much as a taking, but as a surrounding, a gathering of sensate beings with whom she belongs.

This way of being with the world has brought the exterior world into our home in very literal ways. Most window sills, ledges, and shelves display the intricate and unparalleled beauty of nature.

Collections of pinecones, sticks, stones, shells and decaying leaves are now constant reminders of rhythms of life and patterns of how we should be postured on this planet if we are to have a regenerative presence. I wash dishes in the company of deciduous leaves, becoming more mindful of how trees utilize water economically and take not more than they need. I put my children to bed next to window ledge's lined with sea shells, being reminded of how these shells once too bedded a creature in the deep sea. How does my life impact the maritime home of these creatures? I do my work in an office abloom with the semblance of spring flowers, now all dried. What can I learn from the fleeting beauty of these blooms? Perhaps they whisper to me something of that work must not always be in production, but have times like when even the flowers rest. 

This practice of bringing the outdoors in is a ritual that connects us to the stories of our origin, stories that tell us that we are born from holy humus. This ritual however, doesn't only serve to remind but also initiates an imagination for how to live well on this planet in a way that is a blessing for all of creation. The Gospel of Matthew in Chapter 5 verse 5 states,  

"Blessed are the humble for they are close to the sacred earth."

To be humble is to be close to the earth, in relationship with the more-than-human world, and to read the revelatory text of creation. To decorate one's home then with the bounty and the beauty of the backwoods within our lives, is a way of reminding us of how to receive the blessing of the sacred, wild world. 

Anna's school cubby, filled with forest-finds from the park near her school. 

Anna's coat pocket treasures from March 2017

treasures from anna's backpack in May 2017

cherry tree blossoms from april 2017 found in anna's satchel 

What's In a Name: How Naming Tells Sacred Stories

Wendell Berry, one of the greatest cultural critics and environmental activists of our time, understands that while we are inherently members of a macro-ecosystem, a deep seeded connection to a place isn’t achieved through scientific understandings or biological theories.  He argues that the cultural sterility of these concepts can have the opposite effect on a community, causing people to turn away instead of turning toward the land due to lack of meaningful relevance.  To find one’s place within an ecosystem requires an introduction to the names and experience of the very real places that make up one’s homes cape. These features are found not only through direct experiences, but also by the stories we tell about them. 

“The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes, roads, creatures, and people, " says Berry.

I am curious about what happens to our sense of place, to our storied landscapes when they carry the name of notable patriarchs or a simple number. Does the name of a man truly give us a sense of a place and our relationship to it? Does a mere address number really tell you where you are? Many amazing places have been christened with a name detached from a story. In Seattle, many of our parks are known by a last name alone: Seward, Cheasty, and Denny to name a few. It is far more common for a house address to be sterilized with numbers, ignoring the storied lives and land upon which the home sits. 

In far more ancient times, a place became known for events that happened there. For instance, when walking south on the Holy Isle of Iona, with the Sound of Iona on your left, the road turns right to lead west across the island. On the left, just before the gate onto the grass above the seashore, is a smooth green hillock. The name of this rise tells a story in its two names: Sìthean or the Fairy Mound where, according to local legend, the music of the fairy folk could entice unwary mortals inside the hill; and Cnoc nan Aingeal or Hill of the Angels where, according to Adomnán, Colmcille was seen meeting with angels. When one makes pilgrimage to Iona even today, there is a hope that a sacred sighting might be witnessed on this storied hill, and that quiet wish changes the posture with how one engages with this place.

Then there is Mt. Rainier, an awe-inspiring presence in the Pacific Northwest, presumptuously named by George Vancouver after an admiral in the Royal Navy. Indigenous tribes, however, had always known its true name-Tahoma, "The Mountain That Was God." N. Scott Momaday doggedly believes that some names are "old and original in the mind, like the beat of rain on the river." There are names that tell the foundational story and give us a sense of the grandeur of God, the sacred presence of the Spirit, and how we participate in the on-going story of the universe.

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When we forget the real name of a place, we forget the stories that happened there. 

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Stories are critical to how we move through the world and how we understand our place within it. This last year, after years of simply calling our home "2809" we decided to name our house, a name that would taproot us even deeper into the fabric of stories that existed before our time and that continue to weave fresh patterns today. Hedgewood is the name that expressed the years of living in this place and the connections (human and more than human alike) that have grown out of our lavender hedge in the front of the house, the hedgerows we have planted along side it, and the woods that create a sense of refuge in our backyard. This name invites others into a storied landscape that awakens the imagination for what else a place may hold.

As we move through a season that is filled with stories about profound people and places, be curious about the wisdom and events that are seeping into the stories we tell. For example, do you know what Bethlehem means? The Hebrew, בֵּית לֶחֶם‎ Bet Lehem, means House of Bread. The meaning of this place becomes significant in the life and story of the historical Jesus. Be curious about the name beneath the name, investigate the original names of places within your bioregion and how these names tell stories of God and a sacred sense of belonging. 

The Light of Lucia

As our waking days get increasingly shorter and darker, our longing for transcendent light increases in tandem. We are nourished by the dark like the seed who knows to bed down in the dark earth to grow. And yet, even in our knowing of this need, there is always longing for the next season, for the next turn. As we wander into the last week of the darkest time of the year, our desire for light and the nourishment it provides expands with the shadows.  

Solstice times hold needs in tension: requisite turn of the wheel of the year towards elements of the next season with what our body's inherently need for wholeness within the season we are in.

This day’s deepening darkness is traditionally met with the light and love of Lucia! Today is the Feast of Saint Lucia, or Saint Lucia’s Day, a Christian feast day celebrated on December 13 during Advent. She is a woman of deep symbology in this season: her red sash symbolizing her martyrdom, her white gown a symbol of a white baptismal robe, and her candle-lit wreath-crown shedding both light into the darkness as well as opening up both hands to carry as much food as possible to those in need. Saint Lucia’s Day once coincided with the Winter Solstice; however with the onset of calendar reforms, her feast day has become more likened to a Christian festival of light and one that signals the arrival of Christmastide and the arrival of the turn towards light.

Many years ago, I lived in Sweden, where this feast day is commonly celebrated. The long dark winter I experienced there introduced me to a kind of darkness I had never before known; this was the all-day dark, when twilight hues hang, draped over the day like a blanket attempting to warm against the northern wind that left ice in her wake. My grandfather migrated from Sweden, and while much of his life never was unpacked in America, there were pieces of that culture that came out during the holidays, like items from a curio cabinet. Along with lingonberry sauce and meatballs, there was a wooden figurine of Saint Lucia I remember fingering with quiet childhood curiosity. When I was able to experience the festival in Sweden that year, which consisted of girls and women dressed in robes of white, red ribbons flowing down their sides, baskets of cookies in hand, all aglow from the candle-lit wreath in their hair, it was pure magic.

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There was a beautiful reverence in how humanity’s need for nourishment called forth such compassion, such light! 

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Tonight my daughter, who has longed to participate in this celebration, stated her courage to don the robe and sash, fill a basket with cookies, and take her candle light into the world. She left our home singing into the city night and knocked on neighbor’s doors, bringing the light of her self to the starry-night, to the sidewalk, to the stoop. And no matter the culture or creed, the light is what people respond to! In these dark days, in our corner of the world, people hibernate; it is not uncommon to not see a neighbor for months during the relentless winter cold and rain.

When the much-longed-for-light crosses our threshold to that of another, and a cookie is offered as a gift of nourishment and delight, symbols become activated.

The journey takes on real meaning. The metaphors become embodied. Tonight my daughter participated in a hundreds of year old tradition. There is deep wisdom in holding the tension of the season: the light only shines bright because of the dark, and the basket of cookies is all the sweeter as traditionally this time of year preserves were in ration. This becomes a posture of abundance when the season says the natural world has gone scarce. 

The Return: How Returning Home Requires An Open Door

For years I have been challenged with the notion that ultimately, the pilgrimage calls us to return home and live forward on behalf of something other and greater than ourselves. This idea that the road out actually causes us to be beholden to something back home is a critical aspect of the becoming that this rites of passage initiates.For our lives to truly reincorporate and reflect the stories of our journeys there must be effects behind and beyond our front doors; if there isn’t, the travels and travails of the road quickly get reduced to petty ramblings and narcissistic knock abouts.

Ultimately, the greatest influence we can have on ourselves, our families, and the world around us is to live out the wizened effects of our sacred journey on behalf of the Other and the Future. 

This notion’s simplicity allows for a focus of energy around a transformed state. When Joseph Campbell talks about a “wisdom and power to serve others” on account of our wayfaring, he is getting at a fundamental aspect of the gift of pilgrimage. We go out on these personal, intimate soul-adventures to connect to the sacred in fresh, inspired ways. However, if these encounters aren’t having a greater result on the world around us, they are worthless. I believe that by applying our gained wisdom on behalf of the Other and the Future, we are re-gifting our communities and the earth with our God-given wisdom developed on the journey.

Living on behalf of the Other and the Future is a scalable metaphor; that is, it may refer to simply anyone or anything other than yourself and decisions that impact the future. In broader, and more challenging terms, “the Other and the Future” is a way of embracing all of life, especially those that are without voice and marginalized in society, and intentionally orienting lifestyle decisions that will have flourishing outcomes on our earth, the more-than-human world, and future generations. As a result, our personal sacred journey is global in both scope and impact, and we are invited to transformative micro-practices that overhaul how we view our homes and home environments.

Our return home requires us to leave the door open to the wild world beyond its threshold, maintaining the now-understood posture and practice of interrelatedness and solidarity.

Arrival: What is Your Gift?

Ultimately, we choose the way of the pilgrim’s path to get somewhere. We aren’t electing to be sojourners forever. We prefer the pilgrimage because of its archetypal stages: Longing, Arrival, and eventually, returning Home. The Arrival stage is especially poignant as this is the location and/or place toward which our heart has been bent the whole while. It is the place that strengthens our resolve when the going gets rough, or the road seems too dark and dismal. We cast our eyes upward and outward towards this place for which we have longed and to which we have attributed purpose and answered prayers.

The required posture on the Pilgrim’s Path has prepared you for your arrival; you have practiced the necessary way of seeing and listening to the surrounding greater community of things. So it is that when you arrive to your sacred destination, you are equipped to receive that which is for you.

When you arrive, do not be quick to take. Imagine you are a guest and take the time to introduce yourself before any action of harvest is taken. While this may seem silly at first, there is a profound shift in our posture when we verbally acquaint ourselves with our surrounding. Greet your place. Speak your name and your desire. Ask the deep question of your heart. Ask permission to be there and to receive. This shows respect for the personhood of a place, and slows the eager taking to a broader awareness of is there enough and what needs to be left?

Be prepared to offer something. As you approach your sacred site and your heart leaps with the proximity of answered prayers, posture yourself in such a way so to give something back to this place. A pilgrim decidedly journeys not to pick up souvenirs and trinkets along the way, but to look for circumstances to see others’ souls, and give out smiles and kindnesses for nothing in return. I challenge my retreat participants to bring along a physical item on their journey that represents their reason(s) for making the pilgrimage. The idea is that this item can be placed on the altar, or given to someone at the place of arrival as means of engaging the offering. For we know that it is only when we give that we truly receive.

Your posture is submissive and your soul is surrendered.  May what has been silenced in you for far too long, begin to sing!

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Candy Canes & clementines are treasures found within CHESTY Greenspace in December. 

For the last six years, every first Saturday in December the forest restoration group I help guide hosts a Candy Cane & Clementine Hunt in the our neighborhood woods. This sweet treasure hunt is intended for the young children in the neighborhood as a way to introduce them to the natural world and light up their imagination for the magic that is within this urban forest. We intentionally hide the candy canes and clementine oranges a bit off trail so to develop the sense of proprioception (the unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself), and they are always purposely nestled within native plants and at the base of native trees for implicit learning and knowing. It is a morning filled with wonder and delight as children rush around the Hazelnut Loop discovering and taking! The forest gives us much this day, as it does every day of our lives; what is it that we can give in return? What can we offer that shows we understand a gift has been given and that one should be left in its place? 

We put up a table in the woods at the base of a century old Big Leaf Maple tree. Here, banjo music plays, submitting a song as a gift to the natural world. On the table are wild-crafting items, materials where children can create nature ornaments and natural garland that we hang in a tree in the woods. This practice is one of giving back, a posture of mutual agreement that acknowledges with gratitude the gifts given by the forest that day. The children then not only experience the delight in the taking, but also experience the joy in the giving, and the birds all love this seasonal display of appreciation and honor! 

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The Honorable Harvest is an indigenous mindset and harvesting practice that asks us to give back, in reciprocity, for what we have been given. Robin Wall Kimmerer, enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013), offers this deep wisdom to our rapaciously consumptive Western culture. This ethos demands an account for how humans sow, farm, gather, and consume. And it is also an invitation to the practicing pilgrim. Through mutual exchange there is an assurance that there will always be something left for others who come after you. Kimmerer says this, "Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us. One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence" (Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 190). Our local forest is a sacred site, as much as Iona or any other holy place.

We go to these places to receive much. And what is it that we can offer to ensure that our taking isn't the upending of the precious life that is there?

Kimmerer graciously shares an attempt at a written form of the guidelines of the Honorable Harvest (Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 183). I am in complete gratitude for this wise text; it has guided me in how I forage in our neighborhood forest, our own homescape, my own Monthly Mandala practice, and how we are trying to teach our children to move through the world. 

How can we learn from this wisdom, taking it into the folds of our daily lives as well                                                              as using this mindset as we journey the pilgrim's path?

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Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the now who comes asking for life.

Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.

Never take the first. Never take the last.

Take only what you need.

Take only that which is given.

Never take more than half. Leave some for others.

Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.

Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.

Share.

Give thanks for what you have been given.

Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.

Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.

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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

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