Your Sacred Seasonal Rewilding Journey
Wild Autumn is a part of the Wild Seasons series, a quarterly virtual rewilding offering that reflects the teaching and practices I guide people through at the seasonal Rewilding Retreats that I convene at The Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island, WA. These retreats have held the intention of supporting others in recovering the ancient wisdom found within the wild, wisdom that has critical relevance to our modern times. In response to Covid, I was challenged to imagine other ways to offer my teaching and practices.
Through a wonderful partnership with a creative production team, I am able to offer you Wild Autumn and the other Wild Seasons courses where you will learn and practice seasonal rhythms and rituals to connect to Sacred Guidance through the natural world to grow an earthen and elemental spiritual practice.
Here you will expand your sense of rootedness and belonging to a place through the practice of the Rewilding Wheel, a sacred wheel circuit, influenced by Celtic spirituality and indigenous wisdom traditions, and designed to cultivate seasonal practices and disciplines that nurture a conscious and inspired relationship with the earth, the elements, and the divine. You will come away with grounded theory and routine, regular, and repeated rhythms and rituals that honor and connect with Earth's seasons and elements as a way to recover your sense of your own Wild Self and the Sacred in the very real soil of your daily existence! You will also be introduced to the sacred practice of Soul Rewilding, the holy work of bringing your Wild Self back into whole relationship with the seasons, the more-than-human world, and the locale in which you live as a way to cultivate flourishing conditions not only for your soul but the flourishing of the wild and wonder-filled world.
Wild Autumn is offered as a self-paced seasonal course; however, it is more like a retreat experience than an intellectual exercise. And while it’s seasonal in nature, it is perennial in design. You will be able to return again and again to this content, much like a seasonal devotional that will connect you into the spirit of Autumn. You will be guided through the vast topography of somatic ecology, specific to the seasonal correspondences within the Rewilding Wheel, a wheel of life that aims to reconnect you to the “spirit of a place,” the sacred ecology of your bioregion.
In Wild Autumn we follow the wisdom stream of Celtic Spirituality as a guide through the symbolic and sacred terrain of the Watershed, the bioregion that requests our focused attention this season. We also survey the practical fields of Deep Adaptation and Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects for inspiration as we find ourselves at a pivotal time in human history. Wild Autumn demands we look into the growing darkness of the setting sun, imploring we adapt the stories by which we live so that we can transform this sense of apocalypse into a sacred eco-awakening!
Course Description
Wild Autumn helps you recover the ability to read the ancient script of nature found within the wheel of the year. How does this season of Autumn speak to you? What can we learn when we lean in and listen to the conversation between the sacred energies of the cardinal direction West and the element of Water? How is our soul’s journey activated when we ground our spiritual formation in a place, learning to once again listen to the wisdom that is imminent within the Watershed? Through the application of Creation Spirituality, we recover the ability to read the seasons and elements as sacred script.
Wild Autumn invites you to the integral the work of recovering a worldview that sees the seasons, and all of the natural world, as part and parcel to the health and flourishing of our human and community health. Rewilding Practices are offered that will awaken dormant spiritual lives, stimulating roots of interconnection between our selves, the Sacred, and the more-than-human world.
Wild Autumn offers you five professionally produced modules via the on-line course platform, Teachable. You will come away with the felt sense of being out in the wilds of of the watershed, the sacred and archetypal bioregion that is in deep conversation with the season of Autumn. Each module contains three segments that will guide you through the quadrated seasonal learning: Autumn as Teacher, Water as Guide, West as Prayer-mat, and Watershed as Sacred Landscape.
Wild Autumn offers theological and theoretical teachings around Earth Centered Spirituality, Celtic Spirituality, Watershed Theology, Soul Rewilding, Applied Mythology and the re-enchantment of the world within the Christ tradition as additional frameworks for this work of recovering our heritage of experiencing the world as an enchanted and holy place. You will be provided with reflection questions and personal application prompts to deepen your experience within the course content, offering you creative challenges to help live the teachings. You will have access to a supportive community where you can discuss course content and join in themed conversations on a private platform with others on the journey.
Wild Autumn is a self-paced study, on-demand journey, one to which you can return throughout the whole season of Autumn and in years to come. See this as a virtual retreat space where you can tap in to ground into the mysteries of the season and come away renewed and refreshed. You can join this offering and begin working with it at any time; you’ll have access to your material for the lifetime of the Teachable website.
Wild Autumn aligns with the content of Waymarkers’ Rewilding Retreat programs, a Whidbey Institute offering that has historically been offered in the legacy forests of a small Pacific Northwest island buttressed by the Salish Sea. Now, no matter where you are, you can rise rooted within this earth-based stream of spirituality!
Curriculum
Within the Wild Autumn curriculum, you will be offered both theories and practices so that you can begin to form your own eco-praxis as you grow into your own sacred eco-awakening. Spiritual streams, practical theories, and soul-centric practices that are surveyed in the Wild Autumn course include Celtic Spirituality, Watershed Theology, Deep Adaptation, Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects, and Applied Mythology. We will continue to also weave with the threads that are present through all the Wild Seasons offerings: Somatic Ecology, Sacred Phenomenology, Sacred Bioregionalism, and Sacred Nature Connection. You will receive access to five modules with 15 segments of beautifully filmed and produced teaching; application and reflection questions; deepening materials; practices to engage an earth-based spiritual practice; and inclusion into a community of other practitioners where you can be inspired and share ideas.
This is a trauma-informed offering.
Module One: Autumn As Teacher
Segments include:
Rewilding Wheel of the Year
Autumn as Season
Autumn: The Wisdom Stream of Celtic Spirituality
Module Two: West as Prayer Mat
Segments include:
Sacred Directions
Wisdom Within the West
Seeking the Wisdom Muse
Module Three: Water as Guide
Segments include:
Elemental Remembering
Water as Guide
Rewilding Practice: Water as Prayerful Presence
Module Four: The Watershed— Landscapes of the Sacred
Segments include:
Landscapes of the Sacred
The Sacred Bioregion of the Watershed
Rewilding Practice: Weaving Yourself Back Into Belonging
Module Five: The Mythological Journey
Segments include:
The Post-Heroic Round: Arrival and Integration
The Re-Enchantment of the Watershed: The Story of the Well Maiden
The Selkie: Remembering the Skin You are Meant to Be In
Bonus Material:
Full Moon Wheel Practices and Lunar Leading Wisdom for Wild Autumn’s Full Moons:
Corn Moon, Harvest Moon, and Beaver Moon.
Extensive and curated bibliography on the topics of Celtic Spirituality, Watershed Theology, Sacred Evolutionary Cosmology, and Rewilding as a soul practice.
The Wild Autumn rewilding offering is designed for:
spiritual directors/companions seeking sacred eco-awakening praxis
spiritual seekers who desire sacred nature connection
environmental activists needing to connect to spiritual resiliency
healers and therapists desiring to develop sacred eco-therapy modalities
artists wanting to align their practice with the numinous energies of Earth
theologians reconstructing a creation spirituality paradigm
practitioners longing to create place-based spiritual rituals and ceremonies
all humans who are looking to connect to the sacred interconnection of all life
Wild Autumn | Your Seasonal Rewilding Journey
The investment in this rewilding journey is $125.00.
Course content is available year-long and can be returned to perennially.
Additional materials are all downloadable for your own personal use and practice.
Purchased and delivered through Teachable.com | Wild Autumn is non-fundable based on the nature of this on-line course.
Your Guide
Mary DeJong is a spiritual ecologist, ecotheologian, wild soul guide, urban naturalist, and practitioner and guide of place-based pilgrimage. She specializes in the spiritual companionship of "rewilding" and has instructed other spiritual directors and companions through Spiritual Directors International. Mary facilitates retreats and pilgrimages in the Pacific Northwest and in Iona, Scotland that strengthen the unique and mystical interconnection of participants, the sacred, and the natural world. She has studied and practiced within the Celtic Christian spiritual tradition, her own maternal line heritage, for over twenty years, and is influenced by the lives of Celtic saints, and the lands that guided them.
Mary's theoretical and praxis focus within deep ecology, ecotheology, ecopsychology and specialization in Thomas Berry's Universe Story delves into why place matters, the sacramentality of creation, and how together this informs the development of our ecological self. Mary terms this work “sacred eco-awakening” and sees this as a critical and holy endeavor as it allows us to come to grievous terms of our human history and to posture ourselves once again side-by-side with the whole of creation.
Says Mary: "I help people recover ancient, seasonal wisdom to cultivate psycho-spiritual soul formation and sustenance in our modern lives without fear of losing the wisdom within their religious or spiritual tradition. Wild Autumn is a part of the Wild Seasons course series that aims to guide one through the spiritual wisdom that resides within the cyclical seasons of the year. It is far time we reconnect to a sacramental worldview that understands that our spiritual practices and the sacred earth are aligned.”
“I appreciate Mary’s passion for life and ecology and the beautiful world we share.”
— A.J.
“Mary’s guidance is in tune with seasonal, political, and ecological realities, calling me to listen, engage, and respond in transformative and meaningful ways. ”
— R.B.
“I appreciate Mary’s enthusiasm for her [teaching], and the emphasis on the natural world as such an important teacher of spirituality. I appreciate the practices she offers and the richness of the material she has provided as additional resources.”
— M.P.”
“If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.”
Curious about other Wild Season offerings? Check them out below!
