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“And don't think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter.
It's quiet, but the roots are down there riotous.”- Rumi
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Dear Wild Nature Hearts,
 We're at that moment in the grand cycle: Deep nights visit us. The chill nips ever-so incessantly. Frost offers up new forms of seasonal art. Coyotes howl their mysteries and the moon inches her slivered self back into the body of night's wholeness.
Amidst it all an invitation arrives. The solstice gifts us a sacred pause, a still point in the turnings of the world, before the birth of the sun into longer days. The wondrous winter moments call for us to acknowledge our harvests of the year, and invites us to dream anew as we are offered the depth of darkness, rest, and surrender. Will we accept this precious gift?
There are many beautiful ways to mark the solstice and the season. When we sip each season slowly (both inner and outer), when we let the season season us, we feel the reflective turn and all the various species of surrender, and let the elemental alchemy do its work.
 We're halfway through my course Within the Cave Something Pulses, and with five fellow spelunkers we're exploring apprenticing to slowness, darkness, death, and tending our fires. The tagline of that course is "What emerges in the fruitful darkness?" and it is one of the beautiful paradoxes of the season of winter that within the darkest, coldest moments of the year, we can tend to the fires within. Knowing the rhythm well enough to trust what emerges and let it sustain us through the season is an art worth practicing.
Yet the season is not necessarily easy. Cold and wet bring their own flavors of challenge. Darkness can sometimes feels like a beloved, yet difficult relative visiting for too long. Perhaps we finally come to reflect on what is actually alive in us. Through the year, we've absorbed and endured a lot. Perhaps we have lost things or even created things we haven't "caught up with"; we haven't allowed ourselves to feel how it all is landing in our bodies and psyches.
 There will always be plenty of forces out there that have little respect for the wisdom of the season or the body, tempting us to do more things, be more things, buy more things. Yet some part of us knows that if we incessantly try to perform at the pace of extraction culture, the consequences will be sure to show up as symptom, in individuals and the collective. Our body-heart-psyche will speak.
And the new dreams may be too scared to show up. But we know that just like Earth (because we are earth) rest is required in order to dream anew. Yes, we actually need to dream in order to live. Put more poetically, our dreaming is a fire that Earth uses to remake the world through us. So rather than being luxuries, rest and dreaming are fundamental needs.
So here's to creating a sanctuary for our dreams to show up.
May you find your best way to listen to your body and soul wisdom, to craft your sacred pause, and sink into your season.
 Thank you for reading. May we keep our muscles of imagination robust, vibrant, and full of surprises. Solstice Blessings to you all—see you in the new year!
with spontaneous emergences and the slow growth forest of us,
Ryan
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NATURE PRACTICE
Invoking Our Inner Slug
There's something about the season, despite the many cultural messages to the contrary, that invites an inward turning and slowing of doings. We might spend time with slugs, snails, mushrooms or other slow creatures, or evoke their image and energy. Can we meet the slow ones at their pace? Sometimes even watching a video of them can regulate our nervous system and suggests a deeper breath. Can we meet ourselves at the pace that our bodies and hearts desire?
For some regular things you do, try it at 80% of your normal pace. Try practicing delayed responses and pregnant pauses, becoming comfortable with silence, not filling the space. Practice saying no to more. Put an out-of-office signature on your email and texts. What do you notice when you bring your presence to the task? Do you notice any resistances within to letting go of freneticism and list-making? This isn’t about getting things done or not getting things done, but about bringing presence to what is already there. And listening to what rhythms our bodies may want that aren't necessarily supported by the values and structures of society. As Bayo Akomolafe says, "Slowing down is not a function of speed, is a function of awareness...It’s a function of presence."
Dark Bathing
These are the longest and darkest nights of the year leading up to the Solstice (in the northern hemisphere). It's a wonderful invitation to practice being with the dark. Befriending darkness can take many forms. In an over-illuminated world, could it be that we’ve let go of some of our ancestral connection to the gifts of night? You’ve heard of forest bathing. You’ve maybe flirted with rain bathing. Dark bathing is like sky-gazing but you sit or lay in complete darkness. Allow yourself to float on waves of darkness, becoming permeable to its soothing waters. In darkness, our perception of form dissolves, which can allow us to awaken other senses and experience different textures inside and out. What do you notice there that the light of day hides? As that dark-lover poet Rainer Maria Rilke puts it in an ode to darkness:
“You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything-
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people-
and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
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Radiant Roots: Circles to Compost Whiteness & Modernity
Stay tuned in the new year for details.
Radiant Roots will be an ongoing, drop-in, experimental circle, open to all who are interested in exploring the sacred wounds of white modernity and supremism. We will work/play/practice through an embodied, ecospiritual, liberatory lens. It is inherently animist, unapologetically anti-colonial, and intending to uproot false belongings and deepen real roots.
Heart art by Cat Skellington
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Write Your Wild River
(Starts February 19)
Hybrid Rite-of-Passage Course
with Ryan Van Lenning and Katie Baptist
(6 weeks - March-April)
Details Coming Soon - email ryan@wildnatureheart.com to be on interested list.
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UPCOMING COMMUNITY EVENTS
 In This Darkness Singing - Live Online Solstice Event with Michael Meade
Join online for an evening of songs and story, rituals of remembrance and forgiveness, and a resounding collective prayer to bring back the light of healing and reconnect to the underlying Soul of the World.
Sunday, December 18, 6-9:00pm Pacific Time
More here. |
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ECO MEME OF THE DAY
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THRESHOLD OF A SEASON
So you’ve come to the threshold of a season
Take a cue from Sister Aspen
and lay all your old answers down
You’ve received an invitation from darkness
to winter well
and the cave comes calling.
Enter the cave with a child’s heart
and a warrior’s wound
Asking all the impossible questions
impervious to troublesome answers
Fatten yourself up with them
and curl up for a mountain’s rest
You will find that winter
was waiting for you as well
and needs your warmth
The fire around which the season turns
dances in your belly
The company you keep
will become the soil of spring
The dreams you cook together
will become the tulip’s tip
For now, it is enough to know
that the cave is equally your home
within which so much lives.
View a reading of this poem here.
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FORAGING THE LISTENINGS
The hour arrives
to turn the volume down
in order to hear.
The season of silence begins
with a low guttural
and the treetops glistening—
you go in foraging the listenings.
Some silver-bladed violence
begins evaporating
the tangled knots unravel.
Now in the dark,
you see your bright thread
weaving the important things.
Things un-split
and a mammal presence fills the cave.
Like a long-forgotten season,
a deep rest emerges.
When that hour arrives
the bones signal their agreement,
melodies of peace erupt from
and all your ears open.
You enter foraging the listenings.
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I acknowledge that I live in and Wild Nature Heart works in/on/with traditional Wiyot and Yurok lands, in so-called Humboldt County, CA.
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