The following is part of an ongoing dialogue with the feelings and questions of our time. This month, our teacher Ryan Van Lenning explores the ebb and flow of sinking into community, confrontation with the heartbreaks and disharmony, and practices for us to “re-inhabit the deeper animate world rooted in vision and love.”
I’m basking deep in that nourishing afterglow of gratitude, connection, and accomplishment after co-facilitating an Ecotherapy immersion in Massachusetts.
What a treasure to have been in rich earth community, amidst the soundscape of wrens & barred owls, peoples’ authentic truths, amidst rivers and lush gardens with monarchs, bees, & hummingbirds hosting their pollination parties. Together we danced the elements, opened our ecosensuality, cultivated reverence for the sacred beauty of Life, embodied relationality with Earth in authentic movement, journeyed the Work That Reconnects Spiral, honoring our pain and naming systems of harm, flowing our grief together in a powerful Cairn of Mourning. We fed the fire with our letting go, song, and dance, ate robustly, pulled weeds, became seeds, grew our edges, and heard the wisdom of the more-than-human in a fun and powerful Council of All Beings. I can hardly imagine a better way to spend a summer week.
But then: the incorporation stage. We go back to our separate geographies, often in an Overculture that doesn’t much support community or hold sacred stories well, let alone honor the more-than-human world. The fraught collective moment in which we find ourselves is a rough ride: the proliferating polycrises of war, genocide, U.S. police brutality, climate catastrophe, fires, class war, inflation, rising fascism, and gargantuan gaslighting.
I feel we can normalize what comes up for us. We feel heartbroken because things are heartbreaking. We feel overwhelmed because things are overwhelming. We feel confusion and fear because things are confusing. We are afraid because there is much to be afraid about. We feel exhausted because things are freaking exhausting.
None of these realities disappear just because we’ve co-created a version of village life for a while, or get busy with life; but I can’t help but think that the types of earth-rooted, open hearted things we are practicing not only help us to resist and compost these harmful systems, but may with practice and in time (seven generations?) help us build cultures that put care, reciprocity, and sacred at the heart.
And we are never not practicing something. This is a sentiment I first heard from embodiment practitioner and author Prentis Hemphill. It’s a pillar of embodied transformation and there is a certain sacred gravity to it. As well as a certain buoyant possibilitarianism to it.
We can ask:
‘Is this a default habit or inherited script or one that creates more possibilities?
Does what I’m practicing daily help support the worlds I am envisioning?
Is it aligned with the values I am committed to?’
I find these inquiries core to integration, especially when I’m bumping up against cultural and personal habits that pull me in opposite directions. Amidst the soul loss, denial, deception, and violence of the Dominant/Dominator culture, it can be very easy to be pulled into fear as a driving force. Which makes it fairly easy to fall into habitual, restricted reactions, rather than proactive responses. But fear is a cage and each time we act from there, we are practicing that. But each time we choose something different–choose expansion, choose connection, choose feeling—we are practicing that world.
It is re-humanizing in a way that helps us re-inhabit the deeper animate world rooted in vision and love.
For me that looks like: practicing building solidarity in community, practicing listening to water and redwood elders, practicing being with natural cycles, practicing breath amidst the storms, practice not incarcerating people, practice interrogating my privileges, practice learning from/with others what re-humaning looks and feels like, all hopefully with my bare feet on the ground while savoring the season’s thimbleberries.
When all else fails, I often come back to adrienne maree brown’s sage insight:
“Things are not getting worse, they are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull the veil back.”
So, may we hold each other tight, stretch beyond inherited containers, break out of impoverished imaginations, and trust our heart’s longing for other possible worlds. May we keep practicing.
With reverence for the sacred nature within and around us,
Ryan, Ariana, and the Earthbody Team
NATURE PRACTICE
Ecospiritual Practices
By Ryan Van Lenning
One thing I love is hearing about others’ ecospiritual practices. Often we keep these to ourselves, in an Overculture that doesn’t honor the sacred in nature. Do you sing to the moon? Do you have extended conversations with elder redwood?
Do you pray to the seed when you plant?
Here I share a couple simple, but sacred practices – one honoring water, one honoring sun.
🌊Whenever I meet a body of water, especially if they are new to me, I put my palms on the surface, feeling the vitality of this mysterious being, and offer blessings and love to Water. I simply say, silently or out loud: “May you thrive and flow where you need to. Thank you.”
🌊 I do this before taking any for washing, drinking, or playing. It is one way I try to practice being in right relationship.
🌊 Additionally, on Wednesdays, I take inspiration from Pennie Opal Plant in amplifying prayers for the health, liberation and restoration of the Waters on #WaterProtectorWednesday.
☀️I spent the winter in the desert and dedicated 100 days to drumming and chanting up the sun. Every dawn I would join with Sun and either drum, sing, chant, or meditate as it appeared on the horizon, ending with my forehead to the ground and all my ears open. It was a simple, but profound practice of being intimate with the source of life, and anchoring myself more deeply with nature’s cycles.
Since we don’t have many containers for sharing these practices, I encourage us all to share with each other and normalize these intimate ways of reclaiming our birthright and re-inhabiting the animate world. May we be lifted out of the fog of our ecospiritual amnesia.
HOPEFUL ACTIVISM
Join us in celebrating Black led farm, food, and land justice organizations.
California to spend $12m on reparations in milestone move to address racist past
California plans to spend up to $12m on reparations legislation under a budget signed by Gavin Newsom, marking a milestone in the state’s efforts to atone for a legacy of racism and discrimination against Black Californians. The reparations funding in the $297.9bn budget the California governor signed over the weekend does not specify what programs the money would go toward. Lawmakers are not considering widespread direct payments to Black Californians this year.
Read more HERE
Shasta Indian Nation to get homeland back in largest land return in California history
Gov. Gavin Newsom has set in motion the largest land return in California history, declaring his support for the return of ancestral lands to the Shasta Indian Nation that were seized a century ago and submerged.
The 2,800 acres in Siskiyou County are part of the Klamath River dam removal project, which will rehabilitate more than 300 miles of salmon habitat.
Read more about this historic decision HERE
POETRY AND INSPIRATION
The Summer Day
By Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver “was an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books, “particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Oliver’s poetry focused on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.” Kumin also noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.” Oliver’s poetry won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement.” – PoetryFoundation.org
Read Me the River
By Ryan Van Lenning
Read me the river, my love
the part where it meets the sea
Where the heart undone seeks to be
meandered and slicked with longing, There—
let’s have a great river affair
I kept my promise to start
where the crooked creek joins the flow
where herons hum their patient art
and owls chant the night so slow
The dark arrives, too dark to read
but I made a promise to my eyes
and I just may need your sight to see
So read me the river, my sweet
into the last of evening’s light
Read me the riddled heart’s great rage
for days like these the breeze is brave
and I can feel the coming wave
bright and strong and rolling through
that long quest released in you.
Read me the name of river’s root
where earth round and rich receives
the palm of sky and pulse of all
until all the tension is relieved
Read me the river, my love
the part where it meets the sea
Find Ryan Van Lenning at Wild Nature Heart or somewhere on the ecospiritual path.
Thank you for reading! We welcome your comments and questions. Contact EBI: earthbodyinstitute@gmail.com.
We acknowledge that The Earthbody Institute is located in Huchiun, in unceded Lisjan territory, now known as Oakland. We honor and support the ancestors and present Lisjan people. We encourage you to learn more and make a donation to support the return of their land and culture.