We often refer to the Earth as our Mother Earth, and in this way of relating project a whole bunch of attitudes towards Earth that we might project upon our own mothers. What if we imagined the Earth as our Lover instead? How could this conjugal style of relating transform our interrelationship with this sacred planet?
Read MoreThe nature of myths, just like the rhythms of the Earth, is that they are subject to change. In fact, if they don’t evolve in responsive nature to cultures and context, there is likely a fundamental flaw to them. When we decolonize our myths, inviting our heroes to become prophets and poets, what happens to the story? Does it emasculate it? Or do we actually pick up on an ancient sacred whisper exclaiming how they’ve been waiting for this version of the story to be told? Read on for my annual reflections on the Michaelmas festival and story.
Read MoreMichaelmas is the feast day on the Christian calendar when the archangel Michael is celebrated. Intentionally situated near the Autumn Equinox and the quickly darkening days, this festival requires a mythological imagination as we seek light within our communities and courage to face the dragons in our midst!
Read MoreWhat do you do when Hildegard of Bingen’s feast day, the Autumn Equinox, and your elderberry bush is ready for harvest? Oh, and we are in a global pandemic and fires are raging up the western coast? Create a healing ritual out of the creation of elderberry syrup. Read on for a simple recipe you can make from home.
Read MoreI had the honor of creating a Rewilding | Rites of Passage Retreat for my daughter’s 10 year birthday. On this significant turning, we gift our children with a dagger, a symbol of the potent question: Will you be a Life-Giver or a Life-Taker? It was a powerful time together and I am excited about imagining how to offer this kind of retreat for parent/child dyads in the future!
Read MoreThe Seven Directions Prayer includes the directions of up (Cosmos), down (Earth), and within (Soulscape). This expands the prayerful imagination to include the universal principals of diversity, particularity, interiority, and communion. It honors the indigenous tradition of knowing that God’s presence is as diverse and particular as the directions, and invites the supplicant to ground their prayers in a place.
Read MoreHappy Lammas! Celebrate this liminal day of Summer, an ancient festival day that honors the mid-season of Summer, by creating your own garden harvesting ceremony.
Read MoreThere are a spectrum of gorgeous and nourishing herbs and flowers that are a’bloom around the Summer Solstice. Learn a bit more about the Summer Solstice, and create a ritual of celebration that includes a blessing, fire, and sacramental eating! Attuning to these seasonal shifts is a meaningful way to continue your rewilding journey.
Read MoreLife as we have known it is cracking open, the ruptures revealing great potentiality. These cracks—more like crevasses really—are doing the important work of slowing us down to do the much needed work around diversity, equity and inclusion. These cracks cry out with the collective Black Lives Matter voice, and the cry of the Earth herself. Will we find our rapture? I believe we will, but only after we slow down and recover the lives that are within the rupture.
Read MoreThe Rewilding Wheel is a sacred circuit that seeks to locate the wisdom of universal nature symbols within one’s particular homescape for the purpose of spiritual formation. Rewilding Community member Lisa has been journeying around the Rewilding Wheel for over a year. Read this thoughtful interview that provides insight into the seasonal practices that can lead to a deeper relationship with the Sacred Wild.
Read MoreA good Creation Theology will be a decolonized theology that is climate-focused. This post originally was a sermon delivered to Lake Burien Presbyterian Church in September 2019, and responds to the question: How does our faith flourish while our forests burn?
Read MoreAs I have more opportunities to teach and accompany others on their soul-formation path, I am often asked what are the areas that have most influenced my work and Waymarkers’ offerings. As I was clearing out my office recently, I came upon a writing project and drawing that aimed to get at three primary categories of inspiration and influence. I created this in October 2015 and it is amazing to see how these categories continue to shape and form my thinking and my work!
Read MoreAn immersive Rewilding Retreat weekend wetted with myth, soul ceremony, ritual, and wild wanderings was just the thing for a group of courageous women who willingly engaged the Celtic story of the Selkie as a way to re-cover and re-member their meant-for-ness.
Read MoreWhat do you do when you lose something? You ponder its whereabouts, and then go out to look for it, and sometimes you end up recovering that which was lost in places that surprise you. We have lost the knowing that the earth is sacred, that we are surrounded by hallowed presences who bear witness to our lives, as well as express their own inherent divine qualities. Seek through the practice of ceremony. Find a recovered and reconnected way of understanding that the holy is Here. And hope beyond hope, may your ceremonial search yield the surprise of the divine ground of being that is within your particular place.
Read MoreSetting up a seasonal nature altar within your home is a meaningful way of attuning to the sacred rhythms of the natural world. This post will inspire a craft that will have you engaging with key elements within the Rewilding Wheel.
Read MoreMy personal practice of the Rewilding Wheel invited me into a soul-journey of reconnection to the sacred that is deeply rooted in my bioregion. This practice recovered these roots within the forests, fields, watersheds and mountains of my Pacific Northwest home. Discover what I learned from the spirit of my place!
Read MoreThis past Autumn Waymarkers hosted a Rewilding Retreat based on the Celtic story of the Selkie. This seal-skin/soul-skin mythopoetic lens was a meaningful way of leaning into one’s personal story and recovering lost aspects of one’s True Self.
Read MoreWe are approaching the threshold of Winter, and these days that come before that elemental edge are known as Advent, a sacred time of the year when rituals attune ourselves to the growing darkness and hope is kindled by the coming of light. Finding nature-based practices that deepen our sense of this season are a challenge to come by. Biomimicry is a powerful way to look to Nature as a wizened and warm teacher, who guides us into a meaningful and rooted way of being both through the holidays and in the seasons to come.
Read MoreMy Rewilding Year continues and comes to completion with time spent within the associated energies between the Summer season, Southern direction, and Earthen element. Combined, this wisdom resides in the bioregion of the farm, the garden, the field. Read on to learn along with me what I recovered when I spent time with Dr. Randy and Edith Woodley at Eloheh Farm in the Willamette Valley in Newberg, Oregon.
Read MoreThe world has been captivated by the display of grief as an orca whale mother (Tahlequah also known as J35) has carried the remains of her baby on her nose through the waters of the Salish Sea for days. She is calling out to us to no longer see ourselves as separate and apart from the great assembly of creation: will we hear and respond?
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