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Join author and founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, Victoria Loorz, as she explores the possibilities of restoring beloved community and sacred conversation with All That Is: human and more-than-human.
HW S1E8 Ecospiritual Direction
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Stephen: You are listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
Victoria: Hello and welcome to the Holy Wild. I'm Victoria Loorz and this is a conversation with human beings who are restoring sacred conversation with all beings. It's a podcast for the edge walkers. Those who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation, and an emerging new and yet ancient story that's grounded in kindred relationship with Earth. All it takes is humility, deep listening, and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth.
So my primary practice, spiritual practice over the past several years has been a form of wandering, and it's a way to allow myself to behold the holy and companionship of the trees and the noisy crows and the slugs crossing the paths super slowly.
And lately, I've had the privilege. The joy to kayak in the Salish Sea right behind my house. Talk about a contemplative conversation with the holy. It's one of the most contemplative and peaceful practices I've ever done.
Last week, I sat beneath a bald eagle that was at the top of a huge cedar tree. She was just looking out among everybody and I thought I'd sit there until she flew away, but I realized that would've been hours, 'cause they spend a lot of their day just doing that, like they're looking out over their kingdom.
The other spiritual practice is one where I bring my dreams out to the wild. I really don't remember them much because I've just gone through and I'm still, I'm hoping, I'm in an out of this season, but I've just gone through a season of insomnia, so I'm afraid to let myself wake up enough to write down the details, but still, even they linger with me, if not the content of the dreams, at least the emotions of them. They come with me throughout my day.
And so when I wander along the little paths of the grand forest, which is this amazing forest down the street from my house, or I slowly paddle in the evenings as the sun sets and all the mosquitoes awake, I remember those dreams and I tell them out loud, because I'm alone.
I tell them out loud as much as I can remember. I can feel the wild ones listening to me and in telling and processing the dreams. I notice little things along the way, like how slow the slug is crossing the trail, and it's so painfully slow. I stopped to watch to see how long it would take, and again, after a while, got a little antsy that it would take two hours for this little slug to cross the trail.
Those experiences alerted me to my resistance to slowness. I'm learning when I'm out on the water, I notice the little seal who pops her head up to see me, and then she disappears into her world. She has two worlds and I wonder about living in two worlds like her and how I feel like I'm living in two worlds. We are all living in two worlds right now.
The world that we are mostly reading about on our phones, that is just the collapse happening before our eyes and the world of I guess I just keep doing what I'm doing. And it's so weird to be living at this time where these two worlds are becoming both more and more polarized and more and more impossible to keep separate.
So I'm finding that my resiliency plan to read only the barest of headlines and avoid, that shutdown that happens when I just take it all in grief and the anger and the anxiety that comes from just seeing what cruelty is being unleashed. And then I realized after this podcast conversation that I need basically someone to really process this with, it's I don't want to overburden any of my friends. I certainly don't wanna talk about it too much, even though it comes up in almost every conversation. We talk about it for a little bit of what is happening, what should we do? And then we just go, okay, so anyway, we need to get back to work.
So I realized I just need somebody to sit and help me process. That made me realize that I need a new in-person spiritual director who could meet me here among the ferns in this fabled forest edges. It's like because in our dreams, our spiritual lives, you know the way that we process and we integrate reality, these small little stories of our weeks of the time, we watched a video allowed ourself to watch a video of ICE pursuing and kidnapping our brothers and sisters. It's one thing to hear about it. It's another thing to watch it, but we process these stories and then we process the stories of the slug and the bald eagle and the dreams that I've been having. It's someone who's been investing. What I really want is not just a family member, not just a friend, although I burden them enough.
I want somebody who knows how to listen, who really has invested in how to listen as sacred listening, and how to pay attention with and for you and someone who's been investing in their own capacity to pay attention to the Holy in the Wild, which is exactly why I started the Eco Spiritual Direction program at Seminary of the Wild Earth to train people, to support people, as they invest in their own capacity to do that as a service to earth and to people in their community. The word director or spiritual direction is a wholly inaccurate and outdated word because nobody directs you. It's a deep listening. It's a reflecting. It's a mirroring and a sacred conversation. It's a paying attention. It's a companionship.
So we just started this training program a couple years ago, and already dozens of people have completed the program, which is a training, but it's more like a transformational practice of holy listening in service to other humans and to the holy whole. So as we prepare for the next cohort of eco spiritual companionship, I invited two of our guides for the program to talk with me today.
Elizabeth Rector has been an Episcopal priest for many years. She's a retreat leader. She's one of our guides now. She's a practitioner in bio spiritual focusing, and she's the former executive director of Still Point in Southern California that's been training spiritual directors for over 70 years.
And also Deb Metzker, who's an eco spiritual director who for many years has been offering attentive care and healing energy to abandon and neglected animals and all those most wounded by the culture of disconnection to the holy in all things. So I invite you to join us in this conversation where we reflect on what we've learned over this first couple years of eco spiritual direction training program.
[ transitional music plays]
Deb and Elizabeth, thank you so much for agreeing to have this conversation together. It's a conversation that we've had many times over this last year as we've been really experimenting with and learning about what eco spiritual direction actually is in real time. I used to get a little nervous about, ah, we should know all these things. We gotta do this in advance. And it's not how it works.
When something new is emerging, even when it's rooted in something very ancient, it emerges in its own pace and our role is to pay attention to follow it, to respond and to not try to get ahead define it before it's time. So just that as a bit of a background, we wanna talk today about what we've learned in launching this eco Spiritual Direction training program, in which we describe quickly as doing spiritual direction with people in relationship with the holy wild.
As a simple way, but I think I wanna begin with just a question of how, some people aren't even sure what spiritual direction is at all. And so a little bit of background about what spiritual direction is and then how this is different from traditional spiritual direction and how this is the same.
So maybe Elizabeth, if you don't mind just sharing first what even is spiritual direction and how long has it been around, and that kind of thing.
Elizabeth: Yeah, thank you. So it's a, it actually is a very ancient tradition, mostly begun by people in religious life. Not just Christian, but folks who would make space to listen to pilgrims or people in their communities holding space for them to share how the holy is present in their life.
And what we know about that and why it is so ancient is that we need companions for this work. We need people to hold space and witness and let people tell their experience and it's been going on for so long because it's a value to people. It's much harder to do work like this by yourself. You could say it's impossible to do that.
Victoria: And by work you just mean the spiritual life.
Elizabeth: Yes.
Victoria: It's just, I think there's something about conversation. Like I write about that is inherently the presence of the holy. There's something just deeply like foundationally archetypal in this work of misnamed spiritual direction. Spiritual companionship.
Elizabeth: Companionship. Yes that's the word that we're using now, but you'll often hear direction just because we wanna keep the connection to the ancient. That we are following an ancient path of listening together in conversation about the presence of the holy.
And spiritual companions learn how to hold the space in a way that doesn't, that allows their voice to come forth, doesn't invade them or abandon. It's one of the phrases we like to use, but just make space. It's a valuable. Component to walking the spiritual thing.
Victoria: Yeah. How about you, Deb? You were trained in different modalities or whatever, especially with your Anam Cara, Celtic rooting. Anything else you wanna. Add to what this is at the core?
Deb: Yeah, sure. What it seems to have evolved into, for me, and I began formation in a traditional spiritual direction program, but those programs, one program led to another and Companioning became the thread that was the deepening agent for me.
But there's something about being witnessed that opens something for you. And many times your companion will be able to mirror back to you something that you have said when you're in a spiritual relationship with something, someone that opens a door and you actually said it, but you didn't actually hear it until someone else had gave it back to you.
And so just the act of witnessing someone, sometimes opens an experience for them that otherwise it becomes static.
Victoria: Or not even noticed.
Deb: Yeah. Yes or not even given permission to actually deepen into and just the witnessing of it is the permission, the invitation.
Victoria: And you both were, have been spiritual directors for many years.
What was it that kind of made you start to be aware that there was some kind of missing component by not including the rest of the alive world. What was your process of being more aware of the presence of the holy in and between All things.
Deb: I can share that for me, that element was always there, but it wasn't something that I felt comfortable bringing to someone else, because it didn't, it wasn't the norm. It wasn't the traditional circles that I was given the spiritual direction relationship in didn't follow those lines. And so there were many experiences that were deeply profound for me that remained within me, and it was until I could have community to bring those experience to that I really, truly lived into the wisdom that they held because I could hear them from a lens of someone else giving them back to me that held that as holy, that experienced the holiness that was within the experience.
Victoria: It's so important to have that community, especially when you know something is outside of the status quo. You think it needs to be something that's just yours and there's no sort of like external permission to give it the value that not just with this, but with anything.
And then once you have that community to go, oh wait, this is not just me. This is something that we all share and needs to be brought into the center more.
Deb: For me, that was a very exciting moment and also a catalyst to be able to be curious and to experience things in a new way, because I had someone to talk to it about.
Victoria: That's the core of it. It's like I, I relate it to a dream. You can have a dream, you can write down the dream. You go, huh, that's an interesting dream. Maybe it means this or that, and then you forget about it. But when you start sharing the dream with somebody, even if they're not a dream worker or something, and they start noticing things about your story, about the dream that makes you notice them yourself, then all of a sudden this dream that seemed like not a big deal, brings a lot of deep meaning.
Deb: Yes, exactly.
Victoria: What about you, Elizabeth? I know we started to do eco spiritual direction kind of workshops before we were ready at Center for Wild Spirituality to do the full training, but you'd been doing this in your own different way for a long time.
Elizabeth: Yeah, and I appreciative of the question because a good spiritual companion, sometimes what's really important is good questions.
It opens up places that you might not have. Considered before, but for me, when we asked the question, what was a significant spiritual experience that lingers with you, it was always connected to the natural world for me that's where I experienced the holy most significantly. And I wouldn't necessarily, as Deb was saying that there were a lot of places to talk about that, although I did, I would be honest about that.
But more and more what I realized, the connection that I was making in those experiences was love, like the love that I feel for the natural parts of my experience. I just think we've all had these experiences of, you see a creature, you're like, huh, that is not to be ignored.
And when I dig deep into it, what is there is love is just the feeling that powerful experience of feeling loved toward and from. Know that when you sit in the sun, just the feeling, and it's only strengthened in me. And the work that we have started doing together is just, why would you ignore that?
Why wouldn't you receive it and celebrate and wanna know more that feeling?
Victoria: Yeah. So like we say, it's not, and we've learned as we've worked with people the past couple years that it's not, eco spiritual direction is not just for people who are already attuned to nature and are outdoorsy kind of people.
It's really a way of seeing, and it's a way of approaching, and it's a worldview. It's a way of approaching life and the spiritual journey in particular, that's an orientation for the director who's holding that space. And there's definitely an invitation and even an indirect drawing in for the people that you work with to see that there's wisdom and there's relationship and there's deepening into your own spiritual journey and relationship with God, relationship with the holy, relationship with the wild.
Deb: Yes. I'm the thing that is different as an spiritual companion, I come with a worldview or with a spirituality view that encompasses a wider lens and whatever that person brings is planted in me in a wild place. And so it doesn't matter what their point of beginning is, I'm able to go with them no matter where that is because I haven't narrowed my focus to make it be the same.
Victoria: Or just you've broadened your receptivity of the holy. And so that larger container allows people to expand as well.
Elizabeth: It invites them your very presence and expansiveness. It gives invitation to expand the person you're sitting with as well, I think.
Victoria: Yeah. How do you think, and this is something I've been thinking about, like how's your experience been of understanding this idea of holding space, this container we're talking about?
How has that changed how, as we've been intentional about walking alongside our companions with this intentionality of deep relationship with the wild or even just how has that understanding of holding space shifted this year?
Deb: It has for me in that, I don't know that I would actually say still that I create and hold a safe container for someone else to navigate and reflect on their spiritual life.
I would say that the container is being held by the wild and I enter into the container and companionship with that person. Often I feel that we are being held together in that space, and that it's not so much up to me to contain something as it is to be receptive to everything.
Elizabeth: I would agree. I felt the same thing. It was like it's flipped. Like you were saying, there was something about the beginning that we, we listen with people and invite the wild, and I, as you said that, I thought no. The wild invites us and we agree. We move toward, and that's extraordinary for me.
Victoria: That is a shift, isn't it?
It's a deepening shift. It's, you said something Deb recently about how. One of the fundamental shifts throughout this, it's like this intentionality. We're being intentional about responding to this invitation, being opening our hearts to invite in deeper experience of the holy in the wild.
And you've said something about the idea of reciprocity. I was wondering if you could say that again and add to that.
Deb: Yeah. One of the things that I have noticed is that whenever I'm with someone, especially if I'm present with them, whether that would be on a phone call to where I'm in the wild and they're in the wild at the same time, the wild isn't ever just responding to them.
It's responding to us both at the same time, and so often the person that I'm with will reflect something and it will touch a cord in me as well. And there's this communal reciprocity that goes on to where I am never solely only focused and receptive to one thing. It's this total immersion into being together in that moment.
Being surrounded and embraced by the wild, both of us at the same time. It's very reciprocity. It's very much that feeling of flow. Much like water, it's never just one directional. It's multifaceted all of the time.
Victoria: Yeah.
Deb: One of the things that I have come to pay attention to lately is often the question comes of people that are currently spiritual directors wanting to know if, they've already done the training and they have the skills to do that.
I can honestly say that the skills that I learned in my training have been rewilded. I use them in a different way. There's a freedom to that seems more organic more growth induced. It's never a place to end, only a place to begin.
Victoria: Yeah. It's like the, sometimes I think people who start the program who have been spiritual directors for a long time have some time of unlearning and we don't really even recognize it till we're in the middle of it.
And I can think of different times when we identified particular things. I can't think of anything right now, but I'm wondering if we if one of you have, or even myself, if we have a story that just demonstrates how this, what happens. I can remember one that actually wasn't me.
It was Valerie, our other spiritual direction guide. She was working with somebody online and she was sitting looking out the window while this person was sharing something. After she was sharing a story, the person she was working with, Valerie said, I don't know if this has any meaning to you, but this is just really odd that as you've been talking the last three minutes, this fish has jumped up out of the water farther and I ever seen a fish jumped at three times and the women started crying because of fish.
There was, she had other stories of fish and then just Valerie noticing that made it real to her that this wasn't just like she happened to see some fish and there was a fish poem or something that she had seen, but there was something that the wild was communicating to her from this river across the country in this Zoom led connection.
So the web, the, I, I think it's interesting that the worldwide web, the internet is known as a web and that's, that is a connective force just as all things are connected by webs underground and in all different ways. But that's just like a little example. If you can think of any other little examples like that, I think it helps to take this out of a theoretical kind of place into how it's very much, it's very powerful.
Deb: I'll just share. Elizabeth and I we did an example at the beginning of this past year to where we both independently were going to have a session online as a demonstration for the other people. And we had decided beforehand for each to go outside and let something from the wild claim us. Then bring that element into our session, which wasn't pretend and it wasn't made up.
It was actual companioning between the two of us and Elizabeth, I think yours was a weed outside. Yeah? And that held a very strong meaning for you that came back, that led threads out to your childhood and the meadow that you remembered. And I can't remember what it was that claimed me.
It was a feather, I think, from a very small sparrow, but the threads formed as we talked and led us to the places that we needed to reflect on to remember who we are and how we belong. But those are very small things that might seem insignificant, but they evolved into a very soft nest for us to be in together.
Elizabeth: Yeah, that was a wonderful experience. The thing that comes to my mind is, has really related to memory that we carry all the experiences of our life within our memory, and they are available to us. And so it's so incredible to me how the wild can come to us, to something that happened years ago. It's still speaking, it still has power and presence.
I often like to remind people like companion, is there something that, is there a memory here that's meeting you? And we do a lot of work in this program around coming home from exile of those places that were present to us that we've, it's just been written out of us. So it's exciting when memory comes to meet us from the wild.
Victoria: And it's it's different than from like centering prayer, for example. You know what I, the way I learned it is when these distracting thoughts come up, you just release them. I would always imagine an Etch a Sketch, releasing them, letting it go. And this is a little more, you do let go of those distracting thoughts, the busy ones of, oh my God, I forgot to turn off the iron.
Kind of thing. But it is, you honor the memories that come, you honor the animals that you start to imagine, you honor the imaginary things. You remember a dream, you notice something that, that you've just overlooked. And those are the little things to pay attention to. And they're like, this, these numerous experiences with the wild are difficult to talk about.
I was just leading a retreat last week and a woman was sharing after a little short wandering in our group, and it was with a church who had never thought about this kind of stuff, and she had a little encounter with a sparrow and it was just this encounter where the sparrow looked right at her.
That's the whole thing. And in some ways she's, there's no story here. Just this spirit, this word looked at me, at the end. No, but she started crying, and so this hit her, this little encounter, this little engagement of consciousness between you and this little tiny creature that meant this creature is an, is a vow, is a holy other who has looked at me and has experienced me even as I'm experiencing them.
It's hard to talk about, but if you have a safe place to just share these little simple things that we are trained in our culture to overlook or even distrust sometimes in a, in our culture or in our churches or something, but to really slow people down to go, wait a minute. You saw that mouse three times, huh? That's interesting how close they got. Why would what does that mean to you?
[ transitional music plays]
There's a few spaces left in the upcoming cohort of Seminary of the Wild Earth for the Eco Spiritual Direction program. So if you're feeling called to accompany and support the spiritual journeys of people in your community, and you want to deepen into your capacity to hold sacred conversation with the holy and the wild and the souls and hearts of people who are yearning for that deep kind of connection. Then maybe this program is something that can support you. Check out the description on the website, wildspirituality.earth. The deadline for the applications is August 15th, 2025.[
Deb: transitional music plays]
There's a, there's another piece that this reminds me of is that. Often being in a spiritual relationship with the wild is not like a Disney movie.
It does involve some pain and it involves some generational trauma of the separation, and the only place that I've been able to realize where I have the courage to allow those places to unfold.
Is in the wild. It gives me the courage that I need to be able to do that because I'm accepted. Its trauma is my trauma. And so a lot of times when people first start to enter into the wild in relationship, the tears do come, and the magnitude of feelings that they didn't validate for a very long time, or even diminished in order to survive them are there to be witnessed, to be held, to be honored, and to release with ceremony to honor those that have been connected to them all along.
Victoria: And what was a big aha for me in the last few years is that it's my own unexpressed, unvalued, unseen pain, or even just love makes me cry, but it's also we're responding to something from the place herself.
The land holds emotions and has held a lot of trauma in most places. Even if it's just a, an ecological ending of a whole era, a glacier that has come and wiped everything out, much less the human or other kinds of trauma that's happened on the land. And you can feel it in certain places and you feel a certain way that you don't expect in certain places.
I'm starting to realize that's not just my own emotions, that it's also in response to that I have access. We have access to each other's emotions we do. When you come into the room and you are sad, everybody can feel, who's got any kind of empathy can feel that. And it's the same thing with all the beings.
And so that's where climate grief or climate anxiety, there's a lot of talk about that, and I was recently asked about that, how do you help people with climate grief? And it's in relationship, it's the same place. It's like the wild ones. Grief is part of life. The wild ones hold that. They're used to it. It's part of aliveness. And so it's entering back in and expressing and feeling that grief versus trying to get rid of it.
Deb: I think that it's crucial to recognize that. We can't really be in tune with it, separate from the wild. It's in relationship with it, that it can be experienced and expressed and giving honor to it in ritual ways.
But that requires participation, not, you can't do it separate from.
Victoria: And we don't know how to do that in our culture. More people can express their grief in relationship with the wild than they can with each other.
Elizabeth: Yeah. And it just reminded me that so much of the work that we're doing in this program eco Spiritual Companionship is a work of deconstructing, not just, what we, if you've already gone through a program, but it's also just our Western culture that is so incarcerated us really, and separated us from our wholeness.
So as you are in a relationship with someone in spiritual companionship, you're on a journey of freedom. You're on a journey of growth, and part of that's gonna be to really look at how you've been kept from your life. Cut off from parts of yourself because your culture has said that doesn't mean anything.
I would say that's the most powerful part of this work for me is to watch as people release some of the boundaries that had been preset for them. And that's the challenge to do something new like this, the emergence of this, I find myself going, oh gosh, is this the right way? And we get to be challenged by it as we're doing the work and it's a necessity.
To challenge what you think you know and welcome what you don't know yet. It's part of the growth process.
Victoria: And it's helping people in the resilience to being comfortable enough with the unknowing 'cause this is a collective time of massive unknowing and even I love how you use that word, captive and captivity and incarcerated because there's just so much loss, not only to the person who's incarcerated, to the whole community.
So I feel like the land herself is longing for our wholeness. There's a greater story that we're part of, and the others who we've disconnected ourselves from are longing for us to reconnect. It's like the Romans eight within the New Testament is all about the Earth is groaning for the humans to be part of the story Again.
To come back in and not to solve everything. Not to make it up, fix it all, but to just be in companionship again, that there's some growth and evolving this that can't happen without our full re-engagement.
Deb: Yeah. This is very evolutionary and part of it is recognizing the filters through which we've gazed upon the wild from a distance and to emerge into the fullness of community with it.
Elizabeth: I wanna take a risk here because I haven't really said this before, but I have this sense that humans generally, I would say Western mind, humans are very judgey because our mind judges and we so overemphasize that part of ourselves, but I don't feel that the natural world, the holy wild, judges. And it's so refreshing. But you have to remember that like you look at the tree that's dying, you think, oh gosh, I'm so sorry. What I've done or what we've done. And then I think is the tree saying that? I don't know. I don't, I think I'm making that up. I'm projecting my own judgment out here.
That's another healing place. Learn to be non-judgmental. As you swim in the ocean.
Victoria: Like accepting life as it is, versus what you wish it would be, what you think it should be, what you want it to be, what you regret it isn't, but I think accepting what is definitely a part of the, at least the spiritual journey, if not just a liveness journey.
That comes with it, grief, and you just feel it. It's part of it. You can't skip over that and feel good about things that you've missed out on or you wish could have been your longings, whatever. But I think when you surrender, and actually we've seen this with people, when you actually are ready to surrender to what is even like all of us needing to stop reading the news and like I, I made a mistake waiting for you guys today to just read some headlines and I'm just like, oh my God, I can't even.
But it is, me not reading it can help me make it through the day. And it's not like I need to read everything. It's just that this is happening and it's happening to, to people and it makes me grieve. And that gr through that grief, through that emptying, we can find some new way to engage. We can find some new way to hold it.
We can find some new something that we are being called. Bring into the world to speak to what's happening, but it can't happen until we're able to let go, to what we think it should be. Like there's something in the activism I used to do that was like holding on so tightly you, we have to do all this, or else, and the or else happened, we're way past three 50 parts per million.
And me being anxious about it didn't help. But surrendering to this is real, and it doesn't mean I'm saying it's okay. Allows me to grieve, allows me to empty, allows me to say I have no idea what to do. It's like being a spiritual companion saying, walking into it. Like we just saw, we just graduated a whole group of folks a few weeks ago in, in Ghost Ranch, and there were people that up until the end were like, I don't.
I don't know how to do, I don't know if I can trust myself and it's not up to you. You're just holding this and you don't know what to do. Of course you don't know what to do. It's another human being. They're not asking you what to do. You are not guiding them in that way. You are in that place of wholly unknowing with them trusting that it'll come through.
Deb: You point to a very important word in this, and that's trust. And humans have been programmed to trust very little, including themselves, but it is a very profound moment when you realize that the wild trusts you. And if you are willing and able to drop into that moment and receive it exactly as it is.
That changes everything for the next moment. So it doesn't really matter if we trust ourselves, deepen yourself and into what trusts you by bringing you home, by allowing you to know that you belong.
Victoria: Amen.
Deb: I had a profound experience that was pivotal for me in that I feed the birds out of my hands and on my head in the wintertime, in my, in the woods where I live.
Victoria: I love that. By the way,
Deb: I was having a really bad day. I had a very tough exchange with my mom, who's in her nineties, and. I went up to the woods and I was very frustrated and angry. And when I got to the spot where I feed the birds, I expected that they would stay in the trees and just wait for me to calm down.
But they didn't. They came to me right away and to this, their willingness to trust me allowed me to be open enough to realize that what. I was longing for was the contemplative of life, that availability to be present in the moment rather than carrying the baggage of what happened five minutes ago or projecting myself into what was gonna happen two hours later in that day.
But they trusted me in that moment and allowed me to stay in that moment for enough time to heal me.
Victoria: Wow.
Deb: From the moment before.
Victoria: You anticipated the question that I was just about to ask you, I was just about to ask you, was can you name a moment or an experience this year when you felt undone or remade or in the presence of the sacred wild?
And that's exactly it. About you, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth: I was thinking of the one about the wind. Probably the most profound experience I've had this year, but it was related to the wild fires in LA and where I live, the wind was ferocious, but the fires were in different parts of Southern California, and so I was, it was hard to sleep that night knowing that friends' homes were in danger, that this wind was fueling a fire that was so powerful. And so I woke up in the middle of the night and I could hear my wood shed or my tool shed was banging the door. So I decided I'm gonna go out and fix it or I'll never sleep. And when I got out, I just stepped outside. I was just started to weep because I just could feel the power.
The destruction that this wind was doing to friends and more than human creatures and their habitat. And I I just stood in the wind. I just let her just blow and let me stand in the middle of it. And I learned later it was 80 miles an hour this way. And as I stood there, I heard. I'm suffering too.
And I knew it was the wind that was the voice of the wind. And so it was a moment of relationship and also a word about the earth. And we're in this together.
Victoria: You listen to an irritation of the banging door. And it was almost like the wind calling you out and when you got there, you were aware enough and open enough to hear, enter into conversation. Exactly it. And the message is often versions of the same of, we're in this together, we're connected.
Elizabeth: In spiritual companionship, you're really speaking to that, speaking to the relationship that you have, that we have. That's real.
Deb: Elizabeth, that goes back to that, keeping the term eco spiritual direction so that we hold onto that thread of what this began as traditionally back through the years, it's that listening for, listening to putting your finger on the pulse of that relationship, that holy relationship.
This is the thread that we don't wanna lose, is that this is a holy relationship. This is a sacred thing that deserves to be heard, deserves to be witnessed, deserves to be honored, and to make sure that you communicate that to the other person. Is the biggest responsibility and spiritual direction as a practice is a discipline.
And it's not a discipline on the person who's being witnessed and being companioned. It's a discipline on the person who has taken that place to make sure that the other is honored and witnessed.
Elizabeth: Yeah, and I would say that we also talk about this practice as a way of life. We meet with people individually or in groups, but we also are meeting it all the time.
And that our presence and our listening is a way of life.
Victoria: And it's a way of life. It's a relationship. So it's not every time you go out with intentionality into the woods or in along the creek that you're going there to mine some meaning, to extract some meaning, right? It's 'cause relationships aren't like that.
Like what's the meaning of my relationship with you, Elizabeth and Deb? It's how do you answer that question? Relationship is beyond that. And yes, meaning is made in relationship. And so we make meaning as we deepen into each other's lives as we integrate the each other to be a larger beloved community, and that all of us are in this story together.
And so meaning does come through these relationships, but it's not the point of it.
Deb: Yeah you bring something very important in it, and this is one of the things that I have noticed in one of the letting go one of those filters that we hold. And many times people who totally love the wild and have been in relationship with it for a long time, they don't always recognize when they're overthinking something that happened into the wild, in the wild.
And they're creating metaphor whenever it was just love and relationality that trying to mind for meaning that, I gotta have something really profound happen here, or I'm not really doing it right, or that type of thing. Whenever it's just a loving relationship that often unfolds into I've stepped out into the wild and taken myself too seriously and totally had something comical happen. Like I tripped over a twig and landed in the mud and it was like, it's totally humorous, and I knew that the wild was laughing with me.
Victoria: Yeah, I love that. I think that playfulness is important. Did the tree actually say this? Are you anthropomorphizing?
And it's we can get like that about God. We can get like that about ourselves. We can just get serious about it. Like we have that whole being Right thing is one of the biggest things we have to overcome.
Deb: Oh, it's difficult. Yeah.
Victoria: Yeah. But to enter into this with a playfulness and which is an invitation to, for joy and an invitation for, reverent encounter, playfulness, imagination, intuition, all these things in our culture that have been minimized.
As something that's, that's not what it means to be a serious adult. Those are things you can do with your kids or in your recreation. But these creativity, these are like core of what it means to be human. And why intentionally including these kinds of ways of knowing that aren't the central status quo way of knowing, which is through our minds, all of these other ways of knowing of intuition and emotions and creativity.
Playfulness. Those are the ones that we tend to lean on, that we tend to invite people to lean into that part of your being human. Especially as we have these conversations with beings that are very different than us, that don't speak English. We don't speak leaf.
Deb: But we do if we're allowed to let go of our English.
Victoria: Exactly. Yep.
Elizabeth: But we do, I think, know the language of love. And we can hear that in whatever language we speak. That is a language we share.
Victoria: The sparrows gaze, little birds that landed on your head looking for seeds. Those are love. It's what you talked about Elizabeth earlier, like this is just about really what is life about, what is religion about?
It's about remembering how to love each other. We look forward to, the next cohort of people who are hearing that call to, to hold that space for others as a whatever you wanna call yourself, a wild guide, an eco spiritual director, an eco spiritual companion, a friend. And it starts up in a few weeks.
So I'm looking forward to how people are gonna be deepening into. This work is a word, but this seems like there needs to be a better work because it's not play either. It's life, it's aliveness.
Elizabeth: Yeah. Yeah. It's journey.
Victoria: Yeah.
Deb: I would agree with journeying. Yeah. I like journey.
Victoria: We agree. Finding the new language is part of this too.
Deb: Absolutely. Absolutely. And being willing to let the old language go.
Victoria: Thank you so much. I love you. I'm so grateful.
Elizabeth: Thank you, Victoria.
Deb: It's been a pleasure.
Victoria: [ transitional music plays]
Encounters with the holy wild happen when we're open to them. When we approach the natural world with reverence and an open heart, each week I offer an invitation to wander in the wildest places of your home and to do so with reverence and to enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
So this week I offer to you an invitation, which is something that we invite all of our eco spiritual direction participants to do, is to go out and ask for a particular other, to act as a spiritual director for you to go out there to this particular place, this particular tree, or being and share your heart.
Share your dreams and share the way that you know, the little things that you've been noticing in your life. Bring a journal maybe, and then don't take up all the space. Listen, allow the other to speak too. 'cause we find that in the wild, all the relationships are reciprocal. So you might also offer holy listening to the life of the sea and the fern and the wind, and the slug in return.
Valarie: [ transitional music plays]
This is Valerie Luna Serrels. I find my home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and recently I have been drawn to just finding the sacred spaces right here in my backyard, among the small and the. Now maybe the, those things that I don't notice regularly and understanding that there are some spaces that are considered sacred even though all the world is sacred, that there are spots of vortexes of energy that draw life to them.
Kind of like the standing stones that we see, the ancient sacred spaces. And I noticed around a tree in my backyard recently that there is a circle that looks like they were planted, but they were not. These are wild, common blue violets that have created a complete circle around a tree. And I found that's one of the things to look for when looking, when seeking.
Inviting those sacred spaces to reveal themselves in relationship, and so I have been enjoying this little circle of common blue violets as a sacred space right here in my backyard.
Stephen: [ transitional music plays]
Have you experienced an encounter with a tree or a wild being, or a particular place that felt sacred? Maybe it's an everyday occurrence or something more mystical. Did it occur to you that you may have been entangled in a holy conversation? If you have such a story, please record a voice memo on your phone in a quiet space with the microphone about six inches from your face while speaking softly.
If you're comfortable, share your name and where on earth you're speaking from. Please keep it no longer than five minutes and email the voice memo as an attachment to Hello at Wild Spirituality Earth, putting sacred conversation in the subject line. We'd love to share your voice and your story in sacred conversation.
This has been another episode of the Holy Wild. For more information about the movement to restore sacred relationship with Earth, visit wildspirituality.earth and please subscribe to the podcast. Leave a review. And share this episode with someone you know who is hearing the call of the Holy Wild.
Music by Alec, Slater, and Sandy from Inside the Silo at the farm.
Produced by Stephen Henning at Highline Sounds and hosted by Victoria Loorz.