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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.
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 the beings. This is a podcast for the edge walkers, those who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation, and this emerging new and yet very ancient story, grounded in Kindred relationship with Earth. All it takes really to live into this new relationship is humility, deep listening, and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth.
So it is our intention on this podcast to release a new episode every other week, but sometimes life happens.
I have just returned from a remarkable gathering in London with some of the most creative social entrepreneurs and scientists and artists and educators and musicians and podcasters and AI technology pioneers, Tibetan monks and funders and attorneys, and all kinds of community advocates. And all of these people are focused on shifting the worldview toward an animate and alive world. I'm excited to bring several of these folks onto this podcast soon.
But after that, I was in Scotland following the stories of my ancestors and their relationship with the land and their separation from the land and trying to put pieces together about what caused my ancestor to immigrate to the United States in the 19th century.
And it was so much travel and so many different things going on that needless to say, this podcast is being released a half a week late. But as Stephen, the producer of this podcast always reminds me, we get to make up the rules. But all of that aside, this week's podcast is really a good one.
My dear friend, Dr. Forrest Inslee has a tender heart for earth and for people of faith who are yearning to reconnect their faith with the broader beloved community that includes all of creation. If you were to look at Forrest Inslee's bio, you would think that he was an academic. He is that after all, he has a BA in English and he is got two master's degrees, one focused on cross-cultural theology, and another focused on contemporary Native American cultures. And he is got a PhD in ethnography, which is the study of culture through participatory research, but mostly on deep listening. And his work, his PhD work focused on the culture of homeless folks. He has been a professor, he's been a social entrepreneur and a missionary in Istanbul where he adopted his daughter as a single dad.
He's also led several organizations and seminaries, and right now he is the associate director of Circlewood, which is a community and an educational center on 40 acres on Camino Island. It's off the coast of north of Seattle. Circlewood is committed to cultivating, Essentially a more ecologically conscious faith.
I've joined him several times on his popular Earth Keepers podcast, and now he's even joined us as a guide at Seminary of the Wild Earth. And in this conversation today, we explore how the Christ tradition is actually shifting. It's shifting from a faith that's centered on human needs toward an expanded vision of a beloved community that embraces and includes all of creation.
Like it's not just a good theological idea, it's actually happening with people in many, many churches. It doesn't seem like that when you read the news, but there is a whole movement happening, and I can really feel that in the middle of the layers of the crazy decline in America, there is simultaneously a broader spiritual transformation happening.
It's beyond a simple reformation of more of the same, you know, going reforming again and again, the same dogma and doctrine. Something new, something powerful is happening, and it's beginning to challenge the domination worldviews of our culture and to opening space for sacred conversation with the natural world, even within more traditional churches.
This episode weaves theology and personal story and a shared hope pointing toward a future where faith communities can reclaim their role as kin and as agents of transformation, so that we all might really belong again as citizens of a larger, wild, huge web of life. I'm excited for you to listen in on this beautiful conversation.
Welcome to the Holy Wild.
[ transitional music plays]
My friend Forest. Thank you so much. You've been so gracious. You've invited me onto your podcast Earth Keepers several times, and this is my first opportunity to invite you on our new Holy Wild podcast. So thank you so much for making time.
Forrest: Super excited to be here. Thanks.
Victoria: Grateful for your work in the world.
Let's see. I just wanted to begin this conversation around your personal transition. You know, you've done community organizing and even missions work throughout most of your life, but at some point. You expanded your understanding and your vision for the beloved community beyond the human, and I'd love to have you share a little bit about what that transition looked like for you.
Forrest: Yeah. You know, it wasn't until really recently in conversation with folks in Seminary of the Wild that I made a connection that there's a parallel in my development process between my training as a community developer and my Christian faith practice. In both cases, the culture of community development and the culture of the Evangelical Church really foregrounded the needs of human beings, right?
So community development for most developers and nonprofits is all about meeting human need, making life better for communities of humans. And parallel to that, I think the Evangelical Church, when it talks about the work of Jesus. I think there's been an overbalance in favor of Jesus has come to save human souls and actually creation.
The rest of creation doesn't really matter that much in both cases. For me, there's been a transition over the years away from that towards something that's more inclusive of the broader community of creation. So when I was a graduate student in Chicago, I really thought about coming back to Seattle in order to somehow help people to encounter God in nature.
I knew that specifically in the north, in the Northwest, a lot of people knew God through their experiences and nature, and I thought, well, why not make that part and parcel of church life and faith practice? I was part of an evangelical church at that time, and in those days it was pretty standard to say that that wasn't so important as the saving of souls.
So my pastor, when I talked to him about my vision for a different sort of faith practice involving nature, said, well, Jesus didn't die for the mountains and the trees, and I believed it. There was part of me that was ready to believe that. So I don't blame anyone, but that was evangelical culture that I'd grown up with, right?
There wasn't room for a more expansive vision of Jesus reconciliation and repair work to include all of creation and not just human beings. So that led to me being a missionary in Turkey for a number of years, and it was a great number of years. We planted churches and just did really cool humanitarian projects.
But all along I thought, man, there's something else that I'm missing that I'm called to that involves the rest of creation, involves reconnecting to the natural world and making that part of my understanding of faith, my theology really. So after my term in Turkey, I came back to the Seattle area and was actually asked to start a graduate program in the field I was trained in, which is community development.
So I did that my first year back, and again, I was up against this assumption in the community of community development that the needs of people were primary. That's really what really matters. And it doesn't matter what else you do, as long as human beings are somehow being blessed, having their lives made better.
Victoria: Right. So it might be about like water, but it's about water for humans.
Forrest: That's right. Yeah. So even like a relief work is part of community development. So you see nonprofits go into Haiti after an earthquake. Provide food, provide water for the people who needed it desperately, and then they'd leave and they would leave behind mountains of trash of styrofoam and plastic because there was just no attention given to the impacts beyond human need.
So I began to teach in a different way actually, and to help people in the community development world and help my graduate students to understand that the community of creation is much bigger than people. That's something that I really was learning from indigenous mentors and teachers to understand that the goal in life is to be a good relation in the broader family of creation.
And so expanding that idea of community, I think was coming up against a lot of limitations, a lot of pushback.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Forrest: Because the culture was so entrenched, but my students got it, and I think they are all over the world now trying to influence community developers in that correction. So I do see a change happening, not just 'cause of our program, but I think in general people have a better sensibility that the environment has to factor in to this work we call community development.
Victoria: Right. I think there is a change. We're living in this bubble now where most of our connections and people we're working with get it. But I see that it is a bigger change. There's a shift in the world and there's a shift within the Christ tradition, and it includes this larger, expansive view of community and care and kindness that expands beyond other people.
And you've started to see some of those shifts in your podcast and in your relationships, that this is a movement and Christianity is moving beyond old, old, old structure. There's something happening and it's a bigger shift than like moving from organs to pianos, you know? Or sitting in chairs facing the front to circles and couches, like it's something bigger than that.
It's more than a reformation, I think, is what we're facing right now. And that gives me hope. And it's not that this is the only piece, there's a lot of, I think, transition that's gonna happen and reformation new ways of being human, new ways of being Christian, new ways of being a citizen are emerging.
And so I'd love to hear some stories about how people within the inside edges of the Christ tradition are wrestling with this and doing something that is shifting, even if it's little by little, the worldview, if not the actual practice.
Forrest: Yeah. I work for an organization called Circlewood, and as part of that job, I do a podcast called Earth Keepers.
And Circlewood actually aims at individuals and communities who are within the Christ tradition. Not exclusively of course, but those tend to be the people who will come to us for help, for guidance, for assistance, for resourcing. And you know, the podcast reflects that same ethos that I love, love, love talking to people who are doing innovative, groundbreaking, creative things in the whole realm of Earth care.
And while again, we're not exclusively talking to Christ followers, that does tend to be the people we tend to gravitate toward in terms of having guests. And I'll just give you an example. Ben Lowe of A Rocha USA is a really a partner to Circlewood. I interviewed him on a podcast recently and I asked him about the work of A Rocha, and they work with churches primarily, and I asked him if they face a lot of resistance to that work of bringing creation care into the center of the church's work, into the heart of faith life.
And he says, while that was true at one time, it's not true as much anymore. It's not so much fighting against resistance on the part of church, but rather recognizing that churches want more. They understand the need for change, and they're ready to embrace that. So the job of A Rocha is to help churches to understand what does that mean for us?
They have a program called Churches of Restoration, and that's a program that supports churches on their journey to care for God's creation more deeply. So I thought that was a really interesting insight and I think you and I both have watched that happen. We both were working in a time when there was hostility, even from the Evangelical church to the idea that climate change was real.
Or that Christians had any kind of responsibility toward creation beyond stewardship was more of a...
Victoria: stewardship was even 35 years ago when we were working, this was even like radical.
Forrest: Right? Yeah. Yeah. And so that for me, catalyzed the change. I thought, yeah, he's right. Things have shifted.
There is a movement toward something different now, and at least a good part of the church in particular, the evangelical church, is coming to understand the need for a relationship with creation. How to care for their places better, how to help their people to be better caretakers of the earth. Another interview, recent interview that impacted me along these same lines was with David Swanson and he has written a book called Plundered, the Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Justice.
And he also talks about a shift and it's, yes, it's a shift on the part of the church to want to be better earth keepers, but it's also a shift toward wanting to see justice. I think the church has recognized its complicity in the way that Western culture has really abused and objectified the environment.
And as churches realize that, they also realize that they're complicit in lots of different kinds of social and environmental injustice. So the question that he helps people to answer is, what does it mean for our church, our community, to be, first of all, repenting for what we've done, but secondly, how do we turn then to something more effective, more productive, more earth honoring, more just, and I think he's right about that too.
And that's a hard shift for our culture to make, is to acknowledge wrongdoing and to say, we need to pursue a different way forward.
Victoria: Right. I mean that lack of humility and the centrality, even within the institutional church of repentance gets so sidelined and so narrow that we can get away with everything else and go, okay, I'm doing this little teeny, teeny part of it so I can, I'm free the rest of my life.
It's just inconsistent and we're not even talking about the far right kind of church that's happening now, but it's, I think that's wonderful to hear that 'cause it, I think it's hard, probably hard to be an evangelical right now. Because even more than being a Christian right now, you're put into a certain category of the more radical Right. And that's actually not happening even at that level.
Yeah. I remember when I was working with World Vision, so exactly the same thing, community development within a Christian context, and I was working with a few other organizations around creation care, which is what we called it then, is part of our heritage.
This isn't something new, this isn't a left agenda. This was 35 years ago. It was well received, surprisingly, but then easily forgotten. And I was also gonna just mention what you were talking about, what Ben Lowe was saying was happening within A Rocha and the evangelical church is happening within most denominations, even when the mainline churches, where they have a creation care group within the whole denomination.
And I think they're really moving beyond, we need to recycle and not use plastic and things like that, which is we need to even reducing our carbon footprint, even joining the local climate groups and marching with them like it's beyond that. It's like what's needed in the churches most, and the churches can address this more than any other sector of our society is the interchange of repentance, of kindness, of love, of restoration.
Like that's what it means. That's what we're about. That's what religion is about. And so when religion forgets who they are, they become complicit right there. So that's, it's happening. Like it gives me hope that something is arising. There is something that we are part of that we are co-creating a new, like Thomas Berry says a new story.
Forrest: Yeah. Well I think that's one of the reasons I even do the podcast. It's as much for me as for anyone else because in the midst of all the bad news, you need to pay attention to good news once in a while. And so I get to do that on a regular basis is talk to people who are involved in the good news of Creation care.
So yeah, I'm very grateful actually to be able to have those conversations and I'm hoping that other people will benefit from them as well.
Victoria: I was thinking about something you just said about the Jesus message, the Jesus worldview. I recently picked up Walter Wink 'cause like principalities and powers that I read 40 years ago.
And I needed to just revisit it again. And one of them, the powers that be talks about it theologically and biblically, and one of the things he says has really shifted things for me. He's redefining or defining in a better, more original way the word cosmos, which is translated in most New Testaments as world.
So it's like we need to be separate from the world. The world is the problem. And so we have translated that as our popular culture or earth itself. So a lot of the old Christian worldview is that earth is evil. We need to be in heaven and we need to disconnect from the earth, but he translate as worldview.
So it's the worldview of domination that Jesus is really addressing that yes, we live in this Roman empire and you give to Caesar, what is Caesar's like? We're here and there's another way to live. Within this, it's not the way of the worldview of domination. It is a new way. So I feel like this movement that's expanding is really narrowing down to what it means to be following the message and the life of Jesus.
Forrest: Yeah. Which I think is ironic. I don't know if you read news this morning, but
Victoria: No.
Forrest: Supposedly Trump is going to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
Victoria: I heard that.
Forrest: Which is just a reflection of a greater ethos of this administration, which is about domination, which is about imposition, which is about control.
So it's ironic. Don't you think that as that is happening, a large part of Christendom is not doing that they're looking at the world in a different way to use your description of this shift that's happening. So that actually does make the work of turning of re theologizing, re-imagining what the church is for, what Christians are to do as subversive work.
As work of resistance.
Victoria: Yeah. And it, it is what gives me some hope because there's such a cyclical nature of every x number of years an emperor, a new emperor takes over and wants to rule the world. It's just a human story, but it's not forever. It's only a human story for the last few thousand years.
So there is, I really do listen to and believe like Phyllis Tickle, who talks about every 500 years, the massive changes in Christianity and that we are in the latest one in which she says is as cataclysmic as the coming of Jesus. When I first read that 15 years ago, 20 years ago, I was like, really?
And now I see it. Now I can feel it. That's the uprising that we'll meet, and that's the, that's why it's got getting so crazy because I think the whole world knows something major is shifting and really not wanting it to change.
Forrest: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Change is hard and scary for sure.
Victoria: This is the world view shift we're talking about, which is the work of the church, which is the work of Christianity.
It's a worldview shift. It's seeing not a kingdom of emperors, but a kindom of relationships and love. And so do you have any other stories of, especially churches who are making this shift and wrestling with their complicity and then doing something different?
Forrest: Yeah, actually, Circlewood is working with a church right now called Bethany Community Church, and they're in a very urban area of Seattle and they have what's called the wilderness ministry and they actually do organize a lot of hikes and camping trips and such. And that ministry in their church tends to draw a lot of people who actually encounter God more readily in nature than in any other place. And in many cases, those experiences are more church than anything else the church might do on a Sunday, for example.
So I think it is been interesting to see that experiment going on. And Circlewood is actually gonna be teaching a year long series on the journey of ecological discipleship to that group over the next year, starting October. But we're doing other things too with the church. And they, for example, at the intersection of three major roads is where the church property is located.
There's this very, very big triangle of grass, of lawn that has been that for years and years and years, and no one really goes there. No one uses it. They just mow it and water it and it's dead land in a lot of ways. But what they decided was, rather than change that land into a community garden, which can be an overused response to the desire to care for the land better, they said, well, let's listen to the land and see what it wants to be.
Victoria: Oh, see, there's the question.
Forrest: Yeah. You know how to do that is tricky. How do you listen to the land? But listening to the land involves paying attention to history. What was the land before it was urbanized? It involves paying attention to watershed dynamics. So what's the flow of water in this area?
Where are the creeks and streams? Where do they drain? And then what kind of ecology does that kind of map out for that particular region? It's also cultural listening, so we know that native people lived in the area before the coming of white settlers, and so the church has actually done a lot of work with the Duwamish people, which is one of the tribal groups from the area, and gets their congregants involved in working alongside the Duwamish and in different restoration projects, but to pay attention to the Native American history and stories of the land as well is part of that process of listening to the land.
Well, in the end, what they decided was this land wants to be rewilded. So it took a long time. It was a slow process. Both the listening took time, but also the process of restoration because in order to take, to kill that grass, to make room for native species, you don't wanna just rip it off the top of the soil because you're taking away a soil ecology really.
Right? So we covered it with cardboard and wood chips and waited a year for that grass to die. But the ecology of the soil stayed healthy and alive. And then once the grass was dead, we started to plant, planted lots of different native species, and it was hard to look at. At first it looked like a lunar wasteland 'cause these little native plants are one and two inches high, and the rest is all like bark chips, right? And so it was almost embarrassing. We put up signs that said, this is a project of restoration, right? We're returning the land to its wild state. So it was embarrassing to have this wasteland behind the signs, but people were patient and neighbors were curious and were asking questions all the time about it.
And gradually those plants grew up and in addition to the say 20 or so native species we planted, we're now seeing other native species introduced themselves into the plot. Which is always a sign that you're on the right track.
Victoria: Yes.
Forrest: Cause that's when the land is taking over its own process of healing.
That's been so exciting to see And it's attracted..
Victoria: More birds. I bet so.
Forrest: Yeah. Yeah. Lots of wildlife and it's attracted lots of neighbors actually to who wonder what is going on here. Especially neighbors who think, wait, the church is doing ecological restoration work for those people. It doesn't always compute.
Right. Given the church's history. That's actually made for some really good conversations and good relationships with the neighbors as well. So that's an example, right? Of a project that goes beyond, let's plant a garden. It's a lot more nuanced. It involves humility, it involves acknowledgement that, yeah, we've not been doing the right thing with this land.
We've probably been abusing it. But then it involves taking the time to listen to the land and to develop a vision alongside the land for what it could be.
Victoria: It was, community gardens are also a nice step, but they're still human focused. And there's nothing wrong with it. It's just acknowledging that.
But that deeper layers of listening, that's what we do in Seminary of the Wild, and pretty much the whole program is about that. How do we move from what our assumptions are and repent basically of our biases. You can't change them unless you can see 'em with humility. And then deeper than that, just to be able to use all your senses, all of the historical things and things you were talking about.
And then also just a. The actual listening that the native peoples do. They listen to the trees. They have that direct conversation in a way that we are starting to remember, but it's been forgotten for so long. It takes a while, but it's like it is possible to enter into essentially sacred conversation even with somebody who's very, very different from you.
They speak the language of mycelium and we speak the language of English, and so we need to move out of our heads even to enter into that kind of conversation. And that's pretty much exactly the same process. I've recognized as deep meditation, as deep centering prayer, as getting out of your own biases and what you think God should be to be emptied enough to be open to who God actually is.
And the same with all people. We can assume that other people we know, we know how they think. That's the era of like the old missionary style of going in and thinking that you ha, you know what best for a community versus now listening to the communities or another, your partner, your daughter, you assume they know what they mean and you don't.
And so it's the same with the soil. The soil, yes, it was research, but I'm suspecting there was some inner intuition that they were listening to that said the soil wants this. They asked the question in a way that I love. It's like, what does the land want?
Forrest: Yeah. You're making me think about, again, to the graduate program that I started in community development, one of our core ethos words, we had to make it up because there was no word.
In community development, you often hear about empowerment, empowering the people to be their own solution, empowering the people to develop their own economy, et cetera, et cetera. But empowerment, when you really think about it, it's about one way word, right? Empower means there's some person with the power who gives the power to people who need it, right?
And that's often the case. It really is empowerment in a lot of ways in community development. But what is missing is that dynamic you're describing, right? That if we want good things to happen, we need more of a collaborative approach. We need more of a, a mutual reliance. And so we invented a word co-powerment as an alternative to empowerment that, so even if you're going into a situation where you know you're starting an orphanage, right?
Or wanting to help a village, start a school. You can go in with your predefined and predetermined solution and impose it on people and good things will happen, right? But if you take the time to do deep listening to the community first to understand why there are orphans, to understand why there isn't a good school in the village, to understand what the challenges are, but also to understand what are the resources here?
What are all the good and beautiful things that are already present in this space that could be brought together in a way that creates something new and helpful in a way that's just much more sustainable because it's more intrinsic to a place. So that's the big change in community development that I and my students work for.
But it does really apply to environmental work as well. And that's again, where you listen to the soil, where you pay attention to the life that is there, where you pay attention to history and water dynamics, et cetera, et cetera. You can't do good and sustainable work on your own. You have to see it as an interdependent relationship.
Victoria: And that's the foundational worldview shift. Otherwise, you know, it's still a species supremacy, it's a white supremacy, it's a male supremacy, whatever it is. Like there were so conditioned in our culture to the one up kind of power. And so that I think is just so foundational, which is foundational to any native spirituality as well, is it's a humility that we are one of one of the beings that has a particular gifts to bring, just as the trees have particular gifts, just as the soil has particular gifts.
And so it is a relationship. It's restoring that actual kindred relationship, even if you don't use those words. You don't need to use those words, which is what I like about the word and the concept and the practice of conversation. Like podcasts or true conversation. You don't enter in saying, this is what I want this person to know.
You enter in with an openness. The fact that the other person misunderstands you is the beginning of the conversation because then you can understand how they misunderstood. And that shifts what you're saying. And it's, it's a co, what'd you call it? Co powerment.
Forrest: Co powerment. Yeah.
Victoria: It's a co-development.
It's a co-creation,
Forrest: yeah.
Victoria: Of aliveness.
Forrest: Yeah. And as you say, I do actually think that is this relationship language that is maybe becoming more prevalent is setting people free to embrace this world shift, this worldview shift. But even if you don't wanna talk about relationship or spiritual dynamic, you could just talk about ecology, because that's the fundamental premise of ecology is a relationship, right? Yeah. It's independence.
Victoria: Everything is held together. Yeah,
Forrest: yeah. You take away the bees, well, there goes your whole ecosystem, right? Yeah.
Victoria: Your whole aliveness. Yeah.
Forrest: Yeah,
Victoria: yeah. And, and we're just barely like embracing that as a large culture. Much less the deeper impact it has on our own spirituality and our own taking our place within the ecosystem.
And that's really I think what the new story, what the vision, what the end game is for this whole movement. There's all kinds of nuances of it, but I think that's just so foundational. If we can't see ourselves as one of, and see how we are a ecosystem together and that my so foundational that, that I am not free until everyone's free.
This has just been a message in that resistance movement throughout all of history and that resistance movement has always been there and has always remained on the edges. I have, maybe this is too hopeful, but I feel like that this big transition, this big time of massive transition, that this worldview needs to be more than on the edges.
And it's not like we have to become evangelists about it, but I think the more people that are awakened to it and live that way and are unafraid to do what that what the, what? The church with the triangle corner, Bethany, did to just say, you know what, when we listen, it does look messy at first, and we're okay with being in the unknown and the nighttime and the darkness and the death and the compost for as long as it needs to take for new life to come.
So I think that's, that's part of the story too.
Forrest: Well, that's the thing though, is that there's lots and lots of examples of Christian communities all over the world doing this really cool stuff.
Victoria: Well, even just looking in Seminar of the Wild, like we just brought Forrest on as one of our guides in Seminary of the Wild Earth, because this particular cohort is populated by a ton of UCC pastors and other people who are within the institutional church, and it's the first time it's probably 70% of the cohort and other years it's like maybe 20%.
So it's just really fascinating that these are little clues to a bigger shift that is happening.
[ transitional music plays]
How is your connection with and your vision for Circlewood expanding to be, it is a learning center. It's a, it's a place where people, where churches, like you said, people can come to learn how to listen more deeply and do something proactive in their relationship with the land that they have 'cause churches have so much influence because they own so much land across the country.
But also, I'm just thinking about locally, now that I live close, this is my own personal question, but it's also relevant to all of us. Like there's a need for us to draw together personally for the times that are continuing to unfold and to not just hunker down and survive together, but to be co-creating what it means to be a spiritual person, what it means to be a human in the midst of this collapse.
And I'm hoping that that's part of the vision too at Circlewood.
Forrest: Yeah. Interestingly. When we first developed Circlewood as an organization out of a prior organization called Mustard Seed Associates, we had to spend time deciding, well, what are we really going to commit to here? Like, what is our mission?
Initially, I think we maybe just offhandedly said, well, we need to convince the Evangelical Church that they have a part in creation care and that it's central to their function. But that just did not fit well because it just felt like so much work. Who wants to fight all the time? Right? And who wants to fight resistance to that degree?
So we went back to the drawing board and we decided, no, we are gonna cooperate with what God is already doing. Right? So if God is moving a church in a direction toward greater awareness of relationship to place, then we wanna support that. Right. Rather than we wanna be the initiators, we wanna be the steamrolls instead of just,
Victoria: and maybe, hopefully someone will do that,
Forrest: right?
Yeah. And I think there are, there are people doing it, but it just didn't feel like our job. It comes back to that co-powerment. Huge advantage that Christian environmentalists have, I think, is that we have the capacity to co power with God, right? If creation is groaning, if creation is in trouble, it's not ultimately people's responsibility to solve that problem.
What's the answer to creation groaning? It's Jesus, right? It's the coming of Christ. It's the work of God to restore and heal and make new worlds possible. So I think that's a, a better place to be in terms of having hope, because hope doesn't depend just on me and what I can do, that this is God's work and we walk alongside of it.
Right. That's just a, a perspective shift that makes a lot of difference and I think in some ways makes it easier to do the work because now our responsibility becomes just do the thing that we believe we're called to do. Right. Serve creation in the way that's fitting to our gifts and our place and our capacities.
It's just about understanding what is our role, doing that role, celebrating it, and that's good enough, right? We don't even have to focus on the end results of it.
Victoria: Right. We can't actually. We can't. Right. We can't control the outcome. But I, I think I've even gone a step further, and I've seen this in a lot of people who aren't within the Christ tradition, that there is a sense of the sacred, they've been wounded by the church, they don't agree with the language or whatever, but there's some common experience of sacred presence, and that sacred presence is in collaboration with the trees and the soil and the waters.
So it's listening to both. I think when I did that work, translating logos as conversation as the energy, the love, the connection between any, so it's like the connection that we have when we fall in love with a person. When we fall in love with our earth in our particular ways, we fall in love with a particular place, a particular tree.
When we just are really connected there. That connection is the presence to me of the holy. And so I think a lot of people, even outside of the Christ tradition, are tapping into this and feel that this is like the whole wild church network that was initiated by the sacred, what I would call now the holy wild.
That was not something we set out to go, let's make a big, giant movement here. It was just, I'm gonna just do this. I feel like I'm making it up, but it became something that I had nothing to do with. Other than just stepping into like what you're, what you're saying, just stepping into what I'm called to do.
Forrest: Yeah. Our podcast vision, even from the beginning, is a reflection of that the Earth Keepers podcast, because we didn't want it to be exclusively Christian. Right. What we say is that the podcast features, conversations at the intersection of spirituality and earth care. So we do talk to a lot of people who have discovered that there is a spiritual dynamic that they can tap into, that they must tap into that. It infuses all of creation, and to ignore that, gosh, the very least, it just feels like much less fun. Right. But at best, it means that the work we're doing has greater significance and maybe even greater effectiveness, because we're walking alongside, we're collaborating, we're working with rather than on the environment.
Victoria: And it also expands our sense of how we are in collaboration with other people. I think dismantling, as we are dismantling the human-centric, we're also dismantling the US versus them functioning. And there's a fascinating organization in Berkeley led by John Powell that's called Belonging Without Othering.
So there's a certain amount of belonging we still need to belong to our church, our family, our organizations, but we can do that in a way that doesn't have to other everybody else that is inclusive and just we need each other. So I think there it is again, it's that core interdependence of respect for all the different angles, all the different ways that people can engage in this.
So fighting over particular language, just I don't care. Like there was a lot of people. Is this pantheism or pantheism? It's like, I don't care. It's just a word that you are using that you can figure out for yourself. Like it's, we're all gonna use different language. We're all a little bit off. We don't know.
This is numinous, this is mystery, and it's gonna stay mystery. God is mystery. And so I think there's like a humility in just like, my language isn't exactly right and your language isn't exactly right. And we're all tapping into something that is real and we can work together in this. So how do we hold that?
And that's, I think that's what I was asking about. And I think you didn't get to your point, like originally what Circlewood was, and then you were about to say what it shifted into as far as local connections.
Forrest: Oh, right, right. Yes. Yeah. Well, as it's turned out, we really thought that our work was gonna be primarily local.
We have 40 acres of land on Camino Island that we really cared for and our turn to restore back into health. And that's going really well actually. But it's turned out that through the podcast Earth Keepers and through the Ecological Disciple, we've been forming a more of a global community of people who maybe feel alone in this work and who want to, as some of your students yesterday put it, find their tribe, right?
They want to feel like they're with other people who also value this need to reconnect to place, reconnect to ecologies. So we are continuing that work. We do want to expand our work more locally and we have just completed a building on the land, which will be an education center, a classroom, essentially, and already we've gathered cohorts of people.
Our most recent cohort, for example, was a group of young folks in their twenties and thirties who were looking at vocation. Like, what does my vocation have to do with. Being a good earth keeper, a good citizen of creation, a good family member. And the discussions weren't about, well what kind of training do I need to be an arborist?
But how can I as a manager of a restaurant also be an earth keeper? Right.
Victoria: Perfect. Yeah, that's what, that's what we do the second year of Seminar of the Wild, it's like we're asking this, but the kids are, young People are asking this from the beginning 'cause they've grown up with this reality. They had no real transition worldview shift to go, wow, this is real.
Like our generations did that is it. It's like all of us need to integrate this, and I see it as a spiritual leader. So it's not just being a pastor of a church who's doing creation care. This is an integration of spirituality no matter what your tradition is. And it's an integration of ecological care.
No matter what that looks like, no matter what your vocation is, it's just how are use using your voice, which is what vocation means. How are you using your voice in this evolution of aliveness?
Forrest: We're developing mostly under the guidance of our director, James Amadon, a, a model that we're calling the Journey of ecological discipleship.
Victoria: Oh, that's great.
Forrest: And it's aimed specifically at people in the Christ tradition, because we wanna speak their language, we wanna give them examples that come out of their culture. And so that's our market, that's the people we're trying to help and we're specializing in that. So with that model, I think we then have to decide how can we best help churches to apply that model to their congregations, but also how do we help individuals who are trying to make that journey as well.
But essentially the shape of the journey is leaving the old behind, leaving the confines of church culture and incomplete theology, journeying out to the edges to discover something new, discover something better, different, more true in terms of our relationship to creation, and then returning back into closer to the center where then we help other people perhaps to make that shift as well.
So there's more steps to it than that, but that's the general trajectory, the shape of it. So we,
Victoria: which is the shape of any transformation.
Forrest: That's right. Yeah. And, and you have used the language of wilderness before, right? That you've gotta leave the center and go to the wilderness sometimes in order to receive revelation and come back.
Right? So that's the model that we're developing. We're hoping to write a book soon inspired by you and your amazing books. Right now we're asking that question. How then do we apply this? And as I mentioned earlier this fall, we're gonna start a year long series with the wilderness ministry at Bethany Community Church.
And as we teach it, also see what people need. So we're shaping it even as we put it into practice.
Victoria: Right. Always a co-creation.
Forrest: Yeah, absolutely.
Victoria: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I do wanna ask you a personal question around your sort of personal experience of growing closer to the land, those 40 acres of the land.
What does that feel like to really invest in one place with your full being, your vocation, you've let go of other jobs you've made this the center of your life, you're moving to Camino. So what does that feel like and how have you experienced that? And are there any particular places or beings that really have reached out to you for deeper intimacy?
Forrest: That's a good question because that is such a part of my transition right now. I don't live close to the land. I don't live on the island even so there's a strange tension in me whenever I drive up. We do our work there, our offices are there. I'm still a guest in a way. I, I haven't fully lived into a place and I look forward to doing that.
And so that's why I feel the need to actually move up to the island. Yeah. So I'm in that stressful process now of making that transition. But my, one of my particular jobs right now is to landscape, quote unquote the area around the new construction of our classroom community center. And it's that moonscape dilemma right now.
It looks so awful. And the, the things I'm proposing are all about rewilding, all about wild plants. And you can't just change an ecology overnight. It was damaged land and there's a lot of invasive species that dominate, particularly the area around the building. So the work of listening is happening. The work of replanting will happen more this fall as we clear some of the invasives to make way for more natives.
But we dug a pond to try to follow the drain paths of the rainwater across the lot where the building is. So we put a pond at the end of that. So in the winter it'll be a place where water collects. And in my head I've got this vision of a beautiful pond with native pond lillies and native iris. And in the long run it will be that.
But right now it's just a giant hole in the ground. And all that lives in it are mosquito larvae, millions of them. And I just stand at the edge of the pun and think, gimme grace. Give me courage to believe that this will become something. Right. So,
Victoria: but that's part of the journey you were talking about.
It's like, it doesn't go straight from leaving to returning. It doesn't go straight from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. There is that holy Saturday that is all about grief. It's all about surrendering how you think things should be. Your expectations, and I think the Christian Church has skipped over that a lot.
And so I think that is part of the journey. And so that journey of grief, of mosquito larvae, they must play some role in, in the restoration. And doesn't mean we have to like 'em, but it does mean it's real and we are patient that that gives us patience in the place. The way I always think of it is like the Good Friday is usually something that happens to us, although in your case, sometimes I think if we are very, that's part of spirituality, we can get ahead of that and be okay with creating some chaos in that letting go.
And the resurrection is beyond us, like we can't make the plants grow. The only thing we have agency in is that in between with patients being in the unknowing, allowing the compost to do its thing, putting the cardboard on the lawn and letting it look ugly for a while. Is holy. It's part of the sacred journey, and it's just as sacred as the new life of the Butterfly is the cocoon of, of losing everything and becoming mush.
That's sacred too.
Forrest: I will say that there, there are moments of grace that keep me going. And last night I was actually home in my house in Edmonds, Washington, not on the island, and I was going up the stairs to go to bed and I happened to glance out the window and there just standing in the street was a really beautiful coyote.
I've heard them before, but I've never seen them ah, in my neighborhood. But he was just standing there by my car looking beautiful and coyotes are not usually beautiful, but this one was just gorgeous. He's like, someone had groomed him or something, but yeah, he just, and I thought, I have a choice here.
I can walk up the stairs and say, oh, cool, coyote, I'll tell my neighbors. Or I can say, this is a moment of grace. I am being honored to see this coyote.
Victoria: Yes.
Forrest: And not to hyperspiritualize it, but I felt like God is in this moment, in this place, in that coyote for me.
Victoria: Absolutely.
Forrest: And I went to bed with just a, a deep reassurance.
That's how I felt. It's like, okay, in the midst of the stress of moving and yeah. All these other things happening in my life, it's gonna be okay. That was what came to me.
Victoria: That's so beautiful. 'cause that is it, that's the deeper listening too. It's like, I don't remember where I read this, but it was felt so Right.
I've adopted it myself that while beings choose to be seen by you, like they know you're there way before we know they're there. And so when that happens, we have to overcome our normal cultural dismissal of that into this is something sacred. And so you're gonna hold that and just what does coyote mean to you?
So it's not just like, look it up in the totem book. It's just like when you have a significant dream, these are encounters. Our dreams are also holy. They're encounters that we can just dismiss and go, that was weird what I eat last night. Or we can really listen to 'em and let them be part of the change within us.
Forrest: Well, I like your point that wild things choose to let us see them, but I think. There's another choice on our part. We choose to see the wild things.
Victoria: There it is. Yeah.
Forrest: In certain ways. I thought about this actually, again, walking up the stairs after the coyote experience, I thought in order to receive that moment, you have to be intentional.
Yes. And proactive. You have to be ready in a way. Yeah. And expecting something.
Victoria: Yes.
Forrest: Right. And that, that makes a difference. Otherwise, again, it's just a coyote that you happen to see.
Victoria: Right.
Forrest: And I did think about you because you, you've influenced me in this way to make me more intentional. I remember in our very first podcast episode when you were on Earth Keepers, you talked about your experience with the goose and with grief.
And at the time it was very uncomfortable.
Victoria: Yeah.
Forrest: It, it just was like, oh wait, what? Isn't that just anthropomorphizing or imposing your vision on a goose? Right. But, but, but it isn't that, and I think both James and I, after that interview, really vowed, really resolved to practice presence, to practice intentionality, to practice expectation and see what would come.
Victoria: And it's that approach. I over quote this because it's so foundational, John O'Donohue. Whenever we approach anything, a child, a forest, whenever we approach anything with reverence, he says, great things decide to approach you. So it gives agency to the other, to God, but it's a reciprocity. It requires our own choice, our own decision, our own practice.
It takes some practice to undo worldview that is within the dominant culture. 'cause we've, not just us, but our parents and their parents and centuries of undoing. And so to be kind with ourselves when that happens, but it is, it's an openness of willingness to engage in relationship.
Forrest: I would say that when you do start to experience that, it's just such a better way of living.
Better in the sense that it's just so much richer.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Forrest: When meaning is all around, right. When relationship embraces you, when you belong to a place in fundamental ways and are aware of that belonging, it just makes for a better life,
Victoria: right. For both you're, you're gonna rewild your place because you all about the other and your life is deepened.
And that's a great example of how our spirituality is truncated. When we are disconnected, when we're disconnected from, it's not just a disconnection from God as a spiritual non-material being, but disconnection from all the presence of God's presence in and between all things. And I remember that when I was, this is a really vulnerable story, but when I was married, when we were going through our divorce and there was just like a growing tension between us and I shut off my heart and after a while I realized as I shut off my heart to this person that I'm annoyed with, I'm also shutting off my heart to my kids, to God, to my community.
I was a pastor then. Like, you don't shut off your heart. We're just continually opening and opening and that's how love happens and that's how it deepens. And that's what I think conversation is. It's like this sacred conversation is one of the chapters in my new book may not end end up being named this, but it's about, this is that sacred conversation with all that is alive.
Both our inner landscape, the dreams we have, the thoughts we have, the emotions, we have all those inner voices when our inner, it's our inner landscape. In relationship with the outer landscape that is held together with this sacred and that co-creation of meaning is what sacred conversation is. It's more than just like, wow, me and this coyote had this great moment together and coyote means whatever, and now I'm gonna be more like a coyote.
Sure, you can do that, but it's something more nuanced and complex and requires more openness as you are co-create. We are co, we are meaning makers as we are co-creating, meaning that always that changes and evolves. It requires all of it. Looking at your sacred stories and finding new meaning in it, and finding new ways of, of looking at it.
And that's part of it too. And so you're weaving together all these different threads of life. And when there's a big , when all of the red threads are missing and the green threads are missing, you don't have the full picture in them. Tapestry that you're creating, that your life is. So it's just like sacred conversation as the co-creation of meaning.
And so I think that's pretty much what the point is.
Forrest: On a more mundane level, what I took away from my I conversation was pretty based. I, I leave, I have water sources in my, my back property for wildlife, but the fences around it are pretty high. And I saw that coyote and I thought if he were to say anything, what would he say?
And I thought,
Victoria: Hmm.
Forrest: Maybe he'd say, dude, I need water. Yeah, because it's hot. There's no water sources that are really ready available. The creek is dried up, et cetera. So that's real. My, my practical resolution as being a good, good relation is I'm gonna set out some water in a hidden place outside of the fences today.
Victoria: I love that. Well, relationship. Is sharing food. It's caring for each other. It's, it's, yeah, doing what we can for each other. Oh, so beautiful. Yay. Forest. I'm so grateful for you.
[ nature soundscape plays]
Encounters with the holy wild happen when we're open to them. They happen 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 to enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
And this week, after reflecting on this conversation with Forrest. I offer you that same invitation that he worked on with that church in Seattle. And I invite you to go and wander in your place and ask the land that you tend, the land where you live, what they want to become. Have you ever done that?
Really settled down and listened after you ask the trees and the so-called weeds and the soil, and the butterflies and the ants and the squirrels, and even the concrete, what that part, what your shared habitat wants to become. Do so when you wander with that open question, with your heart open, with an intention to listen to the voices of your home habitat, your shared place of belonging, ask how can you be of service to bring that into being?
And then the invitation is simple. Do it. Huh? Do something to show your love, to hold up your end of the reciprocity of interconnected relationship that we are actually already in.
Harold: This is Harold in the hill country of Central Texas near Marble Falls. It's a place of rolling and lazy hills, and I live at the intersection of the Colorado River ancient aquifers, granite outcroppings, heat loving plants, and there are pollinators galore. Right now, it's morning at the bee yard and the honeybees are getting going.
Forages are already heading out. Some are going this way. I see others going that way. Some go in one direction and then head off in another. I wonder where they will go today. Under what stories they will bring back to the hive. Inside are nurse bees tending to the next generation and the queen. Some are at the age where they are just cleaning house all day.
For bees, a clean house is a healthy house. Altogether, they are moving about with a connected mission and vocation for the sake of the whole colony and for the sake of the whole community of creation. I love how they make me feel alive and grounded. They know how to refill me with wonder and with hope.
There is something holy and sacred when I am near or interacting with bees, there is a peace that comes when I draw near. A peace that is calming, a peace that is whole, a peace that is full. Their buzzing reminds me that I am on sacred ground. Ground that doesn't ask me to take off my shoes, but instead to put on a veil to cover myself and approach with reverence, beekeeping for me as a partnership with a holy other.
These bees could well decide they have had enough of me and fly off to make a home elsewhere, but they continue to dwell with me in this place and invitation and to another day walking alongside each other, another season of experiencing life together, of how the mystery of one and the many can exist at the same time of how we live in a world where all things are connected and interdependent.
Honeybees continue to draw me deeper into what it means to be a neighbor for all and how to see neighbor everywhere.
Stephen: 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@wildspirituality.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.