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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: Hi, 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 edge walkers like you who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation and this emerging new and yet very ancient story that's grounded in kindred relationship with Earth.
What it takes is humility and deep listening and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth. I've learned that our wild calling, which is like our particular work in the world at a particular time, that that wild calling is discerned as we pay attention to the threads in our life and at a certain moment, at a certain kairos time, we're called by the holy into the wilderness to weave those threads together to listen.
And then as you're listening, you're weaving together the threads of your life, those synchronicities, those encounters, those dreams, those gifts that you have, your experiences, your insights. You weave those together into a fabric of what is being called of you right now. And one of those threads that's important to really pay attention to is our particular woundings.
That this too is part of our calling and an important one for me. My yearning for that sense of belonging to place rests not just in my theological questionings and my activism and my work and my career journey, but there's also a pretty deep wound of displacement that runs throughout my life and my ancestors' lives.
I just returned from Scotland where I was tracking my ancestors' 19th century displacement from their homeland at the Highlands. It's related somehow to my personal story. I've moved many times with my life. I counted it recently and this last move was my 49th, and when people have asked me throughout my life where I'm from, I've always just said that home is wherever my mom is, and my kids have had to grow up with that same compass.
That home is just wherever mom is. Two years ago, I moved to Virginia to care for my mom who was living with my sister by then, and I'm so grateful for that time together. I was there to care for her and to live with her until last November she died. It's been almost a year since I've talked with her, and now that I'm bringing it up, I can't believe it's been almost a year.
That empty space where she's supposed to hold is still so loud it doesn't seem real that she's gone. But anyway, the point is that once she was gone, I knew I needed to move back west. Where I've lived for all, but two of those 49 moves. Besides, this is a time in history. This is time for all of us in the midst of the unraveling here in America.
Well, I guess there's unraveling happening everywhere, huh? But it's time to really invest in community and kindred relationships with the land and with the people of a particular place. It's time to take seriously this call to belong to a place. I have a lot of deep and meaningful friendships with people from all over the world through my online work and through those many moves at this move, I wanted to be near my children, but they lived on opposite ends of the continent, and so that was impossible.
So I attempted to move near my daughter in Los Angeles, but I kept getting thwarted. Then a random conversation with this pastor of a church that had hired me to lead their annual retreat. That conversation convinced something in me that I needed to move back to the Pacific Northwest. And so after a series of serendipities and synchronicities and confirmations, I ended up moving 10 minutes away from this pastor and his family.
And the main reason was because they instantly felt like family. So this podcast is with that pastor. His name is Michael Ellick, and he's a fascinating human being, and his bio is impressive. He's now a minister of a UCC church in downtown Seattle. Michael is a writer and a mystic, a meditation teacher, a spiritual director, a podcast host, a dad to two remarkable little ones, and a husband to his loving and impressive wife, Alana.
He is a good pastor. He's kind and wise, but at heart, Michael is an activist and a community organizer. He's organized multi-faith peacemaking efforts and developed curriculum to help churches reckon with their legacy of racism and colonialism. And he doesn't talk about it much, but he was also one of the original organizers of the Occupy movement.
His wisdom comes from many teachers. He studied under several contemplative teachers and indigenous leaders, hesseistic practitioners and Jungian analysts. Michael's a lifelong student of comparative mythology and mysticism. He has degrees in comparative religion and philosophy and depth psychology. And in MDiv.
Which is interesting because after his MDiv studies, Michael began to practice Tibetan Buddhism under a teacher for seven years, and he began that after his MDiv studies that led him to search for new ways to understand and embody the gospel. He studied under all these different teachers, but he says, and here's where we really connect.
He says that his chief spiritual teacher is the wilderness of the American West. So thank you for joining this fun conversation about all the things holy and wild. I know we barely touched the surface of his embodied wisdom. So like many of the other guests, this first podcast with Michael will be the first of several conversations here on the Holy Wild.
[ transitional music plays]
I am super excited for this conversation with you, Michael. Thanks for making time.
Michael: I'm glad for the time to share.
Victoria: One of the things I just wanna start with, it's just like a foundational question because it where we could come from, everything else builds on that. And so my question to you is, tell me something about the land who raised you.
Michael: Yeah. Amen. It's a great question and it's a big part of my story and and my identity. I was one of those privileged people who grew up literally in the woods. It was in the woods just outside Olympia, Washington. And it was one of those new developments, but it was carved right out of old growth forest. Right by a stream in all directions. And it was one of those forests, for those who don't know western Washington, where you can leave out something, you know a toy, and it will be covered with moss in a couple days. It'll immediately be taken and seized and the ground is spongy. Because you walk on it and it's thousands of years or since the ice age of rot and trees that have died and then in the, and the wind blows, the trees all move and the ground moves because all of the roots go down. So I, it's a magical place and I didn't know how good I had it until I left.
Victoria: Yeah. That's how life works is, yeah.
Michael: Yeah. I didn't realize that not everyone had this place. Yeah. The woods of Washington state, which my earliest teacher, my earliest experience of God and spirit and unappreciated by me fully until later when I didn't have it.
Victoria: Yeah. Is there a particular experience of a particular place or being that you had a encounter with?
Michael: For sure. I mean, there's a lot of experiences. You know, I was raised fairly evangelical, conservative, Baptist. So I had that overlay and my parents weren't full hearted about it. It was just the church they went to.
So it wasn't like they were so dogmatic. But on one hand I had two religious upbringings. And even as a child, you're aware that there's a certain tone inside in church and there's a certain tone outside. And I was a very religious kid and was trying to always squeeze my way into the inside world, 'cause that's what everyone said you're supposed to do.
And I wanted to get along, but a lot of my early experiences were the forest giving me dissonance with what was inside. So for instance, there was, I mean, it sounds strange to anyone who doesn't live in the woods in true wilderness for a long time. But there was a rock there, there was a trail across the street that went down this ravine followed a stream that the salmon come back in at certain times a year. But it ends at this rock. And we called it Big Rock because that's the kind of imagination we had. It's big. And you could climb on it, and there's a tree up there. And we all knew in that kid way that big rock was sacred.
We just knew it. And we didn't use the word sacred, probably. I think we used the word holy.
Victoria: Okay, well that's close, good word.
Michael: Holy enough. And this is a holy rock. So there was a lot of mythology making around the rock. It was a destination, it was a clubhouse, it was a meeting spot. And you know, you'll see things in the woods.
It sounds crazy to my adult mind, but I saw little creatures there. You know, things that as an adult, I have been properly educated to know, maybe they didn't happen. But maybe they did. Maybe there are gnomes in the forest. I saw gnomes, I saw Bigfoot. I mean, I was a moss covered kid.
Victoria: I can just picture you a little green man.
Michael: Yeah, I was a little green boy. Yeah. So there was a lot of that. But at one point I had, as a test of my own courage or something, I was a little bit afraid of the woods in the wind. You know, when there was a storm, the trees twisted and the ground would undulate, 'cause as the trees moved in the wind, the root systems all touched each other.
And so I remember this vivid moment where I'm on big rock and all of the trees are moving, the ground is undulating like water. Because it's all connected. Right. And moving as the trees move. And I heard a voice say to me, nothing is solid, but big rock. But I was just old enough to know that Jesus was sometimes called a rock.
You know what I mean? I had this little bit of a concept. It sounds silly, but I had this sense that in my heart was something infinitely stable. And at the time I equated that with Jesus. But later on I would turn against the church pretty hard. Like within a couple years of that experience, I would think that stability is in me and maybe is in Jesus, but it has nothing to do with the church.
But it gave me this innate sense of, you know, all the things that mystics encounter in the wilderness. I'm not very original connectivity, a body sense of interdependence. Like you could feel the woods and because the church had no language for it, I adopted Star Wars language. The force is clearly what this is, and anyone who lives in the woods very long knows that the force is real, that there's people who can feel it and people who can't.
And that's just an issue of proximity to wilderness in my mind. So the force and Big Rock, all that stuff started to shape me and it was just the environment we lived in. Years later, I realized that that was unique. And so that concept of there being an internal felt sense in my consciousness that is part of nature, uh, and that we can all tap into and can give you things, that was a visceral felt thing.
And as I got older, none of the language I had was sufficient. People didn't really take Star Wars seriously. Okay. I didn't take the church seriously for a long, long time, so I just had to be quiet about my forest sense.
Victoria: Did you have that word for it? Forest sense?
Michael: No, I think that's later. I don't know. I just had a sense, I used the word the force, but then in high school I started experimenting with other words and then by a certain age, you know, very early on there are things like meditation, and by 16 or 17 I'm seeking out.
You meet a Buddhist and you think, oh, okay,
Victoria: that this is how I can recapture that.
Michael: Yeah.
Victoria: You're describing something that I think a lot of us have experienced. It's almost like a coming out of having these two different lives of, that was my experience, like it was like I most experienced the numinous presence of God, which when I was younger than 21.
I had no words for it. It just, I knew it. It was just my place that was the closest I could come. This is my place. I'm in connection with everything.
Michael: Yeah.
Victoria: And then when I was a Christian, it was, God, this is Jesus connection. And then later on was like, wait a minute, it's both of those and it's in me. It's like, but in the church I couldn't talk about it.
Michael: Yeah.
Victoria: And then I was also in the climate movement then, and I couldn't talk about it there either. That was just very much like activism and we gotta change laws and all of that. Love language is just mushy and silly. It's soft.
Michael: It's soft for organizers. Yeah, we need hard policy.
Victoria: It's all about recruiting faith communities.
That's as far as it would go. But it's like these two parts of my life didn't match and I was trying to do, when I entered the church as a leader, I always did spiritual formation kind of stuff, like services and labyrinths and any centering prayer. It was as close to mysticism as you could get where it's a direct experience, which by the way, is the title of your podcast.
Michael: Yeah.
Victoria: Yeah. There's so many things that you've said already that I wanna go back to, but there's so many more things we could do. One of them is just echoing that sense of, oh, this sounds silly. It's hard to talk about this yet when we don't talk about something, it devalues it. It's invisible, but we're not used to it.
And the experiences are so interior that you go, whoa, I had a grasshopper and you looked at me. We will at each other eye to eye. It just sounds Okay, good for you. Like great.
Michael: Yeah.
Victoria: But it's this deep experience that essentially our language we don't have language for.
Michael: That's right. Fortunately, there are other cultures that do have language for it, and I don't know all the nuances of your journey, but when you, you used the word numinous earlier, which we don't usually have in school. Like you gotta be a little older to learn the word numinous, but it's this word that's a mix of revelation and maybe fear and there's not that language. You know, Tibetan Buddhists do have this language and it's different. Just this weekend I was with friends in the Warm Springs reservation in Central Oregon and we did this sweat together, and they are singing songs in the language as they're translating for me, the idiots who doesn't know, there's these words that mean all these different, they carry that body sense.
And I, I think everyone has some degree of knowledge that our bodies can feel things beyond the five senses. Right? But if you use ESP or telepathy, it carries connotations with it. And for me, finding the Tibetan Buddhists was a boon and finding philosophy, language. Eventually you think, oh, I'm not silly, I'm smart.
You know, I got trapped in the smart bubble for a while where you think, oh, I, I have a superior experience. You know what I mean? And then you gotta back off from that too. But there are more and more people in the West who are finding their way to modalities of negotiating direct encounter with the wilderness and thank God.
So a lot of what you're doing is, I think, blazing a trail and saying to people, it's okay. Church of the Wild, we had a thing, church of the Woods, now it's Church of the Beach next week. Why are we making this so complicated?
Victoria: Exactly.
Michael: Everyone goes out there and has a numerous experience. So why are we indoors again?
I, I guess rain maybe
Victoria: rain cold. But even that, even that kind of separates us, that we're separated from the reality of weather and climate. It's part of the problem. We're addicted to comfort.
Michael: We are, you probably know this great Gary Snyder essay on re inhabitation. It had a big impact on me at some point reading it.
But he became aware that even though he is in a place, he's not from a place that the water he drinks, that the food he eats, that the clothes he wears are all separate. And he likens himself and all of us to hungry ghosts that roam over the countryside. Untethered from the ecosystem and the watershed.
And, and at some point that became, for me, like an obvious mission. What does it mean for my family and I to reroot and reground and boy, and we're not, we're a work in progress as a family, but, but we think a lot about what does that mean to be from a place and what's that mean to be at the mercy of a place and have to adapt to its rhythms, it's magic.
It can be also difficult and inconvenient and in the West there's withdrawal
Victoria: how feel, we just don't want to, you know, it's like even in the church, one of the things that I got annoyed with was God is the God of light, not untrue. God is also the God of death and suffering. You know, when we do that bifurcation, when we do that separation, there's implications.
This is a worldview that we're replicating within our interpretation 2000 years later of a really radical way of living and worldview that honestly, if we didn't have spirit, there's no way we would understand any of this. And I think what we're entering into collectively in the United States and pretty much the whole world is a opportunity to experience what Jesus was talking about maybe for the first time.
Michael: Totally. I had this epiphany moment when a friend of mine was being ordained. They were decking out the church for this ordination. And they had all the things you see at a lot of churches where it's felt banners that have pictures of doves and pictures of burning bushes and whatever, rainbows maybe.
And it was just this big aha moment of, oh yeah, like the picture is safe. If I have a picture of a dove, it's never gonna bite me or shit on me, or not show up. And it's abstracted. It's the abstracted dove. It's the abstracted plant, which keeps me rooted in the world of my own ideas, which becomes a small house of mirrors.
What would it be like if the church really believed in real doves? Like what would happen if the plant, not the picture of the plant? So I wrote this sermon, it was like, don't trust pictures of doves. You know what I mean? Don't trust them, they're liars. No offense to whoever's out there listening who has made some beautiful banners for their church.
But it's part of a wider abstraction.
Victoria: Well, and it's the metaphor too. It's that big rock to be a metaphor of Jesus versus an actual experience of connection with the rock. Rock. So the Jesus as a rock, that's a metaphor.
Michael: Yeah.
Victoria: But the rock. What is why a rock? What is the rock itself? Not just have to say about the presence of the holy but embody and Christianity and I think most of the traditional religions are grounded in relationship, and yet we forget that so easily because people say, God's not a tree. What do you mean you the tree talked to you, whatever. Right. It's, first of all, it feels exactly the same as when God talks to you. And how do you know that? So it feels exactly the same.
And the way you open yourself to being able to receive that is exactly the same. As emptying yourself. Humility and honor. And the first time I started realizing that I didn't just hear the voice of God tell me I'm with you always. It was also the deer. And so it, it's not an either or, it's not God spoke through the deer.
It's a interconnected relationship and that's the core of this is this relationality. And even that relationality is another example of how we don't have the language.
Michael: Totally. It's funny you, you use that specific words. It's not funny because you're thinking about it all the time. And I, I, but these friends, I was with some elders from the Warm Springs tribe and one of the concepts that they refer to a lot and that my friend was trying to write about, he's getting older and he, there's a few things he wants to do and he's, I don't think the younger people in the tribe get this phrase, and if I just say it, it seems simple.
The word is tamanwit. It means reciprocity. It also could mean law, but when they are singing the songs, they're also using it as a word like God. So I don't, I am not an expert on tamanwit and what it is, but as they were describing to me like, how do you use this and what are they, they said something really interesting, and it goes to what you're saying a little bit.
And we were talking about white people and the guilt of what we've done and our alienation from we're close enough to be able to name these things pretty directly. So we're, we're getting into the mix of it. And he's was saying, there are these questions when you're being trained into tamanwit, if I understood 'em correctly.
And one of 'em is like, where were you born? Just like your first question, where are you from? And you say, Olympia. Okay. And they basically keep asking you questions about your identity and where you're from until in the was shot context in the native context. You are forced to come to, the only thing you know is that you are of creation.
And he said With Christians, maybe I can't get them there. Maybe I can only get them to being child of God. But essentially they keep asking you questions about who were you before you knew you were a boy? Who were you before you knew? And part of it is this curriculum where you are of creation and you can't control where you were born, what you look like, who you were born into.
You have no power over any of that creation chose you to be there. And so they were saying in the tamanwit context, our job is not to save anything. Our job is to follow our original instructions. What's your original instructions to be in reciprocity with creation. That's their job. So we love you because you are of creation and yeah, we're resentful that you're not aware of X, Y, Z.
But it was interesting he said, because in Christian, he's like, when I started taking this and realizing what we had and sharing it with Christians, I realized their job is not in their minds to follow the original instructions of reciprocity. They think their job is to save things. That was just a really interesting way of thinking about you're still not in reciprocity, and as long as you're in this mind that you are separate and have to rescue creation.
I know you've heard this notion, but they, it brought us back to we're not gonna save. Creation creation's gonna save us. So it gave me a lot. I mean, I've, I've played with those ideas and, but ideas aside, where am I living in that reciprocity? To what degree am I living those original instructions of reciprocity?
And I come up short, you know,
Victoria: and what's interesting to me is I translate, I like, I'm a, a. What do you call? I play around with original language. I can't speak ancient Greek, but I can use the tools.
And so I translated once Romans eight, the groaning creation. And I flipped out when I actually read it and what actually says, and not what we repeat saying.
And it basically says, it's like this conditional thing. It's like when we reconnect, when we are able to feel, hear the groanings of creation and feel them, like feel that. Feel their suffering.
If, it's very conditional, if we're able to do that, then we connect with, then we are in relationship with Christ.
It's conditional. It's right at the center of it. Like I never, I skipped right over that when I was a pastor of indoor churches
now, and it's just, whoa, it's all right here. You know? I first translate, I was sobbing. It was like, it's right here. We've just lost.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Amen. And how many examples have you probably had since then or before, even in different ways of finding those moments In our tradition, because my view of our tradition, and again, it's my tradition.
Like I, I'm thousandth generation. I don't know how many far back I've been Christians, but some point, the view I had of it, oh, I can't feel the force and believe Christianity. You know what I mean? It just felt insane.
Victoria: We had to hold them both separately.
Michael: Yeah. And, but then at some point you start really reading the original language.
You start reading the scriptures and you're like, holy god, it's crazy.
Because so often the story of the Bible is the story of liberation from cities into wilderness. It's again and again and again.
Victoria: Yeah. Every I did it. I was like, is this really true? I counted every single one except for one story of Old Testament and New Testament.
Every leader at a pivotal moment was called into relationship with wilderness. But even just the language of, when you say of creation, like when you said, and that I was very clear when I named Church of the Wild that it wasn't in the wild. It's of the wild and of is a word of relationship. It the locational word of is a relational word because we're so relational atrophied.
Michael: Yeah.
Victoria: In our language is, that's why I just like dig into every aspect of it. And I looked at every single time Jesus went to pray, he went into Into the wilderness. Into the lake. Into the garden, which is a word. So there's something that. Reciprocal.
Michael: Yeah.
Victoria: That was happening there. And it's built into even our, even the most like anti-environmental religion that there is, it's built in and we've just, we've just glossed over it over the last probably 2000 years.
At least for the last 500 years. Because there's always been those monastics on the edges.
Michael: That's right. That monastic tradition. Yeah. But that's an exciting moment because I think at some point when I was circling around returning to the church, I would find myself playing this game where I was a good enough Hebrew Greek reader and I'm like, where I was playing this game, and it's the game that I accused my conservative church as a child of playing, where I would take things out of context to prove my point, and I would staple together this whatever Frankenstein theology, from a little bit of this and a little bit of that, well, that I would have a good reason to ignore. But when it comes to thinking about the relationship to wilderness, it was a really different experience. And it was that moment where you're like, oh, maybe we're not playing games. Maybe it, it is there.
And to my mind now, I can't unsee that this, like every other tradition in the world is an indigenous one. And it's exciting too, because it's also the story of de indigenization, right? Of removal of abstraction and of that happening in real time. And what that does.
Victoria: [ transitional music plays]
This is something that I've been thinking about the, the separation itself belongs. Just as the death belongs, just as the, the grief belongs, just as the dark belongs. And there's a timeline that's bigger than what we can like comprehend.
Michael: This gets us into dicey ground as church people, right? But I feel the same way.
A, as a naturalist nature doesn't take little cul-de-sacs. I mean, it might try things out that don't work. And so, you know, one, one way is that relatively all of our human history is a blip on the timeline of the natural world, right? So on one hand, maybe it is just, let's try this for a while. Kind of works, kind of doesn't.
And if it doesn't serve the ecosystem, it'll all get blotted out soon enough. But from a Christian perspective, I also think, like I used to play this game as a kid where it's like, what if. Because I think a lot of us like, oh, wouldn't Jesus be disappointed with what actually happened to the church?
They're like, oh, Jesus would be so upset. It's all empire and murder and the crusades and forced conversions. And, and at some point I had this thought, what if Jesus knew exactly what was coming? And so what if Jesus not only saw this, but knew . Planned it.
Victoria: Yeah. Jesus says part of the Pascal mystery that we're all living.
Michael: Totally. And I, I, I remember I had a day where I was praying about that and I was thinking about that, and I was thinking like all those passages, like I've come to bring peace, I've also bring, come to bring war and famine. Right? Jesus says this, especially in the gnostic sayings, gospels like Thomas. Then I was like, what is this part of a necessary cycle we have to go through?
And then I had this aha moment of, oh yeah, that's what the prodigal son story's all about. Like on some level maybe Jesus Prophesizes about all of civilization through that parable that, yeah, go ahead, go on leave, go on out, and you go. And then it became a joke with some of my Buddhist friends, if you wanna reach enlightenment as a Buddhist, you gotta practice hard.
You gotta sit around and meditate and eat right and eat well. And maybe if you want to do it as a Christian, you go and drink and eat and sleep around and you wreck the environment and then you can come back. It was a joke, right? But I've more and more thought like, what if we're, yeah. What does it mean for us to be on a journey of return, from that blindness? Like maybe we did need to go through something. Now easy for me to say.
Victoria: Yeah. And by we, I think it's the whole humanity. The whole species. A hundred percent. And the whole earth herself. There is something about humans where we need to return. In order to return. You have to be gone. You have to leave.
It's the rite of passage of indigenous societies. The young, young men would leave the village and face death. And it's so hard. Like you can't wrap your head around it. With our worldview that is focused on me and my family and my kids, but you can, the only way I can even survive right now get out of bed is to look at it from the bigger picture, that there's something bigger than us going on. Humans have gone through their version of it. Yes. This is a bigger version and it's the way life evolves and I don't like it. If I were God, I'd totally do it different.
Luckily I'm not, and this is just the way it is and so I think that first step of just really seeing the way things are accepting it, which opens you up to grief. Which opens you up to joining your grieving sobs and keening with creation herself is the passageway.
Michael: Amen. We could just talk about grief because what from the notion of dying before you die, which predates Jesus, this idea of dying before you die, but in my life, and I'm sure in your life and in everyone's life, I know that grief journey plays a role and that is so central to access to the deeper levels of spirit.
And there's the grief of coming home and finding that the woods you loved have been turned into a target. I was ready to go to war at one point in my life. That's it. I'll sell everything. The grief of losing loved ones a baby or whatever it is that I think pulls us out of our worldview.
Victoria: Yeah.
Michael: Right.
Victoria: It's an essential, it's the same thing.
To deny it, to deny the grief, which our society gives you three days off of work.
Michael: Tell me about it.
Victoria: Hey, you're good.
Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Get back into the war.
Victoria: Yeah. I used to, when I left being a pastor of indoor churches and started Wild Church, I stopped doing Good Friday and Easter Sunday services, and I only did Holy Saturday.
Michael: Oh, wow.
Victoria: Because it's, we have no control over Good Friday. It happens to us. We're gonna lose everything eventually, and we have no control over the new life that happens miraculously. The only thing we have agency around is our authenticity to the grief. Which is Saturday.
Michael: Amen.
Victoria: And so it's like we just need to remember and learn again what it means to be.
Human to what it means to be alive. It's, it's more than human. It's more than human. All beings go through this.
Michael: Yeah.
Victoria: Including the whole planet herself.
Michael: Amen. But there's an interesting, because it's such a threshing floor of birth, death, resurrection, birth, death, resurrection, like just a engine of that mulching at all times.
I think there's a way in which we keep that at bay in the same way that we keep grief at bay. And they are the same. And, and like I said to somebody at one point, who's going through it and we've all gone through it, we have a culture that wards off grief and it's almost like that's a second puberty.
It's like there's some horror sadness that wants to happen.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Michael: And I spend a lot of my life even now, like when I know better, like I'll try to feel better or I don't always steer right in.
Victoria: Decolonizing our, our habitual way of processing life takes more than understanding it.
Michael: You know, it's the work of a lifetime.
Right? It's your lifetime. And I work at it and I catch myself, anesthetizing myself to some grief. And yet when those griefs have come that were too big for my ability to hold it bay. And I would never have chosen it. I'm not brave enough. I'm not a hero enough. I would've left screaming if I could have.
But when those things hit my life, a the only place you can go is the wilderness. There's nowhere else. Like your friends can't contain it. You become a leper to everyone. Nobody.
Victoria: Nobody knows how quite how to help. And the more they try, the worse it is.
Michael: Yeah. And God, and I don't wanna hate them for trying, you know, but it is a revolution in your body.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Michael: And if you can stay alive through it, I look at the huge religious experiences in my life that actually really feel like, wow, I, I got changed. It wasn't through my religious practice and my diligent meditation and journaling, it was through horror. And I don't know. That's in the Bible too, and it's in the woods.
It's such, and yet when we are ministers inside the colonizing, right as colonial Minister, there's this idea that God, that my job is to protect you from the horror. It's hard because it's just hard. Period. We're all part of this thing and you try to teach your kids. I have two little ones and what's that boundary of safety and of teaching them respect.
Okay, go out and be out, but you gotta know this. Are they aware of the wind and what it will do? But there's a fine line when you have inside you a nervous controlling dictator somewhere. And I do. Somewhere inside me is a mad emperor Nero, That wants to control my children and you and every, it's like, yeah, and you gotta keep that recognizing that you're possessed by this thing and even your best at attempt, but the woods doesn't care about that.
And it's a humbling
Victoria: nature doesn't care. There's a part of nature. You just, you just like, I am not that important out here. Which is true.
And, and that's a reflective of God. They're just part of God that just doesn't care. And that's part of reality. And you feel very loved and very, I've had experience of being very seen and very connected and very embraced by the wild.
And so it's, it's the both end, which is the reality of not just the spiritual journey, but the aliveness journey is that it's both facing what's happening on our planet right now and being absolutely heartbroken and grief and that same place is so heartbreakingly beautiful. That owl just looked at me for a half an hour in the eye, and I am, I'm crying again, but from Joy.
And so it's like that is the spiritual journey to hold both.
Michael: Amen.
Victoria: And so one gets outta balance, and then that's our responsibility to fall back into I need more. There's days where I look at the news too much and it's just like, all right, I need joy today. How do I grow? Totally.
Michael: Do you have owls where you live?
Victoria: We do. Yeah. Yeah.
Michael: We finally, I've never lived in a place that has owls outside and, well, not since childhood. And now as an adult we have that. And I feel like it's the largest privilege I could ever hope, isn't it? Or for my children, we have coyotes. It's funny be because we have owls and coyote, I've been, circumstances in my life have had me doing a deep dive in coyote medicine.
And it's just been coming up in a lot of ways. So some friends and I are going deep on Coyote and of course. Coyote is also a trickster, right? And both in mythology, coyote is everywhere, but Coyote is a shapeshifter and an opportunist and a joker. And so we've been like, what if we just embodied Coyote for a while?
This group of sort of activist minister types. And we've been thinking about tricks and cunning and the stunts we've pulled that were the most entertaining to us. And someone sent me this thing where apparently it's known in like the naturalist, biology world, whoever studies coyotes, that it's really hard to trap a coyote.
You can lay traps and you'll catch skunk and muskrat. You might even capture a wolf, but you're very rarely gonna capture a coyote
Victoria: too wily. That's awesome.
Michael: They're too wily. And, but apparently there's this known thing that happens widely where they will dig up a trap, turn it upside down and piss or poop on it.
And there's all this, and someone sent me this article where it's all this evidence where like the person is saying, you tell me that they're not funny, right? Like, he's trying to make the case that this is deliberate, right. F you comedy. And, um,
Victoria: Crows can do that too.
Michael: And crows and ravens are the other trickster in North Pacific Northwest, right?
Like they're survivors because they've had to turn the traps of modernity on its head. They've had to find ways of doing turnarounds and literally make things, things upside down. And what do we have to learn?
Victoria: We need to learn from that. Absolutely. That's what this time is about for us. Edgewalking.
Michael: I think so we've been talking about tricksters a lot and if you read our Judeo, our Christian story, it's filled with tricks.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Michael: But it's also filled with examples of getting trapped. We should just talk about Raven and Owl for a while. But Coyote is this amazing thing. And now in a world where if I put my activist hat on, I'm losing, right.
I've lost all the things I ever fought for and like I used to be considered a pretty good faith-based community organizer.
And I realized sadly, that you're only pretty good if you keep showing up and doing it and, and people like you. But if you're going on success rate, I'm not so good. I've won a lot of local wishes.
Victoria: What is, what is success in the big picture? Well, pretty much all of maybe so. Yeah.
Michael: But in the in community organizing school, they tell you this is not, this is about wins.
Right. The way they train you is you're not here to wax poetic. You're here to move the needle for your people. Right? And so I came from some of that. Do we have water or don't we, is the minimum wage changed or isn't it? And we've won some things, but it's a sad era where I am. No, I, I've had to accept we're not gonna win on the terms that I was trained in.
And so instead the coyote, and that's far more my teacher now than Solinsky is wonderful, but Right.
Victoria: But it's a different time. I remember the first time Trump won, I was still had one foot in the climate movement. And I went to one of those big group partnership calls and, and I forget which organization was leading it, but they're like, okay, here's the plan, blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, all right, you lost me. There is no way. There's a plan this early. And the fact that you're saying there is makes me know there isn't. And I just, I didn't even stay through the whole call. 'cause it's like this is a new age and the things that worked last week don't work anymore.
And even then, in climate, at least if you're measuring by parts per million, no matter how many millions of dollars you raise or how successful your campaign is or how many kids show up at your marches, it's a failure because the PPM keeps going up and that leads necessarily to burnout because you're outcome focused.
And that's what I actually love about and and have some hope about. Just bring this back into, you're a Christian pastor of an indoor church.
Michael: Yeah.
Victoria: And that's what I actually love about Jesus. He consistently says, this isn't about outcome. This is about today. This is about how you love. This is about loving others as you want them to love you.
It's about loving God, the end. He wasn't ruffled by the Romans. He just, people would come and try to trap him and he'd just be like, I don't this. You guys are like on the wrong level. You're not even asking the right questions.
And that's where we are now. And I'm just curious from working within the institution, because I, I have been outta the institution for a while, how do you see that shifting?
You've got, you're part of a pretty progressive and loving church, and yet we're in a new world where even the old way, the old ways, just if you're paying attention, just don't fit right anymore.
Michael: That's right. That's right. You name it really, really well. There's a lot there because I've been in and out.
I'm, right now, I'm in and I can never entirely leave churches. Like the spiritual DMV is the joke I always make. Like you, you get everybody at the church. We're a pretty progressive one in the university district of Seattle, Washington and the first Trump presidency, people still had a lot of fight this time around.
I don't experience that fight in the same way. It's despondency, as you can imagine, people are still trying to rah, rah, rah, let's do this. Let's sign that. Let's not purchase that. We're gonna boycott that. But underneath all that is, we're in a period of disillusionment. And although on one level I'm a pastor and so I'm trying to give hope and I'm talking, there's a lot of pastoral counseling right now where people are acting out at crazy things that aren't, obviously not the issue, but as a meditator and as a mystic, i'm aware that this is the phase transition moment, and I am really, in a weird way, hopeful, and again, I've thought about this in different ways at different times right now, I, I, this experience I had this weekend in Warm Springs is, is really ringing with me in a new way. What does it mean to follow your original instructions?
What does it mean to acknowledge your of creation? There's something incredibly liberating there. To know creation still produces me and wants me for all of my nonsense. White, straight, middle class heteronormative, cis, you know, I'm really part of the problem, but that I have some role and the church does too.
So I'm, what I'm seeing is that people are definitely disoriented, scared, frightened. They are flocking to meditation. They are showing up in bulk and they are showing up. They want devotion. Here are these lefties who are all about clipboards and all of a sudden, yes, they want to pray to God and behold the beloved in the mossy forest where Michael lives.
Right. Fascinating. And, and I've done this long enough, there's a joke in meditation circles where whenever you open up a meditation class, there's 50 people coming and when they find out you're actually gonna meditate in silence, eventually you get down to 10. Right? The reverse is true here. Our contemplative heart based stuff is surging off the roof. We're getting people off the street, not to our Sunday worship service as much as we are to the Monday night. So I'm seeing the move inward of,
Victoria: yeah, and that grief, the disillusionment, leads to the grief, which leads to the emptying. Yeah. Which is where
Michael: kenosis Yeah. And, and
Victoria: that's the only way that something new can take shape.
And so it's just beautiful to hear that people within, within the church are feeling this and responding to it.
Michael: Yeah. I mean, on a very emotional way. Right? Like I think intellectually you might say, I wish I was doing more. Right? There's still that programming that says, I need to work harder and I need to, but when you look at their actions, there's this deep yearning, there's a yearning for contact of spirit.
Victoria: Right.
Michael: And everyone who lives in the Northwest, I think knows that they get it.
That we're in one of those privileged parts of the country. You can go outside and get it. And so we, it's funny we discovered you here as a community because of this impulse. Like all of a sudden someone handed me your book.
I literally, this is the first time I ever saw your book in your name. There was a Post-it on my, in my inbox with, uh, Church of the Wild. This is exactly what we're talking about. Exclamation point, exclamation and I, and we all read plenty of books on environmental justice in the church. This was different.
There's a transformation coming and I think I feel like a lucky human to be able to be alive and serve other humans and serve nature in this time. But you have got something that you got your finger on Victoria. And for me, I'm not just saying this 'cause I'm in front of you. I, it's really close to my heart and it gives me a lot of hope that there's people thinking this way.
Right. Sometimes I think we're in a little isolation tank and then I like, oh yeah. Oh wow. Look at all these people are signing up for Church of the Wild. Like, where have we been?
Victoria: Yeah. To the thing That's what I, this new story, the Thomas Berry news story, the new story that we know is emerging, that's really an ancient story that's grounded in love and relationship and all the things Jesus was talking about 2000 years ago, that that story is not like one new story. It's like a hundred thousand little very local, very placed stories. And it's like what you were saying, remember our place, remember where we belong, re story our place and replace our story. It's like this is just the next step.
It's not like I, I intuit in the beginning. This isn't just like for people that love the outdoors, like all the, all those Pacific Northwesterns with Subarus.
Michael: Oh, totally, totally armies of them. Yeah.
Victoria: This isn't that. It isn't. I didn't grow up in the, in the woods. I grew up in suburbs. But it is, I think it's a reformation, a reforming of our culture, of our religion. It's something that is so important that it has to be infiltrating everything and how we, how we live into this, whether as a pastor doing this from within inside with love and compassion for the difficulty it is to change. Or you're doing it from the outside and you are starting a little wild saga in the middle of the prairie that's now covered up by asphalt.
You're grieving instead of enjoying the butterflies, but all of that matters. And it's all those little things that's gonna, it's going to be that soft way. It's also the feminine way. It's like we've done the masculine way and it's time for the, the more feminine way. If we use that binary.
Michael: It's true.
It, it's not a forcing your way through. And grief can't, you can't do that with grief. It has to pierce you and it's gotta take you down. But that's part of what this network. And others too. There's others that are doing this are able to do is provide that mid wifeing and give people, it's easier to grieve when someone's holding your hand.
I've got some friends in real grief right now, and on one hand, nothing we do will take them from the pain. We're not gonna really reduce it, but by being together somehow it can be survived in a way that without people, there's just some intangible quality of human being seen and held when you go down.
And that's where we are, I think as a civilization too.
Victoria: And we're not used to grieving together. We're used to, oh, asking forgiveness. We start crying. And my mother just died and um, she went her last week where she was in hospice and not conscious was right after she found out Trump had won. Ugh. So I've been holding all of this and so I'm feeling this yearning for just companionship and not just to hold me as I'm crying for my mom. Although yesterday I only cried four times yesterday on one day. So it's just like allowing that tears to I keep cooking while I'm, or doing my thing while I cry. Like it's just, I'm, it's, I'm allowing myself to normalize it. It's an embodied thing that we have to hide and let me go upstairs later and I'll, and I'll really cry.
So it's a relearning how to grieve much less that, that we are in touch enough to be able to grieve
Michael: and to be messy on some level. It's just being messy.
Victoria: Yeah.
Michael: It's also that God that you don't have to be brave, the masculine versus feminine formed, I think is right on. I think there's some degree, my wife is a childhood Catholic, so of course our home is a, is a secret cult to Marian apparitions in the wilderness, right?
Like,
Victoria: oh yeah,
Michael: we can't have regular friends Victoria, because people come over and are too weirded out. It's the branches everywhere. There's a cauley, a black Madonna, there's a thousand and so good. And it sounds so strange if you don't have this experience, but if you do, it's so obvious that at some point the switch goes off.
And that's the only way I can relate to God and not to punish the other ways. But like that is our, if I'm really honest, what our primary devotion is, is the rosary
Victoria: awesome
Michael: through, but it's this nature mean. Another time. We'll talk about the elemental rosary that my wife
Victoria: Ooh, I wanna hear.
Michael: Yeah. She had a vision of it and we practiced it.
But part of that, especially for a recovering charismatic leader like myself, who's into forcing things. I love to force and I love to fight and quarrel and tangle and agitate. I'm a community organizer. And at some point all that fails and I was lucky enough to have people around me who still love me when I just utterly failed.
And a version of God that said, it's okay. This was always where you were headed. And not to just be humiliated.
Victoria: Yeah,
Michael: but I just needed it. I, growing up Baptist, in the way I, in the way I was Baptist, I don't wanna pick on Baptist. I didn't have those images. Right. And so thank Goddess, thank Mary and Atara and Kali and those images.
Hold me in a way that, that the old model couldn't, it doesn't take away from my faith. It adds to it, but
Victoria: beautiful. What a gorgeous ending.
Michael: Yeah,
Victoria: for sure. For sure. That's good job.
Michael: I have somebody, wow. Who's really doing the work in front of me. Aw. Thank you for talking to me.
Victoria: [ nature sounds play]
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 wild in your wildest place and to do so with reverence and to enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
I know I touch on coping with the grief and loss of our current reality of unraveling a lot. I read one of the comments recently in the Holy Wild Podcast notes. Where somebody very kindly shared that they wished I would talk more about what we need to be doing next. And I just need to respond that I hear you. And also I think that the way through to this new story of love and companionship and collaboration interconnection, that we all feel deeply in our bones.
It happens slowly and it happens with care. And it happens only through the portal of collective grief, and dare I say and use this word, but it happens through repentance. So this week I offer an invitation to embrace your authentic emotions of sorrow and remorse about the groaning of the land and her people, human and more than human.
And then to listen to the response from the land. I've heard stories from many people who have done this, and I've experienced it myself, that when we, with humility and authenticity express our regret and sorrow and love for those who are suffering, the response we often receive from the wild ones at least, is very often gentleness, and something like gratitude, like the groaning of creation.
In Romans eight, it actually says that our identification with the suffering of the creation is the pathway of return to our interconnected and sacred identity. It says that, that as we as kin inherit our place in the land, that we become participants in Christ. If indeed, if indeed it is an if, the passage says, if indeed we feel the pain together, the earth is waiting for us to listen to and pay attention and to return to intimate relationship. And this isn't something we can think our way through. It's something we feel our way. We dance our way, we sing our way. We sob our way, we sit and stare at the ocean our way through. It's something we can only work out in relationship with one another, with the land where we are, with the land where you belong right now, grief is sacred work and our fates are bound together in a mysterious way. Grief registers the many ways that this kinship is violated. And grief is the pathway toward reconnection. It rips a veil of blindness and protection off. And the sense that of separation dissolves before our eyes.
And there's joy and awe, and this gasp is, oh my God, we are really connected and we reenter into relationship. We, all of us, are part of repairing the great conversation.
Stephen: Have you experienced an encounter with a tree or a wild being, or a particular place that felt sacred? Did it occur to you that you may have been entangled in a holy conversation? If you have such a story, we'd love to share your voice in 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.