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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.
[Intro music with the song of a Swainson’s Thrush plays]
Stephen: You are listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
Victoria: Hello and welcome to the Holy Wild. I'm Victoria Loorz and this is a conversation with human beings, who are restoring sacred conversation with all beings. A podcast for the edge walkers, those who walk along the edges between an old story of dominance and separation and an emerging new and yet ancient story grounded in kindred relationship with Earth.
All it takes is humility, deep listening, and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth.
I'm really excited to get this launched. After years of thinking about it. In fact, I made myself do it by adding it onto my bio for my latest book, the Field Guide to Church of the Wild. And a few months ago, I realized, oh my gosh, I better actually do this. So with the guidance and brilliance of our producer, Stephen Henning, it's finally happening.
What gives me hope in the midst of these scary times of collapse is knowing that there are people in every sector of society quietly building a new way of being human, a way that is grounded in the ground. We share and focused on restoring respectful human relationship with all the other beings in our interconnected web of life, which I think is at the core of what we need to address as we face these many layers of crisis.
It's a worldview shift, a full one. A shift in the way we see ourselves and value life in a story that's bigger than ourselves. So I'm excited in this podcast to enter into conversation with fellow edge walkers who are doing the work of restoring relationship with Earth as sacred.
And so in this first episode, it captures a conversation with me and Stephen, our producer.
We wanted a chance to share our vision for the podcast. And if you're new to Wild Spirituality, to set a foundation for what that means and why we believe it's so important at this moment in history.
[Transition music plays]
Hey, Stephen. Thank you so much for, for joining me today. You know, we’ve spent the last few months envisioning what it could be. So this first episode we thought would be kind of like you interviewing me, as we make our way through the program.
Stephen: Thank you for inviting me on the podcast for our first introduction as you and I get to map the holy wild, as it were for our audience, for our listeners, for the fellow edge walkers in our development of the podcast, you and I decided that one of the most important things that we want to know from our guests, so we set it as our first question.
And we're gonna ask every guest this because it kind of, you know, it sets the table for what we're trying to do here on our show. So I'm gonna mirror it back to you and ask you some questions about what this podcast means to you, why now, those kind of things. But we'll start with this first question.
Tell me about the land who raised you.
Victoria: Don't you love that question?
Stephen: It, goosebumps every time.
Victoria: Well, even people that have never thought about it before. Stop for a second and go, wait a minute. You're right. There were these, these little, this little creek or these frogs or my dog.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Victoria: That was part of who I am from the beginning.
So for me, I moved a lot my whole life. In fact, I'm getting ready for my 48th move in my life.
Stephen: Wow.
Victoria: Yeah. So being a bit of a nomad is part of my story, which probably relates to longing to be in one place, and deep conversations with place and fidelity to place and belonging to place are all core journeys for me, which a lot of our calling in our life is born out of wounding.
Stephen: Mm.
Victoria: So we lived mostly in different suburban neighborhoods. My access to these more than human, others that helped to raise me were pretty much in our yard. We never went camping. I was not somebody who grew up on a farm or had access to forests, but it was our yard or our neighborhood that had a lot of other houses that were being built.
So I had to create my own little special places, which I did out in the field behind our house or the, the creek that went down the gutter on the street that I would build little mud dams. Definitely, I would always find a place that was mine. That was, that belonged, I felt like I was seen. It was, it was a quiet contemplative, you know, how children like to go into their own head and create stories. And so mine were pretty much in the yard when I was little.
It wasn't until I started writing my first book, Church of the Wild, how Nature invites us into the Sacred. When I started writing, then the stories started to unfold and the book actually begins with my place that I lived in when we moved there, when I was in middle school and high school in Thousand Oaks, California.
And behind our house was a barranca, you know, which is kind of a, a gorge, and that, when you walk up the street and go out into the fields, which are now houses. I would, I had a particular way and I knew where the, where to turn in all of the bushes and oak trees out there. I knew I had a little place that I called my place and I literally didn't tell anybody about it.
I didn't bring anyone there and it was just my own secret place and it overlooked the barranca. I could hear, there was a campground at the bottom of the barranca, which I never went to in the six years that I lived there.
Stephen: Outside observer, right?
Victoria: Yeah.
But being above that, I could hear people, I could, I created a little, and I talk about this in the book, but I created a little space for me that was like a circle that I created with, with stones.
And I would sit in the middle of it and
Stephen: Wow.
Victoria: You know, I didn't have religious language for it at all. We didn't grow up really going to church except Christmas and Easter, so it wasn't to me particularly or expressly spiritual, but it was, you know?
Stephen: Yeah, of course it was.
Victoria: It was just this little place and one time a deer came and visited me and it was like absolutely a sacred moment.
So that, that little place.
Stephen: Wow. You, you and deer.
Victoria: I know
Stephen: We'll talk about that later, but wow, the Deer Whisper
Victoria: And I didn't connect that until I started writing it, so I, I recommend to everybody to take time to write your story 'cause things start to make sense and connect.
Stephen: You triggered a few thoughts here.
My first is that. It only sounds cool to me that you move 48 times in your life, if you can say, 'cause you and I are both United States based, if you could say that you've lived in like all the lower 48 right states. But I doubt that's the case.
Victoria: Nope.
Stephen: For you. The second thought is, uh. Like knowing where to turn, having your own path through the barranca and like to your special place reminded me of the silly moment in the Office TV show where Dwight is giving people directions to his house for his wedding.
And one of the directions on his instructions is "walk until you hear the beehive and then turn right."
Victoria: That's perfect.
Stephen: That makes me laugh every time. But there's some truth to that, like I absolutely know the feeling of that sacred space. I grew up like way outside of town. The nearest place I could buy a candy bar or anything was 30 minute drive away on gravel roads.
Victoria: Wow.
Stephen: And I had my own place, like a ponderosa tree where the bark had kind of grown to almost look like a human face.
Victoria: Oh.
Stephen: So I had this it, that was just kind of the place I would go to like vent things that I didn't want to talk to my parents about or my little brother or things, you know, there was me in that tree, huh. It's special.
But also the other thought I had was moving around so much like finding yourself the through lines, especially through a suburban neighborhood, you know, that makes me immediately think of, the relationship might be more, almost species based of like, you probably have a deep relationship with Kentucky Bluegrass.
Right, right. Because that's the suburban grass that everyone wants. Or you know, the suburban trees that everyone plants, like the Norway Maple or the Linden. So those trees probably, I imagine, have become like a through line for you almost of like, oh, there's my,
Victoria: Yeah, not really. It's interesting,
Stephen: Huh?
Victoria: Yeah. I can't even remember particular trees in most places. I remember one place we lived in Colorado, my dad dug holes all over the yard to plant trees and then never planted them. So the holes themselves became fun, you know, bunkers that we played in and
Stephen: Fun. Ants and worms and all the wildlife that comes through that too, right?
Victoria: Yeah. So it, it is a different path and it comes out of longing, I think. You know, which, which I actually, you know, so longing is persistent, I think, throughout our lives, and we think we can meet that longing and so we, we sort of pursue what we're longing for.
When John O'Donohue talked about "belonging means being in the longing," I started to think about it differently. That if we, what does it mean to be in that longing? That the longing itself is a state of being that is sacred, that there's always a longing for wildness, really.
Stephen: And it, it, it doesn't strike me the same as constantly living in like an awareness of lack.
Like it doesn't feel, feel like an acknowledgement of like, ugh, if my life just had this, I'm always missing this. Longing is so much deeper. It's like, it's in our marrow. Wow. And to just be in that, to sit in that.
Victoria: Which I think is a really important spiritual practice because we're in a time of so much unknowing, more than, more than normal, you know?
More than we've grown up with so far. At least those of us in a more privileged situation.
Stephen: Yeah.
Victoria: You know that we are in a time of deep unknowing. I've started saying after every plan, you know, God willing, something that I said in my evangelical days 25 years ago, uh, 35 years ago, but it's, you know, it's all so provisional.
We don't know what's, you don't know how this collapse that we're in the middle of is, is going to unfold. We don't know. Nobody knows. That's the point.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Victoria: Um, and so we never knew we were always in a place of unknowing. We were just fooled in our comfort zone. To believe that we could make plans and execute them, and then if we didn't execute 'em, there was something wrong with us versus the reality that we are always living in this place of unknown, which I think is one of the gifts of this time that we have been living in this severed separation, you know, from the rest of the natural world, from most of, you don't live with everybody, but just with an identity that is separate from other people that are living very different lives.
Stephen: Yeah.
Victoria: And so that severance, that life style of severance, which we all in the western world have grown up with has a lot of consequences. And which is one of the things I want this podcast to address, is that the consequences to the earth are very obvious in the ecological destruction that we have for many generations been engaged with as a species.
Stephen: Yeah. The intellectualization we've pulled on ourselves to insist that we are individuals who don't need to be dependent or interdependent on place, neighbors, environment. Like that very, I mean, we've said it already, you and I are both US based, that very libertarian bootstrapism energy that we were indoctrinated with. Right.
Victoria: And the undoing of that is helped when we recognize the impact, not just on the deforestation and the species extinction and all of the other damages that we have caused to the earth herself. It also has caused deep severance from our own wild self, and it has major impacts on our, on our spirituality and on our emotional stability. You know, you don't recognize that at first. You, you feel like, oh, I am.
Stephen: I'm just me. I'm not domesticated.
Victoria: Yeah. Like, I did a talk last night with a series of nuns, basically, in Iowa last night about climate grief and the grief that we feel sometimes, I think for a lot of people, don't recognize that it's connected with the rest of the world.
We'll go to a therapist and we'll find out. What happened in our childhood? Or what do we need to change in our, in our life in order to not be depressed anymore?
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Victoria: Take this medication, and medication for depression's really important, but there's something beneath that, that we are, as humans are meant to be in deep, intimate, sacred, familiar relationship with our place, with the stones, with the trees in our yard.
Even if you're living in a, a loft in New York City. It still matters. And so that disconnection has big impacts on us.
Stephen: Well, it's funny you even think of like the, the common depression medication, immediately made me think like vitamin D, right? Uh, the sun. Yeah. Ultraviolet light actually serves you when you take a walk or lay in a hammock.
It's always been available to us in that way, but we've, kinda like we said in the trailer, like we've almost tamed ourself to a, a point of like, we always want to be under a roof. We always want to have walls blocking the annoying wind, right? We also, you know, we want to be away from the insects, but what is robbed?
What do we lose when we don't learn to have a, somewhat tenuous, but a consistent relationship with the mosquito. Or the, or the horsefly, you know.
Victoria: Exactly.
Stephen: These things that we call like the uglies.
Victoria: The pest
Stephen: ...or the undesirables. Yes. The pests. Exactly. Like, turns out the pests are also just trying to live their lives. And survive and thrive in their own instinctual way.
Victoria: And that's what it, that's what it means to have a new view, a kinship view of even the mosquitoes.
Stephen: Hmm.
Victoria: And it really does as we shift our worldview, just that one orientation, that we're not separate from the rest of the alive and sentient and intelligent world that we are, in fact, relatives as our indigenous brothers and sisters use that language because they live that language.
Stephen: Yeah.
Victoria: And it's foreign to us in our culture. But to shift that, just that one thing, which is kind of the core of the Seminary of the Wild program, is to shift into relationship with a mosquito as a kin takes more than just thinking about it.
It takes us spiritual practice, you know, I mean, I just, I've been doing this for, you know, like 10 years and just within this past year, I got bit by some mosquitoes and my first reaction was a blessing to the mosquitoes that I was able to offer something to them. You know, I don't want them to eat to, you know, I don't wanna feed the whole...
Stephen: We have to acknowledge the spread of disease and that kind of thing.
Victoria: But it was, but I was like, whoa, that has actually shifted. I mean, it's taken a long time. But it was my first thought and it wasn't something I had to talk myself into. Whereas I've had to do that over years to just go, yeah, but what about the mosquitoes? You know.
Stephen: Like coach yourself into it. Fake it till you make it mentality a little bit.
Victoria: Yeah.
Stephen: Right. So you and the Center for Wild Spirituality, you just mentioned 10 years. It's notable to me that a decade into this, now is the time for a podcast. Huh? So I am curious, like, why, why the podcast now? What is, what's going on? What's the shift beneath our feet? Why is a podcast a way that you want to represent, kind of like broadcasting the, the message or the thoughts or the, the worldview?
Victoria: Well, first of all, I love podcasts because if anyone's read Church of the Wild, right in the center of the book is my exploration of the word Logoss. As you know, it's used in, in the Gospel of John as a metaphor for Christ that the word Logoss as Christ is translated in every single New Testament, as in the beginning was the word, but my, my research and exploration revealed that actually that word meant for the first four centuries that it was used, it meant conversation, not one word. It meant that at the middle of all things, at the center of all things is the presence of this, this Logoss, this conversation that holds together all things, which is then compared to that's, that's Christ.
Stephen: Wow.
Victoria: And so that shifted things for me that within the Jesus sayings, one of them is when two or more are together, there I am.
You know? And so it's like that conversation, that capacity to connect with another being, another human, another place, and to hold what the conversation is, is like the container or the, I can never come up with the right word, the, the vein of connection between any two beings is the conversation, the tether, the the connector, the web, and that is the presence of the holy.
And so it's just consistent, like that's how life is, you know, from an atom to a planet, to a family, to a country. Conversation is the weight of love. And so podcasts are conversations, you know, more so than the only conversations we had before podcast, that we had access to where, for most of history was just communities had conversations.
People when they live close to each other, they have conversations, when they're friends. But now we live in a world that is, that is globally interconnected. And so the only conversations since like television are like these talk shows that are like celebrities and they're not real conversations. You know, they're entertaining, they're planned out. These are professionals.
Podcasts are people just, you know, they're people just connecting. They're people holding the presence of the holy just by the connection. So that's one of the reasons is I think I love podcasts.
But the question of now is, is what you're really getting at is, I think it's just time.
You know, we, the first stage of this work was my own kind of like experience and research. Like I had to research, I had to invest myself into the scriptures of my tradition, you know, the holy stories of my tradition because I had been told, or at least it was kind of the zeitgeist within the church that God is not a tree, so stop talking about that.
Even though my experience of God was most felt in relationship with nature. So I had to go onto a journey myself to say, do I need to get- release either my spiritual tradition or stop talking about my experience of God in nature? And I found that actually the scriptures, both testaments are totally immersed in deep relationship with the natural world.
And so that was sort of my first step. Um, and then I did different experiences.
Stephen: Yeah, they're not incompatible. I also grew up very strictly evangelical before that became- well, probably as it was transitioning into being its more political two-headed beast. But I remember a deep skepticism around what we would call pantheism.
Victoria: Oh, right. There's a demonic word. Oh my god.
Stephen: We can't talk about that. Yeah. Like God isn't everything. That would mean you're everything right and you're God. And that would also mean that would call into question, turns out, like our fall theology and total depravity and all these things that we insist are true because can't you see that us humans are deceitful to the core and all those.
Victoria: And what a gift that we get a teacher like Richard Rohr who comes and says like, may I present a word that has always existed called Panentheism? Like this theology of like, if we won't go so far as to say God is all, then we can at least say God is in all and God is present in all. What else could we mean if we said that God is this creator and sustainer of what is?
Yeah. I mean, I didn't like officially, I guess quote unquote become a Christian until my twenties. And so even from the, and it was in the Evangelical Church, but even from the beginning it was like I had this little subversive path beneath my Evangelical membership that was like, hmm, god is in all things. I sort of just knew it from my life.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Victoria: And you know, Christ within you, Paul talked about it like, it just was very obvious to me and I didn't understand how you can know that. And what does that mean? I remember saying that exactly. If God is in all things, then God is everything, then God is nothing, you know?
It was like my logical brain couldn't comprehend it, and yet I was drawn to the mystics, the ancient mystics, the Hildegard, the St. Francis, the the ones who went into the woods who experienced and lived.
[Midroll music plays]
Stephen: Speaking of this, Logos as sacred conversation and not just a one-sided capital w word, that, did bring up Francis for me because it, it made me think of the genesis story of- let there be light, let the day be divided by the night. So the sun and moon are set and like in the sacred conversation now you hear creator saying, let the day be divided from the night.
What you don't hear with language words is that immediately then the sun and moon and as Francis said, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, are immediately in conversation with that divine dance, with that sacred conversation.
Victoria: And I think that's an important thing, what you just said. It's taking something that we have in our culture and in our Christian religion for the last, you know what, at least 1500 years.
Stephen: I mean, all western tradition and religion really.
Victoria: Yeah, pretty much, do this duality. It's like, day is good, night is bad, dark is bad, light is good, masculine is good, feminine is bad. You know, it's like all of those polarities become dualities instead of in deep relationship with each other. There's something necessary.
Like we have to sleep every night. The trees have to go through winter every year. Like it's just something that restores life, that evolves life, that it is the pathway of becoming. And yet we wanna demonize half of it. It's just, it makes no sense. So I think part of this reconnection of this severance between humans and nature- the rest of nature, 'cause we're part of nature- is also just restoring relationship with all of these things that we put, including the political craziness. You know, like the only way through is for us to be able to have conversations, authentic conversations with people that think very differently from us. And it doesn't seem possible, like I'm incapable of doing it right now, and it doesn't seem possible when both sides or either side is just spouting propaganda or rhetoric.
Stephen: It's so hard. I mean like, may we have a change in heart so that in the same way we can gaze at a mosquito enjoying some of our life force, and say like here's a blessing for you. It's like, to borrow and hopefully not appropriate, an eastern thought is like the, in this sacred conversation, may we namaste. May the light in me see the light in you.
And understand that like, restoring that conversation is getting past animosity. It is getting past the, the disgust instinct we have evolutionarily ingrained.
I love that. That conversation can be more than language. I think a lot of science in the West has privileged the fact that us humans have what we call language and we have words, and we have the printing press, and now we have blogs and pod, you know, we have the words.
That somehow makes us better.
Victoria: Well, we're self-defining the caste system, you know?
Stephen: Exactly.
Victoria: And we're putting ourselves at the top. And that's another piece that needs to be dismantled.
Stephen: Whereas the question is like, how, how can we be in conversation with things that don't necessarily use words to speak back?
But I mean, you and I are recording. I'm aware of the fact that you and I are recording mere hours before the next New Moon phase. And like, how can we be aware of those rhythms? One of my favorite quirky out of left field icebreaker questions for people is, what was the last planet you made eye contact with in the night sky?
Victoria: Ooh, that's cool.
Stephen: Like, when were you last aware that Venus is up there, or Jupiter, or you know, Mars is exiting Gemini right now. Those, those kind of questions of like, how much are you able to gaze softly at what is out here in the, in what we're calling the holy wild and say, I'm part of this. I am not separate from this. I am Earth.
We talk about Gaia mother Earth. Like I am not something out here observing Mother Earth. I did not come here on a spaceship and show up. I am birthed from this soil. So of course like, you dig in the soil and you look at those worms and the ants in the holes that your father dug for the trees that never planted, right?
It's like, oh, that's me too. So in that kind of sacred conversation, I have kind of two questions in one. The broader question is, how do you experience the holy in the wild, currently? The more specific question is- I want people to read your book. I found it as one of my, it's one of my top 10 favorite books ever-
So for those of us who have read Church of the Wild, we know about your, your deer friend, Mary and her fawn, but can you speak to a more recent encounter that you've had or a more recent sacred conversation that you've had without language necessarily, but with a more than human other?
Victoria: Right, and this is one of the questions we want to make sure that we ask most of our guests on this program too, because it's really about not talking about it. Just like, I think Wild Spirituality, Church of the Wild is not talking about God, but just deepening relationship.
Which is what a sacred conversation is. It's a conversation with both the other, the deer, the clouds, the wind. As well as the holy, that it's all kind of not really separated, which I wanna just say is about language. Like we have a language that's so noun based that we have trouble like seeing the dance. We look at the dancers.
Stephen: Yeah. We're not a verb culture.
Victoria: Yeah. One of the, um, recent experiences was, and you'll hear in a, in a future podcast conversation I had with Justine Huxley, where she shares that Pat McCabe, who is an indigenous elder and speaker and author and brilliant woman is on their board and offered an invitation to their board to give offerings, to bring offerings to the waters, to their place, for 30 days.
And so I was so struck by that after that, that I brought that invitation to everybody within Seminary of the Wild to the Guides first, and then, and then to all the participants and then I did it myself, and it's, and I went to this little creek, it's a seasonal creek in my little walk around my neighborhood and when I started it, there was still ice over the waters and by the time I ended it, the creek is almost gone.
But I went there every day and I, and every day I was like, I don't know what you need. I don't know what you need. How can I bring you an offering that's meaningful to you? And so I just started bringing different things. You know, I brought corn meal. I heard that was something that other people brought as an offering.
I brought stones that are meaningful to me, and anytime I, you know, I've got little stones and pine cones and things all over my house.
Stephen: Oh, I have pillars and all sorts of stuff all over my desk. Yeah.
Victoria: So I'd go through and I'd go, "Ooh, I like this one too much. I don't dang it. That's the one I need to give." you know?
Stephen: That's the sacrifice. Yeah. That's the blessing.
Victoria: Yes. And then I brought little nuts for the squirrels and different things, and through that experience, the fidelity of showing up to the same place every day, even when it was inconvenient, you know, like sometimes it'd be- I'd be getting ready for bed and I'm like, dang it, I didn't go today.
So I'd stumbled down there in the dark or if it was raining or whatever. So it just really helped me to develop a practice in a way that is easy to not be accountable, you know, to just go to, ah, I don't feel like it today, or whatever, which I definitely guilty of. But this practice was really helpful.
And so when I was there, when I would go there, some days it was just a visit and just kinda like, offer the things and notice some beautiful things about her or just notice how she's changed or ask her what she needs and also just share some of things, things that I needed. So it became a conversation. And the first, the first day I did it, I was walking back home and it was after I walked away that, that a thought hit me, you know, in an unexpected thought.
I used to call 'em God thoughts, which they still kind of are. But this was a river thought or a stream thought and it was essentially I'd been fretting over, you know, moving. My mother recently died. I moved here in, in Virginia a couple years ago to be with her, to care for her. Um, and now that she's gone, I'm gonna move back to the West coast to be near my daughter.
But I had just been anxious about it, like trying to figure it all out and nothing worked. And you know, what do I do with my cat and all of these issues and the lease isn't up until I can't- Anyway. And as I was walking back, I heard this sentence. It was like how I noticed when I was with her that the places where there were obstacles created the most music.
Where, where the water hit the rocks, it created the most music. It's the most beautiful part. When I would take a picture, I would want to find little waterfalls and she would always find her way around them, but they were what? The obstacles is what created the creek yourself.
Stephen: Wow. The noisiest river is the one with the rapids?
Victoria: Yes. Yeah, the waterfalls. Yeah.
Stephen: Wow. I love that.
Victoria: And so it was like, how can I approach this, all of these obstacles that I'm facing, like a river.
Stephen: Wow.
Victoria: And so that really opened up to me a different way, like, like the way of the most ease around the obstacles. That, that was the insight that I needed was how do I approach these obstacles by going, by approaching them with the way of most ease.
Versus making everything complicated, which is what I normally do.
Stephen: And in the meantime, allow the obstacles to be what makes the music of your life.
Victoria: And that comes from just listening. You know, it's like remembering how to listen. It's, we all know how, we just have forgotten.
Stephen: It's going on a walk without your AirPods and music and audio books. Right? It's like, today my soundtrack is the irrigation ditch or the chickadees.
So we're, we're kind of coming to the end of our time here, so I kind of wanted to speak to, I guess some practicality, right? We've had some gorgeous conversation, sacred conversation today already, but kind of in the practical, I was wondering, kind of for our last question-
what practices, big or small for you, do you think can help heal some of the disconnection that someone who's, who might be listening and is being introduced to this idea for the first time, and if, if they're identifying like, wow, I, I'm not aware of the moon like that. I don't know what planet I saw last, or this bird sings outside my window every day, but I don't know who's singing. I don't know what species that is. I've never met them.
What kind of practices can you identify as, as ways to kind of take our first step or two toward kind of healing that disconnection or like reconnecting that, what we were talking about earlier, like that connection or that tether or that, that thing that binds us all together, you know,
Victoria: the conversation.
Stephen: Yeah.
Victoria: Well, there's one practice and it's, you know, it's, it's simple. It's wandering. We call it wandering, we call it sacred saunter. It's going outside and slowing down. You know, if you need to go outside to, to run and, and run up a mountain, go do that.
But that's not what a saunter is. It's approaching the others with reverence. So it's a slowing down. There's an intentionality. Like we, this is the core practice of Seminary of the Wild. It's the core practice of Church of the Wild. It's the core practice of my spiritual practice now, and it's listening for the holy in all things.
That's one way to say it. It's just, it's listening for that particular chickadee. It's listening for how the birds shift as you keep walking.
When are they really loud? What are they talking about? And then you start to recognize, oh, the towhees are really loud when my cat is outside and stalking something. The towhees start freaking out, you know?
Stephen: 'cause they're warning each other. They're talking about the predator and the grass.
Victoria: Mm-hmm. Right. And so I learned to notice that. But, you do that by being outside, by slowing down and intentionally entering into relationships. So we have different practices that we, you know, sort of like best practices that you can apply.
We have a wandering guide that, that is available on our website. But it's basically like before you, you know, you might take some time to walk to a place that then you wanna start wandering or sauntering and cross a threshold. You know, it might be where it shifts, like the back of my yard goes from grass into woods.
There's a threshold or maybe there's a, a stick in the road, or maybe the trees kind of create an arch. You'll recognize the threshold. They'll become aware to you. So then when you, when you come to that threshold, when you step over, stop. Take a moment to pray or be intentional to say, when I step over this, I'm entering into enchanted forest and I'm opening up my heart and my mind like a child in a playful way of like, I wanna be in conversation with this place and anybody who's calling me into relationship, I'm open to you.
And so you wander until you feel that inner curiosity. Kind of like yearning to sit down to stop.
You know, maybe it's snowing and you don't sit, but you stop and you enter into a conversation with a tree. It's not anything woowoo, it's just, it's just stopping. And with reverence. Just like noticing, just- but it begins with asking permission and I always like to remind people of that is that like if you meet a, meet a stranger in a coffee shop and you're gonna sit down in front of them and you wanna start talking to 'em, you don't just sit down and start talking.
You know, you're gonna ask. And so it's that kind of thing and you can feel it. You sort of feel, you know, usually it's a yes, but sometimes there's a discomfort and you're like, I think this is a no.
Thank you. You're not wanting to be in a conversation, that's fine. So it's just a little bow and keep walking.
Stephen: So often for me it starts with a natural curiosity of like, oh, I wonder who this is. You know, that's, that's how I know that it's a small leafed lime tree, or that's how I know it's a Norway maple now.
Victoria: And you find out about them.
Stephen: Yeah. You start looking up like, well, the leaf is shaped like this. Yeah. Like I use an old bible to press a bunch of leaves from trees that I pass on my favorite neighborhood walks with my dogs. And you know, it turns out you learn that the mountain ash tree that grows here in Montana, after the first couple frosts, you can harvest some of those berries and make jelly out of 'em.
Victoria: Oh, wow.
Stephen: But, but the berries are poisonous if you eat too many of them raw. You need to cook 'em down and match 'em with like a crap apple and like bind them with pectin and make a jelly. You know? And it turns out that that dish itself is a traditional Irish, celtic thing that has been known about for centuries, you know?
Victoria: So cool.
Stephen: But it all starts with that curiosity of like, wow, these orange berries are striking. I wonder who this is.
Victoria: Yes. Who this is. I love that.
Stephen: Mm-hmm.
Victoria: So what we do in Seminar of the Wild and Church in the Wild is offer an invitation. An invitation to wander. And it may be something specific, like if we're talking about grief, we'll say, you know, go out to the land and ask them the Mary Oliver question from her poem, Wild Geese: "tell me of despair yours, and I'll tell you mine." You know, and just entering into that. And so we want to offer in this podcast an invitation by the end of every episode, an invitation for all the listeners to go out that week and bring that invitation so that you are living into deeper relationship with your place.
Stephen: Yeah, that's how we want to answer that question of, okay, this, this all sounds beautiful and this has given me goosebumps. But what do I actually do now? How do I begin living that out? Embody it, like put it, download it into your body in such a way that you can begin blessing your mosquito neighbors, right?
So that literally is what we're gonna do now. We'll enjoy an invitation. And I actually have a story of my own little sacred encounter that I'd like to share. So that'll come in a moment.
We also wanted to, I kind of wanted to prime the pump here as it were ,for we would love, for those of you who are listening, there's gonna be an opportunity every episode, our email is available to begin sharing your own stories, to enter the conversation with us. With permission to share your voice, we'd love to hear about the trees in your yard or the birds you've met or the snakes you've become friends with, or the planets that you've connected with, all those kind of things.
We want to expand the conversation beyond me and Victoria, beyond Victoria and her guests, and we'll all begin building something new out of this chaotic time, huh?
Victoria: Yeah. It seems like a simple thing, but you'll be surprised at what unfolds.
Stephen: How much tenderness it unlocks,
Victoria: and as we remember how to fall in love again with our place, it's also gonna be opening up our hearts to fall in love again with all the beings, the humans that drive us crazy, as well as those parts of ourselves that we are impatient with.
You know, love expands us. And so falling in love with those beings that have been completely disconnected from us, to the point that we use the pronouns of it with these more than human others.
Um, so that's actually another, another practice is just to change your pronouns.
Stephen: Yeah. I love that your creek is a she/her. That's wonderful.
Victoria: Pronouns matter as the queer community has taught us and is teaching us. And so, yeah. I'm just really excited about this. Stephen, thank you so much. You are a deep professional and just so open-hearted and enthusiastic, and it's been really a joy to work with you, and I'm so excited about what's gonna unfold in the weeks ahead.
Thank you so much for helping to launch this.
Stephen: Well, for my part, thank you. It's been an honor to be in conversation with you today, but also it was one of the easier decisions I've ever made in my professional life of podcasting for almost half a decade now. This is the exact podcast that I've been looking for and that the world needs to be a part of. So it's my absolute pleasure and I can't wait to see where we go on this map we've made of the holy wild.
Victoria: So really, what this invitation is about, is approaching the world, all the others, with reverence.
[Background sounds of a flowing creek and birdsong plays]
Encounters with the holy wild happen when we're open to them. When we approach the natural world with reverence and an open heart. Each week I'll offer an invitation to wander in the wildest places of your home. And this is the way to enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
Reverence is slow and intentional. Wandering with reverence means that you're looking at the world with softened eyes that no longer see others as objects of utility. Like seeing a tree as lumber or even objectifying it as an object of beauty. Reverence allows you to behold the trees in the waters and the tiny ants as separate beings.
The Celtic poet and priest, John O'Donohue said in his book, Anam Cara, "reverence bestows dignity. And it's only in the light of dignity that the beauty and mystery of a person will become visible."
And I say that same thing applies to seeing the dignity of a tree or a place or even yourself. So for today, a simple invitation to wander slowly in your place to greet all the others that you meet with reverence.
Send the robins blessings as they're making their nests and the spring wild flowers. Sit and listen. Can you hear the whispers of the holy through the branches of the old oak tree in the park?
[Background sounds of a flowing creek and birdsong end]
Stephen: Hi, this is producer Stephen in Montana with my sacred conversation.
Prairie Falcon shared with me his view of life in winter, this past December. I was wandering through Montana State land with my dogs and witnessed my new friend soar down and perch on a Ponderosa pine snag surveying his available food options from the prairie dog village to our south.
His stoic resolve against the winter wind, which was skating over my calm valley, was a sight. His white and brown feathers ruffling. I took out my birding binoculars and sound recorder and crawled through the dirt and brush. He remained for long enough for me to make several pencil sketches in my notebook, and at one point, I swear, make eye contact with me through my eyepiece.
He conveyed something only a non-migratory bird of prey could. He said abundance is here in winter. Even when the sun hides in the trees retreat to merely casting shadows, instead of offering shade. Just look at these riches among us, the rodent village, the sage, the grass, the evergreens. It's all abundant through these eyes.
Punctuated by a cry, he flapped twice as one of my dogs, wandered too close to his tree and soared again closer to his meal, but no further from his home. Because he taught me that day that his home is simply that which is content and abundant between his two wings.
[Outro music plays]
Have you experienced an encounter with a tree or a wild being, or a particular place that broke your heart in love? 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 place 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 to around a minute long or 150 words, 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 in your story in sacred conversation.
[Background sounds of a flowing creek and birdsong plays]
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.
[Background sounds of a flowing creek and birdsong ends, with a song from a tin flute and a rush of wind]