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Join author and founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, Victoria Loorz, as she explores the possibilities of restoring beloved community and sacred conversation with All That Is: human and more-than-human.
Stephen: You are listening to a podcast from the Center for Wild Spirituality.
Victoria: Hello and welcome to the Holy Wild. I'm Victoria Loorz, and this is a conversation with human beings who are restoring sacred conversation with all 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 that's grounded in kindred relationship with Earth.
All it takes really is humility, deep listening, and allowing yourself to fall in love again with our holy and wild earth. It's very easy for me, and I bet a lot of us to feel discouraged at these times when we sense that the end game of so many of these manipulative moves that are being made by the government right now are going to end up with a lot of people harmed.
A lot of fear and anxiety we're all wrestling with, and I've been reading a lot lately about the cyclical nature of things. Like from Earth evolving complexity, the way that human culture evolves and changes, and it's all done through this process that we might call the Pascal Mystery, that process of creation and then destruction and recreation, life, death, new life belonging and connection, and then into exile and disconnection.
Then that's the pathway to returning and reconnection. There's this pattern in all things, and it sounds cool as a thing to say, but when you're caught in the middle of that disconnection and destruction phase of an empire, it's not so fun. It's a bit terrifying and totally infuriating, but it's when I can see from the widest and largest perspective that I can feel some calm descending on me.
My guest this week does that so beautifully. He helps us to see that we are not the first or even the last to go through liminal times of unraveling and destruction. Gary Paul Nabhan is a Franciscan brother. He goes by Brother Coyote, and this man is one of my favorite humans. He's humble and loving and generous and brilliant, and he is involved in the lives of so many people.
He spends about a fifth of his life with indigenous community of friends across the border in Mexico, and he does so working with them on their agriculture, their seeds. He just got back from Morocco where he worked with a women's seed collective and he just went through a head trauma, an injury when he was attacked by a homeless man.
But the tender way that he treats the homeless in his southern Arizona community, it's forgiving and loving. Gary is an ethnobotanist and a professor, and a farmer, and a wild church leader, a plant and a seed expert, and he's written dozens of books throughout his life on these themes. His latest book is called Against the American Grain, A Borderlands History of Resistance.
These are brilliant stories to remind us that we are among good company in these times of collapse. We're in good company with soulful people who lived throughout all time and all geography on these border land edges. They chose to drop out of the empire and head for the wild, and the way that he talks about it made me just feel more grounded and more able to engage into what he expresses or what he calls spiritual resistance.
Man, I'm so excited for you to share this beautiful conversation with Brother Coyote with me.
[ Transition music plays]
Hi Gary, Brother Coyote, so good to see you. So deeply respect who you are and your heart and what you, how you invest yourself in love, in everything you do. So welcome.
Gary: Great to be with you, Victoria. And greetings, all you earthlings that are listening to us.
Victoria: You know this, this is a new podcast. We're called The Holy Wild.
But I think that that's sort of a, uh, subtitle of your many titles. That you are all about. You know, you are deeply immersed in the wild, in our deep relationship, our loving relationship with all the beings beyond and including the human on this planet and all of that is, is holy to you. Grateful to know you and read all of your, your very prolific, prolific writer.
You can't help it. It just flows from you. Maybe a way to begin is a way that we're beginning with a lot of our guests is to ask you about the land who raised you. Who are those on the land, the water, the creatures that raised you, and where was that?
Gary: I love that question. It it brings me back to some of the most intimate memories I have of sitting in the Indiana Dunes under a tree at dusk when I was maybe three and a half to four and a half years old, and just listening to the birds and the oaks and cottonwoods and hickories above me, and thinking that I was part of their conversation, that their language was what I was born to listen to, and at the same time, there was another language down at my feet.
I was sitting in sand and composted leaf litter. I think I was being inoculated with the world and its fragrances, and since I've had a concussion and impairment in my eyes, my sense of smell has exploded. But I had that sense of smell. I think we all do when we're children, we're, we're paying attention to the cues, warning, celebrations, greetings that come through scent, not just through sound.
Victoria: I love that, 'cause it's all of your senses are the vehicles of that conversation that children know in, implicitly, that we all know implicitly when we start. Then what is it in our civilization that the many layers distance us from that?
Gary: Yeah. I feel like it's erasure that we, we want people to be just visually oriented to be less engaged with sound and scent of other organisms as communication. They, that's their way of communicating with us and so. I think, you know, that's why Jesus and Buddha love children so much. You know, there's a sense that they still have that, and many of us spend much of our adulthood trying to get back to that sense of wonder that we all felt in the wild when we were young.
It's not, it's not even a question that nearly every human being has felt that.
Victoria: So that return, it sort of reminds me of the reality of the Pascal mystery in all things, right? It's, it's that there, is there some function to that exile? I wonder, you know, that we are all begin there and then the spiritual journey begins, I think begins in the return in the returning home.
But maybe the exile itself is part of the spiritual journey.
Gary: I think that's an internal and external journey that many of us make and that Moses made, Jesus made, Buddhist made. And so I, I think it's part of coming into that Paschal mystery that the creator is alive and embedded in all of creation within and be beyond and around us.
We have to bump into things now and then, like I recently did in getting a concussion to be reminded of that.
Victoria: You, you have such a good way of reframing what happens in your life.
Gary: Sometimes. Uh, the distance between how I feel the moment it happens, and then reflection and contemplation afterwards just seemed like bringing together two different worlds.
Victoria: Well, which I think is the reality, you know, the spiritual reality of always being in that place of vision beyond this world isn't possible.
We have little glimpses, we have little glimpses of the way life is meant to be. And then we also live in this world like we're in. And especially now, as you deeply know, especially now we're in this liminal space this time where most, a lot of us believe, or at least hope or experience that the old story, the Empire story is, is uh, revealing itself in um, obscene way.
And at the same time, I think, I feel like it's last breaths of that old story of that empire story.
Gary: It's collapsing and, and we know that there's always a fierceness at the end of an empire of people defending their turf.
And yet I, I think that's a, a signal that great revealing is upon us now. And so are we grieving and is there shallow?
Yes, but I think it's another indicator of transition. I always laugh as an example that a couple decades ago, California passed an English only bill when in most of the cafes, homes, and community centers, Spanish or Chinese or Japanese were being spoken more than English. And it was enriching communities, but the law was oblivious to the fact that the change had already happened.
And so I think we have to remind us, uh. Joke on us sometimes, but, but that, um, we have to live through these transitions just like all of us were awkward teenagers at one point.
Victoria: That's a good, uh, correlation for sure. It's, it is to, to describe these times as awkward. It's a great reframing there. You're at it.
Gary: Society that's like a 14-year-old that's wondering what to wear and whether anyone will notice the blemishes on my face rather than thinking about my love for other people.
Victoria: Right? No, absolutely. It's very much of an adolescent, pre-adolescent, even culture. Right? And it needs to go through the collapse in order for what is, you know, what we might call Thomas Berry's new story.
To really take hold 'cause the new story is alive, you know, it's alive on the edges. And, and I love how in your new book you talk about those edges, your new book about against the American Grain, a borderlands history of resistance. I, I'd never really thought about it before until, until your book about how this new story, this way of being of, I'm just gonna use the word fighting for, fighting for what is kind and good and loving has been happening on the edges all along.
Gary: And the edges, you know, is where I grew up. To get back to your first question on the edges of sand dunes and Lake Michigan, the third largest body of water in the United States and, and then I've spent most of my adulthood on the edges of desert and sea, which are the the most elegant, austere, haunting places for deadly contemplation, but always seeing what's on the edge. That, that edge effect is, I think, what my whole life has been about. So being a, a natural history geek and being a Franciscan brother to me is in no way a contradiction. It's, you know, I, I just don't have much tendency towards dualistic thinking, I guess.
And so loving those edges, looking at living in a poor community, an indigenous community in Mexico for about a fifth of the time each year, reminds me of all this innovation and creative disruption that emerges out of poor communities that enriches all that that news story isn't just coming from the berries and the mertons, it's, it's, it's emerging on every edge with people thinking about it in terms of race, class, and gender or any other way we wanna think about people on the edge.
Victoria: Which makes sense. The dominant culture needs to, in order to remain dominant, push those with any different perspective way of being to, well, they'd rather have it go outta the edges, but they, they remain on the edges because that's kind of how empires and dominance works.
So looking toward any people, any like species who has been pushed to the edges makes sense that that's the place where we need to listen most deeply.
Gary: You know, when empires fall, you always have this beautiful counter movement that, that's part of the, the book against the American Grain, but let's even go deeper.
Our whole tradition in Christianity of desert spirituality and contemplative practice emerged in the desert of the Seti. That's where we get our word, asceticism. Obviously it's older in the Judaic traditions and that, but as a real movement, we could say that when there was a hostile takeover of the Catholic Church by the Roman Empire, a lot of soulful people dropped out of the Empire, and it was a little bit like the sixties and early seventies in the United States and Europe.
But those people set up both communal places for retreat in the desert and, um, individual hermitages where they could, they could be alone. We're never alone, of course, but they can be present to every other than human, uh, spirit in the world. And so I, I think we go through cycles of that and to have despair about this cycle of collapse and renewal.
It's not necessary to be desperate now because if we look back at those other movements, we can see that people just like us have gone through this phase of growing pains and renewal and it's, it's a blessing, not a curse.
Victoria: Hmm. Wow. There you are again with that beautiful reframe. I wonder, and I've hear, I've heard this from a lot of different people using different language.
This is a time like Bio Ku Lafe says, this is a time to go into the cracks. This is a time to, you know, gather together with others in a place of refugia. This is a sanctuary of, um, you know, of sanity. These kinds of words of, of drawing together with your neighbors, your actual person to person, neighbors. I love to connect that with what you said about soulful people dropped out of the empire, you know, they went into deeper relationship with the wild, that's where they went.
Is that, you know, how can that be a model for us? In what and why? You know, it's a little harder to find deserts, uh, perhaps to, uh, hide, to walk out of the empire. You can't fully walk out. But there are ways to do that. There are ways to walk out and to be in the empire, but not of it, so to speak.
Gary: That's right. And many of us that are involved in the Church of the Wild Movement have had one step in institutions and one step out, you know? Mm-hmm. One leg in and one leg out. I'm not disparaging any of our faith-based institutions, but they need us to challenge them to embrace this new story and the wider wilder world, just as much as we need contact with them.
We all need contact with other soulful people. And so that's why those institutions were set up. But I think at this moment in time in America, what I've been talking about to farmers the last month and a half is agrarian sanctuaries. That that we have perhaps half of our agricultural workforce of people that bring us our daily bread threatened and terrorized by potential deportation, even documented immigrants and refugees feel the stress of this moment, this threat of mass deportation that may not care about whether they really have papers or not.
And what I sense may emerge is that churches, synagogues, mosques, Zen centers have about 17 million acres of land in the US that could become legal sanctuary. Just like when I was young. I was blessed by being in the community where the sanctuary movement started with John Fife, uh, uh, Presbyterian and, and Jim Corbeta.
Qua, as he called it, the Mexicans called them a Quaker, um, and 800 churches, um, 200 religious orders. Um, 600 interfaith nonprofits offered sanctuary to more than 50,000 immigrants and refugees. Climate refugees, war refugees during that period. We need not to place them in just sanctuary cities because they're gonna be under attack, but it's sanctuaries of the wild and agrarian sanctuaries out in the hinterlands where they're less of a target while they're completing their legal processes.
And so this is a time when the Church of the Wild in groups like Agrarian Trust that has a faith lands movement need to be in dialogue with each other. The conservation of wild lands and what we practice as Church of the Wild celebrants need to be in dialogue more than ever before.
Victoria: Beautiful.
Yes. That's a, a call to action that's very concrete. And, and, and you are also saying like, in those 17 million acres. Could also not only be a sanctuary for the people, but for the food.
Gary: That's right. Uh, I mean, the thread of the potential deportation of half our agricultural workforce and our food service worker workforce means that there's gonna be big hit to American food security, food prices and all of that.
And I don't wanna go too far in that, but places have. Churches and synagogues have been willed lands by widows or widowers that are farms, that are community gardens, that are ranch lands, where these people who grew up in agricultural cultures can mentor us. Many of them are from desert countries of how to grow food better in a hotter, drier world.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Gary: The, the churches and synagogues and, uh, Buddhist and Hindu centers can help support that and get food from people who know how to grow up better than most of us know how to do it. And so we need to see those people not just as hands, labor. I hate that term for our, uh, the people who bring us our daily bread, but of minds and hearts and, and knowledge that can help America through this transition.
Victoria: It's just, it's, it's that, um, it's just so ironic. It's so ironic that it makes you realize there's some other thing going on, that as the, you know, the national government is trying to decrease diversity, the very thing we need the most is to listen to those who are most diverse from us.
Gary: Oh, absolutely. And of course, you and I feel enriched by many faith traditions. We've never bought into cultural appropriation of them, but, but to accompany them to attend, to listen to them is really important. And they enrich the spiritual life of Americans so many ways. A cousin of mine, uh, Christine Warren, has written a book about how meat packing plant workers in the Midwest have really brought back churches that were almost abandoned, um, because they, they brought liberation theology with them from Latin America into the Midwest in places where over the last quarter century we, we've gone from 200 acre farms to 2000 to 4,000 acre farms. The landscape, the agrarian landscape was depopulated, and these people are faith-based people, and most farmers and farm workers are, I don't know how you could farm without a, a sense of faith because you know you're not in control and you know that uncertainty is part of your life.
But that's obviously what farm workers know in their daily lives, perhaps more than anyone else. And so they're enriching our society already, and we need to accompany them through this crisis because they stand to enrich us, not only in terms of our food, but our religious practices.
Victoria: Right? I mean, if, if what we are about in our own spirituality is at the core, love your neighbor.
You know, just that simple. I mean it's how do we practice being a faith immersed person? It's just that simple. No matter what you get back from it. It's just when those who are and more than human as well, when those who are targeted for violence, it is just being, being an alive person of love.
Gary: That's right.
And that's why I, I think I, I love the joining of the two words, cultural resistance. I'm not a political strategist. I'm not asking for a political revolt. I, I don't, I believe in one nation under, uh, indivisible, under our creator or of our creator, since we're all part of creation. But cultural resistance is a broader thing that includes spiritual resistance.
So the way Walter Brueggeman and other people like that have used that term and cultural resistance means that we resist being divided, that we resist challenges to our constitutional right to spiritual expression. And that's why my latest initiative about sacred and ceremonial plants recovery not, uh, with indigenous communities is saying construction of walls and other efforts to divide us cannot trample on wild places where sacred and ceremonial plants used by indigenous people for thousands of years have grown and they've cared for them. Their constitutional right to religious expression is also embedded in those plans.
We can't say to a catholic church, by the way, we have a new law that overrides your religious freedom and communion wafers, uh, have to be taken out of every church because they might be contaminated. We, we can't do that with any action of the government overrides, uh, indigenous people's First Nations, right? They have access to the plants and animals and lands that are, have been part of their spiritual expression before a single built church was erected on North American soil. So I'm not just offering my hope that this crisis will reengage us with immigrants and refugees, but also with indigenous peoples to accompany them in their efforts to protect their sacred land.
Victoria: [ Transition music plays]
Yeah, it's so integrated. It, it feels like, I mean, everything's just so crazy right now. Like what you're saying makes so much sense and so therefore it's disconnected from what's happening in as far as the, feels like two different worlds are colliding so that cultural resistance is at the, is at that edge.
Gary: You know, and I, I think that why we feel so overwhelmed right now is that we feel slapped every day, uh, by news of something there.
I, I mean everyone, I mean, everyone, Democrat and Republican we're just caught off grounded. You know, I had this wonderful revelatory experience one time when I went to Assissi as a Franciscan and wanted to do a silent retreat there, and I walked down to the San Damiano chapel that Jesus restored when, when he heard the voice that said, Francis, repair my, my church because it was broken.
And of course he rebuilt it with stone and then the voice said, no, I mean, the church, it needs repair, not the building, but, but I, I went there for a silent retreat and there'd just been the earthquake in Assissi a couple years ago, and I got to the silent retreat and there were jack hammers.
Victoria: Oh my gosh.
Gary: At the time I was there for my silent retreat working on the building foundation and all of that. But I went in anyway to the chapel and I was just disoriented like we all are now. Like the noise is civilization impinging on my most adored sanctuary of Franciscan practice. And as I sat there sort of weeping and looking up with this damiano cross above the altar, I saw Jesus's feet wiggling and I, I cleared my eyes.
Said, oh, it must be because I'd been weeping the, I'm here during this enormous heavy metal version of jackhammers singing. And then I heard a voice that said, you know, the feet were still wiggling in Italian ,by the way, take little steps. Just take little steps in the right direction. And I think that's all what we have to do.
We are disabled by feeling overwhelmed. And if we take little steps in our daily practice in our communion with the saints who live all around us, both human and not human, I, I don't think we'll be immobilized and frozen out of right action.
Victoria: That's so beautiful. That is what it means to, of resilience.
It's just a little step. With, and I love that the, with the saints, the people, the grass, the
Gary: un, you know that the saints are as ordinary as you and me. They're, I mean, in other words, every time we, we gather together, there's saints among us and I, I think we've elevated and reified saint hood and prophet as terms.
We make them unreachable of, you know, it's like people who believe that the, that miracle stopped, uh, when the last chapter of the Bible was written. I always love running into people who say, oh yeah, when God wrote the last Bible in chapter of the Bible, and of course some of those people think it was written in English, miracles stopped.
Yeah. And a miracle are all around us. Around.
Victoria: We live in miracles and it's, it's about, and what you're talking about too is that resiliency of which is just basically the spiritual path of being fully aware of the, the suffering and also fully aware of the joy holding both the grief and the celebration at the same time.
Is, is not an easy thing, but it is, I think the spiritual path.
Gary: My dear sister, what I loved about first meeting you at Warren Wilson College at our little retreat up there was we were in a retreat where we could easily be overwhelmed by words, and then you took us out into the woods and our spiritual practice was not so much what came out of our mouth, but what we took in our nose and we took in our ears.
And little altars that we were building with our hands. And I think the other antidote to despair is that tangible, palpable ritual of connection that is at the base of your life. And that to me, you're one of the most beautiful and vivacious and invigorated proponents of in the spiritual communities of America and beyond.
Right now, we need that reminder that we're in our heads too much, and that the Celtic traditions, the Kabbalistic traditions, the Sufi traditions, the traditions of St. John. Cross and Avila, I'll bring us back into our bodies.
And our senses. We need to come to our senses and that's what I love about your charism the most.
Victoria: Mm-hmm. Well, thank you so much Gary. So kind and, and it's, that is, like you said earlier on our bodies and our intuition is how we enter into conversation with those who need to be cured the most. Whether we can speak that we think we can speak that language or not, you know, so to understand with our mind the, what the tree is saying to us is less important than entering into relationship with that tree, that person, that situation.
Gary: To me, to me, the, the interesting thing is I. I worked 35 years as a desert ecologist, is that we all get trained in isolating things to species or during reduction, reduction area experiments in science, and it's really about the interactions, the ecological interactions make or break the health of where we live, pollinators, butterflies, and milkweeds, whatever example we may wish to use, but.
What changed me as an ecologist even was realizing that the creator is incarnate in the world and even in my body. That, that, that somehow, I, I think most people don't get the sense of what that word incarnate means. We, we don't have to go away to find God. We can celebrate the wonder of creation.
As an embodiment within us and around us, rather than something abstract or distant in any other way. And doing the kinds of creative liturgy that Church of the Wild communities do is an expression of incarnation.
Victoria: Hmm. Beautiful. Yes, that's true. It really is. It occurred to me while you were talking that there's, um, a limitation for those of us English speaking western minded people.
That's part of our undoing and re-learning. I love how in indigenous languages, including Hebrew, it's very verb based, and so it's all about the interactions between, it's all about the dance. And so it's like a totally different worldview for us to, to move from this tree and that squirrel and me standing here.
But it's like the relationship between is, is the sacred presence, like it is like there's some something foundational in the practice of religion reconnection.
Gary: Yeah.
Victoria: That is about relationship.
Gary: Yeah, that ties it bind. That religio word is so much actually, you know, oikos, the word that ecology is from, is the, the same kind of sense that it's relational.
And I, one exercise I do on my morning walking meditation with my Aussie Shepherd dog is not name the plants and animals that I'm seeing, but come up with goofy names for the relationships between them. Like,
Victoria: oh, that's awesome. Give an example,
Gary: like instead of Milkweed or Monarch, it's, well, lovely flutter, descending on, on blossom and sucking nectar, so, so you don't have to name the Milkweed the Monarch.
Name, the relationship you stay with, uh, the verbs of relationships and why I think we have a lot of Americans divorced from inquisitiveness about the natural world is that the way we were taught about nature in schools was about the thingness of nature. Yeah. Not the re relationality, the interactions, the dynamisms.
And so we, people just say, I don't want learn another freaking name for a plant in Latin. That stuff gets in my head and it stuffs it, and I can't think about anything else. And if we move to teaching children first about those relationships, they stick with it.
Victoria: Reteaching ourselves. I love that. As a spiritual practice, I'm gonna, I'm gonna suggest that at Seminary of the Wild.
That's a beautiful practice.
Gary: You know, I, I love that seminary has the root word of seed in it, that, that it nursery grounds. You know, we're just like the root word of the root meaning of academy in Greek is walking together in a grove of trees.
Victoria: No way. Oh, I'm gonna use that too.
Gary: And that's why Academy and Macadamia, that's so, I don't know if I got my degrees from academia or a Macadamia, but point is, let's say, let's say that I've ended up a nut either way can, so, so I, I really mean that, that there's ancient expressions.
Not just in Christianity. I love the continuity of some of those in the, the Orthodox churches, all that embodiment being through all of our senseis. Uh, a friend of mine, had a, a visit with, uh, patriarch of, uh, Orthodox Church, and they talked about 140 different kinds of plants used in incense in the Greek Orthodox Church and how some of them had become rare and hard to find frankincense over being over harvested and so is Myr for putting them in capsules for anti-inflammation work. That their point was not the endangerment so much as the wonder that people for thousands of years have maintained this connection with 140 plants.
Victoria: Hmm.
Gary: In incense and why Incense? Incense is the recognition of people every day of the invisible connection to the universe that the spirit is present, even though we may not see it.
Victoria: Yeah. And in the plant. I mean that it, that it's not just like spirit. It's not just taking something like a smell and making it not concrete Right.
But through the concrete, like through the actual honoring of these 140 particular plants and the awareness of that. 'cause I think even within a lot of, uh, contemporary non Eastern churches that's been lost completely.
Gary: Yeah, and, and because when I had my traumatic brain and eye injuries, my vision diminished.
My smell exploded, is just a spiritual practice of just burning something at the start of a, a ceremony or start of my contemplative practice, just like bringing my little gong that our mutual friend gifted me when he brought students down here. So, so those things of what sensory accompaniment we got in our spiritual contemplative practice, I think is really important, that those are not trivial.
They ground us, they're part of that religio. We open ourselves to the amazing world of sound that is being overwhelmed by street noise and TV and, and everything else. We, we open ourself to, to sense rather than industrial pollution. And then many of us become defenders or stories of those presences rather than letting them further slip away.
Two old friends of mine, David Rothenberg, the jazz musician and Bird song compiler. He, he actually does concerts in zoos with birds.
Victoria: Mm-hmm.
Gary: Um, he has turned his attention to plants and even aquatic plants. So we put a microphone down in our pond and we listened to, to algae, um, uh, singing and, and it just opens up worlds within worlds.
And that's what's happening to me with desert fragrances. We, you know, when we have, my first book was called The Desert Smells like Rain. And every time we have a pulse of rain like this last week, this extraordinary evocative, um, musky smell emerges from the earth and from all the plants that for months of drought, have just layered on one layer after another of volatile oils on their leaves to protect them from damaging radiation and desiccation, and then it rains and all of that washes into the air.
40, 50 different kinds of plants are signaling to us. We just got a, a celebratory message that we can start growing again. Hooray. And, and the desert just explodes with scent. Yeah, and we, we realized like that all this life underground is communicating with us. All the plants that we think are dormant are almost dead after months and months of drought are doing their Hallelujah chorus through fragrances. All of my technical research is on that, that that scent, not visual cures or, or sound, is really the, the most widespread way that different organisms communicate with one another. That, that, you know, um, can't really make much sounds, but they're constantly communicating with plants, animals and us. Um, and a lot of the fragrances that we attribute to the genome of plants exclusively are really fragrances that are coming from that they're connected to. Okay? So they're giving us, uh, cues, triggers, uh, warnings, celebratory shouts all day long. And we just need to. Learn how to tune into that.
Victoria: Remember how to, right, because you knew that when you were little.
Gary: That's right.
Victoria: You didn't, you knew exactly what that was. Well, a lot of the, A lot of this is remembering, remembering what's deep within our DNA, remembering what we knew when we were born, remembering what our great, great ancestors practice.
Gary: And that's of course, like religio, remember, become part of the community again. You know, and, and I just, I just feel that, that that's our task in front of us right now. To remember to re story, to restore the earth by remembering its original story and. We can't really restore a wounded place unless we know it's deep story.
And so, uh, restorative justice means listening to stories that were being erased and damage. Restoring a wounded landscape has to have that restoring. As part of it, if a community is going to stick with the healing of that place, uh, crew can't come in, plant trees and it's restored. It takes decades of a community being committed to a piece of land to restore and re-story it.
Victoria: Thank you. So beautiful Gary Brother Coyote.
[ Nature sounds begin]
Encounters with the holy wild can happen when we're open to them. When we approach the natural world with reverence and an open heart, each week I'm offering an invitation for you to wander in the wildest places in your home and to do so with reverence. So that you might enter into sacred conversation with the holy and the wild yourself.
Gary talked about something today that I was intrigued with when I wrote Church of the Wild. The Consequences of Living in a Culture with a noun based orientation. English is one of those noun based languages that orients people to the separateness of things. This bush, that butterfly, my land, your car, but verb base languages, those that most indigenous peoples have spoken throughout history, orient the speaker to see the relationship between all things. They're oriented to the dance rather than the dancer. We need a new language in our culture to orient ourselves to this shift. To an emerging and yet ancient worldview of interconnected relationship. So let's start to do that. See if this week you can wander in your place with an intention to create a practice for yourself that honors the unique presence and gifts of particular plants in your place.
So wander and see if there's a plant or a tree that wants to engage in conversation with you. Who's interested maybe in developing a relationship. I don't know how to explain how you would know that, but you just trust that inner feeling that you get when you choose a particular plant. And you ask permission, and that can be something casual, like, Hey, are you up for this?
And then listen. And when you feel a nudge a yes, then begin by paying attention to this plant. But pay attention to them in terms of their relationship with all the other beings that are important to them. And then name them. As Gary suggested, go there and name all the different little relationships that you observe.
I love how Gary named not Milkweed and Monarch as their thingness, but he named them through their relationship. He said, lovely flutter, descending on blossom sucking nectar. Do this with playfulness and with a poetic spirit. And see what shifts start to happen in your language and your orientation to the world.
I would guess that the holy and the beloved community of all wild beings might start to shift a little bit.
Alex: Hi, I am Alex. Um, I'm calling from New York City and, um, calling from the Lenape People's Land. And I wanted to share my encounter in the wild. Um, one of the most profound, uh, moments of encounter I had was at the beach in Florida where my parents live, and I was coming kind of with some big soul questions and I walked into the ocean and felt a whisper around the ocean, baptizing me and feeling a.
Kind of coming from Christianity and deconstruction and releasing a lot of past dogma and, uh, embracing more mystery and just feeling this call from the wild, the ocean, the waves to surrender and release. And be held and renewed and just this new way of being that was surrounded by love and wisdom with the waves.
And so I kind of felt this, yeah, sacred conversation happen between me and the waters and the waves around me. And, uh, release. And went under the waves, came back up, and then I was surrounded by a school of fish that was just so, felt, so magical, loving, surrounded by this wisdom, and felt the multitudes of divine around me and just surrounded.
Stephen: Have you experienced an encounter with a tree or a wild being, or a particular place that felt sacred? Maybe it's an everyday occurrence or something more mystical. Did it occur to you that you may have been entangled in a holy conversation? If you have such a story, please record a voice memo on your phone in a quiet space with the microphone about six inches from your face while speaking softly.
If you're comfortable, share your name and where on earth you're speaking from. Please keep it no longer than five minutes and email the voice memo as an attachment to Hello at Wild Spirituality Earth, putting sacred conversation in the subject line. We'd love to share your voice and your story in sacred conversation.
This has been another episode of the Holy Wild. For more information about the movement to restore sacred relationship with Earth, visit Wild spirituality.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.