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“May we trust and nourish and be part of the larger fruiting body of all freedom and flourishing movements for one another.” —Brooke Kuhnhausen
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Dear Wild Nature Hearts,
A few days ago, I woke up feeling overwhelmed. I sensed my imagination waning. Perhaps you can relate to that sensation of constriction that can arise when you've been digesting too much about climate catastrophes, shameless capitalist exploitation and commodification, patriarchal domination and supremicist abuses of all kinds. The energies of both anger and grief swirled in me, that these systems of impoverished imagination are running rampant over so many lives, that it doesn’t have to be this way.
 I wondered how to deepen my role in enriching our heartstorming for co-creating systems that support life and liberation. Then I took/gave a sacred pause with mycelium and fungi (see Mycelium Gratitude below) that were newly emerging after the first greatly appreciated rains of the season. The yellowing bay leaves among the redwoods and beautiful slugs and snails joined the conversation. They helped re-invigorate an imagination that had been temporarily truncated by dominant/dominator culture.
I was reminded of all the unseen, unlifted and  beautiful work and play that is being done in service of Life and Liberation. How both slow and rapid processes are involved in breaking down the old and building up the new. How growth can be slow like giant trees adding ring upon ring over great stretches of time or quick like mushrooms popping up over night with sudden exuberance (puhpowee, in the Potawatomi language, according to Robin Wall Kimmerer).
How unseen networks link whole ecosystems, non-human and human. How intimately connected seemingly far-flung people and events are. For example, how intricately bound up the women and girls uprising in Iran against an abusive regime is  to struggles in the United States for women’s right to bodily autonomy and growing resistance to patriarchal censorship and control, to black liberation struggles for reparations and against police brutalities, to indigenous struggles for sovereignty, #landback, and the rights of river and salmon, to Ukrainian people’s resistance and and workers everywhere flexing their muscles for dignity. These are mycelium webs of mutual liberation.
As Rebecca Solnit writes in her book ‘Hope in the Dark’:
 “Mushroomed: after a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork-or underground work-often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists, and participants in social media.”
I would throw into this circle all of us treehugger tricksters, wild wind whisperers, full moon mystics, water wizards and sensual witches, heartbeat healers, all of us getting in the 'good trouble' of putting our shoulders to the wheel of the Great Turning in our unique way, especially when we link our gifts to collective change.
Solnit concludes, “It seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.”
 Autumn is a season of deepening. As we continue to apprentice to slug and mycelium, to listening better to the more-than-human world and those growing liberation, we practice slowing down to be with what is here. It enables us to take the next right step, and to build the capacity to hold the charges and changes at our doorstep, personally and collectively.
 Thank you for reading. May we belong to earth’s season, may we belong to the season of our lives. May we keep our muscles of imagination strong, vibrant, and full of surprises.
with spontaneous emergences and the slow growth forest of us,
Ryan
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MYCELIUM GRATITUDE
“I believe that Mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of Mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind.” —Paul Stamets
In September, people from around the world created simple rituals to express their gratitude for our Mycelium kin. Created by ONE (Organization of Nature Evolutionaries) and partners, it was a love note back to these mysterious, ancient beings that have so much to teach.
I love this because it honors an often overlooked, often unseen member of our biotic community, and doesn’t require anything but our intention to be in good relationship.
I created a simple altar and offered poetry and bows, listening to their wisdoms. While this was a coordinated and dedicated day, gratitude for mycelium and mushrooms, or gratitude for any kin, is a practice that we can offer on our own time, in our own way, in our own landscape.
See a simple and beautiful blessing offered by ONE below in the poetry section.
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NEW Embodied Book Club:
Where The Wild Books Are
 With in-person gatherings and exploration, we will nibble on, discuss, and practice a book that is at the growing edge, deepens our belonging to the animate world, and challenges the dominant/dominator culture and cultivating seeds of life and liberation.
The first book to practice is Hospicing Modernity, a book about facing the multiple crises of modernity–and hospicing modernity–with maturity, humility, and integrity.
If you are interested in joining, email me at ryan@wildnatureheart.com. As we get critical mass, we'll find a regular time/date that works for all.
Uncolonizing Thanksgiving (Nov 25)
Communal Meal, Council Circle, Film Showing, Fire Circle
as a Fundraiser/Awareness raiser For Wiyot Honor Native Land Tax
Arcata. Details coming soon.
Email ryan@wildnatureheart.com for more info and to be added to interested list.
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UPCOMING COMMUNITY EVENTS
 Earth Hospice Rites - Free Online Gatherings
Co-hosted by Trebbe Johnson of Radical Joy and Alison Cornish of The BTS Center, Earth Hospice Rites is an online, ongoing gathering place to lament, celebrate, share, and offer mindful attention to the places and species we love that are endangered. Every other Wednesday from 4:30-4:50 Eastern time (20 minutes). Earth Hospice Rites is free, but we ask you to Register first.
 From Land Acknowledgement to Land Back! (for settlers)
What does it mean to move beyond performative land acknowledgements? As we honor Native American Heritage Month join us for this arts-integrated workshop, where participants will engage in dialogue, reflection, art making, and collaboration to move beyond land acknowledgements in support of #LandBack. This workshop will invite participants to restore their relationships to land, water, peoples, and themselves.
There is one date (Nov. 12) for People of the Global Majority (BIPOC) and one date (Nov. 5) for Settlers (Non-indigenous White People). Register here.
Talking Water and Eros with brontë velez and justine epstein (Nov. 17)
"Our friendship, scholarship and praxis has many and ever-evolving intersections as comrades and clowns hospicing dying systems and reckoning towards repair with ancestors and the earth in times of deep unrest." Register here.
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 Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures
This is the most stimulating book I've encountered in a while-it had me popping with outbursts of awe and pulsating with ideas. It's a book that will have you marveling in wonder at/with these spectacular members of our earth family. Find a copy.
Decolonizing Time Podcast Interview with Ixchel Lunar (55 minutes)
A discussion the role of time in their lives including how time is hyper local, what it means to attune to the rhythms and the cycles of the land, why we often judge ourselves and others for honoring the pace of their body, what they've learned from observing turtles and sloths, and how we allow time to be stolen from us. LISTEN.
 Foundations of Somatic Abolitionism Workshop
I just finished one of the most impactful workshops I've ever participated in. With Resmaa Menakem (author or My Grandmother's Hands and The Quaking of America) and Carlin Quinn, we explored slowing down, practicing somatic skills, creating space in our nervous systems to handle the charge of racialize trauma. As a way to support co-creating an embodied anti-racist culture. It is the process of resourcing energies that are always present within one’s body, the collective body, and the world. White bodies and bodies of culture gathered separately one day, then gathered together on another day. A rich and powerful experience that I am still integrating. Learn more here and see the 2023 schedule.
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ECO MEME OF THE DAY
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From “Unraveling” by Terry Tempest Williams
We can reweave the world anew, not from the places of fear and doubt, but from the intimate spaces of belonging we must retrieve for ourselves. We are Earth unraveling and reforming creation. We are meant to engage, not isolate. These are difficult days. What causes us to recoil, strike, and retreat is also what allows us to reach out from the anxiety of unknowing and dare to trust what is to come—a reassembling of our humanity.
There is something deeper than hope. Between the hours of darkness and dawn, the voices of our ancestors are amplified in the dreamtime—warning us of our awakening wisdom—a blessing to behold and a burden to enact.”
A simple and beautiful mycelium blessing offered by ONE:
Place your hands on the Earth. Breathe deeply into your heart center and when you exhale, send love and gratitude down through your arms and fingertips to Mycelia:
Beloved Mycelia, you are the unseen, unfolding power: creating, sustaining, decomposing and regenerating life.
Plant, tree, animal, and human life benefit immeasurably from your immense network, and miraculous undertakings.
I offer you my gratitude.
Your fruits are medicine that heal our bodies, shift our consciousness, and expand our understanding.
You transmute death into rebirth.
You exemplify the sacred act of reciprocity.
I offer you my gratitude.
May we recognize you, honor you, and emulate your benevolent ways. May you be revered, recognized and encouraged.
I offer you my gratitude.
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YET THE WATER
Ryan Van Lenning
“We don’t have a word for nonlinear in our language because no one would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line the first place.”—Tyson Yunkaporta
“Standing at the foot of a map of loss is clarity.” —Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Whatever salmon were here are no longer here.
Or I cannot see them. Only this dead one
at my feet, discarded on the rocks
with a metal needle through its mouth
green plastic through its back.
Ki pierces me with a side-eye.
Yet the water.
Whatever village was here
I cannot see either.
Only this dead one at my feet.
Discarded with a dollar sign strung through
where the heart should be.
Yet the water.
We-three must stand not merely on the shore of things, but in the flow of it.
Intimacy with water
is a template for everything else.
That’s what the waterbugs sing.
The thread of this poem goes everywhere waterbugs go, and waterbugs are everywhere.
And by “this poem’ I mean your life.
And by ‘thread’ I mean that thin green line connecting everywho to everywhen.
And by waterbugs I mean the berippled ones, blessed and berivered:
“‘Til you get the river in ya man, ‘til you get the river in ya, we ain’t comin’ back to you.”
I am surprised by their accent.
Even more surprised I can hear them at all—
sometimes my ears feel full of concrete.
We-three remember when Winona LaDuke said
just go down to the river and listen—
Stop your lists your antics your theatrics
your Windigo zombie economics
and bright colonial aesthetics
and open your goddamn ears for a minute.
So we-three chip away.
After all, concrete is only as permanent as you make-believe.
It doesn’t stand a chance against jack hammer hearts of deep time.
Still less against this unstoppable flow
from back of beyond to the Big Pond
which is what Life looks like
on the side of your face.
Tributaries of memory begin to flow.
Maps emerge bearing no mile markers but the ones uttered from the land itself.
And on the deep side, under an awning of fern, our own meandering eyes register movement.
A migrating elder takes shape.
A flash of red signals north.
Yet the water.
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I acknowledge that I live in and Wild Nature Heart works in/on/with traditional Wiyot and Yurok lands, in so-called Humboldt County, CA.
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