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Dear For The Wild Community, 

Join us this month in rooting into rest, nestling into grief, and burrowing into love. As spring calls to us in the northern hemisphere, let us remember that our roots are just as important as the buds of new growth. 

In this spirit of connection, possibility, and creativity, our team is dreaming up and even deeper explorations of what For The Wild is and might be. Thank you for journeying with us.

We are nothing without each other. Who has loved you into being? How can you surrender to these lineages of love? 

The Art of Surrender is our fifth installment in our digital zine series. This zine is meant to facilitate a surrender towards love and reflections on the interconnections of our lives. 

The Art of Surrender features excerpts from brontë velez, adrienne maree brown, Alok Vaid-Menon, Gabes Torres, and Alynda Mariposa Segarra, who bring together reflections and insights that show the power of surrender. Pulling from deep wells of queer, feminist, and decolonial theory, these excerpts are thick and potent. They connect our singular lives to the deep forces of love, community, and interdependence that affect us all. They invite nuance and multitudes of interpretation. We hope you find them resonant. 

The zine also features a playlist that centers a meandering set of songs to feel every part of letting go, letting in, and letting up. 

With 35 pages of content including: guided ritual, meditations, prayers, episode excerpts, hand-selected episode quotes, reflection questions, and resources to further deepen your practices, we hope you find resonance with this offering.

Zine Excerpt

To What Must We Surrender? Forces beyond the individual call to us to listen, love calls for our surrender, the natural rhythms of the earth call out to guide us. In listening to these calls, in surrendering to forces much bigger than ourselves, how can we attune our senses to a world of connection and compassion?  

Remaining vigilant though, we must remember that forces of capitalism, of patriarchy, of prejudice call us to surrender too. How can we learn to tune into what forms of surrender will bring spaciousness and peace and which will bring further harm? In refusing to submit to these systems, how can we find surrender, pleasure, and joy in that which lies beyond?  

For more in-depth reflections, practices, reflection prompts, and episode excerpts themed around topics like rest, grief, ritual, and gratitude, you can purchase them on our website or sign up for our Patreon at The Study ($5 USD) tier or higher.

THREE BLACK MEN on the World as Ritual /368

We are thrilled to bring you a special conversation from a dear friend of the podcast Bayo Akomolafe. Recorded while in Ghana for the Three Black Men Tour, this conversation features the voices of Bayo Akomolafe, Resmaa Menakem, Orland Bishop, Victoria Santos and Okhiogbe Omonblanks Omonhinmin, all of whom were involved with the conversation and presentation of the Three Black Men tour. 

In 2023, Resmaa, Bayo and Orland shared space as they visited three cities across three continents, tracing a diasporic route in reverse from Los Angeles in The United States, to Salvador in Brazil, and finally to Accra in Ghana. 

Through the tour, these three visionary Black men, sharing their leading edges, are inviting us into a radical re/imagination of how we respond to our time. They sense into emergent possibilities, triangulating toward a synthesis of new forms, new magic, and new directions.

This conversation touches on the community of care that Bayo, Resmaa, Orland, Victoria, and Omon contributed to and experienced across the tour, the lessons they learned from this undertaking, and visions for what is to come. As each conversation partner emphasizes, “Blackness” is about far more than pigmentation. It is a call to re-story the world, to reimagine possibilities. Together they discuss the cracks, callings and visions that invite us into a paradigm shift that none of us could imagine alone.

Learn more about the tour at threeblackmen.com and centerforhealingandliberation.com.

Winding through questions of philosophy, science, and meaning making, this week’s episode brings together vital thoughts on what it means to live an embodied life in an entangled world. Guest Merlin Sheldrake shares the motivations that drew him to study fungi and the complex ways this study has shaped his life and thought. 

As Merlin shares, “an account of life that doesn't include fungi is an account of life that doesn’t exist.” Our relationship with fungi is non-negotiable. Merlin invites listeners to pay attention to what this relationship means and how it shapes not only our lives, but the entanglement of life across the world. With this, Merlin also shares the ways fungal life offers a diversity of expressions and possibilities – offering up the perspective that the diversity and complexity of relationship and expression is what makes life fertile. 

Across the episode, Merlin and Ayana contemplate the history and meaning of science, and come to see life as a process and a relationship, for “being is always being with and becoming is always becoming with.” The meaning we make does not come out of a vacuum, but rather out of relationship. The ways that we process information and create metaphors show us who we are as a culture. Life itself, in its many forms, is improvisational. Understanding this, we are left with the provocation: How might we speak to the world, rather than about it?

Jarod K. Anderson has a new book out! Delving into nature, mental health, and the life journeys that sustain us, this book is a beautiful peek into the ways our minds are intimately connected to the world around us. 

Check out his book here and his interview with For The Wild from last year!

Theme: Embracing Connection

• What connections can you control? Which can you not? How can you create intentionality in thee connections regardless?
  – from THE ART OF SURRENDER: Practice + Resource Zine
  
  

• What webs connect you to the more than human world?
  – from MERLIN SHELDRAKE on Embodied Entanglements /365
  
  

• What rituals do you allow to guide your life? How do they serve you?
  – from THREE BLACK MEN on the World as Ritual /368
  
  

• How do boundaries, both from yourself and others, allow you to more fully embrace the things that give your life purpose?
  – from JAROD K. ANDERSON on Reclaiming Limits /319
  
  

• What metaphors allow you to understand yourself and others more fully?
  – from MERLIN SHELDRAKE on Embodied Entanglements /365
  
  

• Design a ritual of connection to the world. What does it look like? What is it inspired by?
  – from THREE BLACK MEN on the World as Ritual /368

Join Herban Cura for an upcoming knowledge share next Wednesday, March 20th, 2024 on Militarism and the Environment: Impacts on Palestine facilitated by Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh. 

Topics that will be explored:

• Militarism’s ecological impacts on the land and people

• Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the destruction of Palestinian ecology

• Groundwater pollution

• The occupation’s impacts on flora and fauna

• Israel’s weaponization of the land

A percentage of the proceeds received from this knowledge share will be given to APN, (Arab Group for the Protection of Nature).