Access this newsletter in our online archives

Dear For The Wild Community, 

We hope that this missive finds you cozy, warm, and embraced by the land around you. As many of us may be feeling now as the Northern Hemisphere grows darker and grief seems to settle into our souls, it is impossible to carry the weight of the world alone. As we witness and feel the violence, unease, and unrest of the world around us, rituals of community, remembrance, and connection to the earth are life-affirming in the most important ways. We hope this month’s conversations and offerings bring forth a soft moment of respite and camaraderie. 

We’re offering a sneak peak of our newly released Zine – The Grief Edition.

November Zine: The Grief Edition

How can we bear to grieve in times such as these? How can we bear not to?

The Grief Edition is our second installment in our new zine series. This zine is meant to facilitate a ritual of grief and a soft space to be held throughout the process. Grief can be a lifelong process and we hope that this zine offers evergreen companionship throughout the ebbs and flows. The Grief Edition features wisdom from Andrea Gibson, Yoalli Rodriguez, Stephen Jenkinson, Perdita Finn, Jacqueline Suskin, and Katrina Spade. With 30 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.

To read the full zine, please join us on Patreon at the $5 tier or greater or buy it directly on our website. 

The accompanying playlist that patreons will receive with the zine is a collection of sounds in embrace of transitions, a reminder that the dead want to hear from you, a call to listen with no rush (a resistance to erasures), and an opportunity to let grief bloom life and song.

Excerpt:
Grief beckons at odd times. In times of the year when the veil feels especially thin, when tears seem to be the only balm, what is the Earth calling us to grieve? 

In a culture that shies away from the pain of facing our sorrows, that fears and cloaks death, grief is a vital balm for the individual and the collective.

The prompts, excerpts, and guides in this zine are designed to guide you through a journey of grief that is spacious, that makes room for play, and for deep emotions of all kinds. Wisdom from past guests like Andrea Gibson, Yoalli Rodriguez, and more opens up many pathways for coming to know grief. In this, we invite you to pause and take the time you need for those things in your life that may feel too heavy, that may be begging for attention. Let time be spacious. There is room for feeling here.

FARIHA RÓISÍN on the Courage of Listening to Our Bodies /354

This week, Fariha Róisín offers both timely and timeless wisdom on what it means to live in a body that has experienced trauma. This is a conversation that bears witness to the deep terror and distress of the world and still charges forward with undying compassion and care – the compassion and care of wild survival. 

Offering both deep personal reflection and spacious contemplation about the state of the world, Fariha reminds us that our bodies guide us to what we need. This episode brings up the things that we so often don’t want to touch – trauma, abuse, global systems of disregard – and handles them with care and love. Fariha shows us what it means to take pain seriously. It takes courage to listen to our bodies – especially bodies that have been abused, subject to violence, and forced into paradigms of “wellness” that do not work. As we face the new horizons of this rapidly changing world, how can we understand the world by understanding ourselves and our bodies?  

Throughout the episode Fariha threads in a profound relationship with god, and a type of faith that is filled with questioning, fueled by queer thought, and driven by love. In even the darkest of times we can turn to love, accountability, and community to find the care that we need.

Invoking ancestry, magic, and a deep relationship with the Dead, this week’s guest Perdita Finn invites listeners into a world of mystery. Perdita’s work, including her new book Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, calls humanity to engage with a faith in the unseen world, a faith in surrender, and a faith in the other side. For Perdita, this faith is not rooted in an otherworldly abstract idea of spirituality, but rather a grounded, embodied experience. 

Following ecology, not theology, Perdita calls us to think about the ecological equation – the reality of bodies feeding other bodies, of death opening a portal to another life. This is a reality that animals, plants, and all our more-than-human kin know well. How can we tap into their earthly wisdom? 

As we come to face the existential questions of our time – war, climate change, and disasters of all kinds – Perdita reminds us that we are not alone. We can lean on our ancestors, both human and more-than-human, for strength. As we live into the long story of our souls, what wisdom can we pull from lives beyond this one? Tapping into creativity, resilience and connectedness, life comes after life, comes after life, and the meaning of our cyclical lineage is ever-present. 

 As those of us in the Northern Hemisphere enter into autumn, this week’s guest Jacqueline Suskin reminds us that the earth gives us dedicated time for reflection. In a conversation that roots deeply into seasonality and life’s rhythms, Jacqueline’s meditations and suggestions feel perfectly timed. 

Jacqueline uses her book A Year in Practice as a practical guide for finding inspiration and meaning throughout the seasons. Detailing her ongoing connection to the earth and the wonder she feels about humanity's place within and as a part of nature, Jacqueline details the way our rhythms are drawn from those of the earth. Even as the climate changes and we are beginning to lose the predictability of earth’s rhythms, our bodies carry the memory and significance of the seasons.

For Jacqueline, poetry serves as a vital foundation to sit with the earth and the seasons as they undergo such significant change. Poetry offers insight into how we might navigate how to change with a changing world. In a time of both endless possibility and the end of possibility, Ayana and Jacqueline contemplate how to address the need for this change with an understanding of the competing pull of patience and urgency. Jacqueline reminds us that to find meaning in the sea of hope and hopelessness within modern movements, we must bear witness to the earth.

This past month’s episodes inspire deep questions and options for conversation.  Write with these prompts in your journal, share them with your kin, or shout them into the wild. However you engage with them, we hope they offer a moment of pause, respite, and imagination. 

Join us on Patreon for a library of deeply-rooted resources.

Listener support is one of our main funding sources, so if you enjoy the podcast and want to see it keep running, please consider signing up for monthly support. Support us here.