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Dear For The Wild Community, 

As we embrace SLOW – appreciation for the last dregs of sunset, the life cycles of the plants around us, the long conversations with friends, the intentional work it takes to build community – we are reflecting on the resources, people, and spaces that make us feel supported and capable of growth. 

As we take the time to notice all that does and can support us, the world’s abundance is made noticeable. 

In the spirit of abundance, we want to share an excerpt written by Lynnee Jacks in our most recent zine:

Cover art by Kristin Anchors

Art by Rachel Fae Coleman

How we approach the gifts of the Earth often depends on the level of presence we feel, the connection we feel to our surroundings, and our approach to a situation. By tending to our attentions, taking the time to slow down and notice, a temperment of gratitude and appreciation is easier to cultivate. Find the entire ritual guide in the newest zine.

Want to contribute?

If you are an artist and would like to have your art featured in one of our zines, submit your work here. 

If you are an author and would like to have your writing featured in one of our zines, submit your work here.

Zine Giveaway

As a token of appreciation for our newsletter subscribers, we will be randomly selecting one person from our list to receive downloads of our three most recent zines (ABUNDANCE: Reveling In & Respecting the Earth's Pleasures, AT THE EARTH'S PACE: Meditations on Slow Media & Slow Being, PRACTICAL WISDOM for TIMES OF RENEWAL). These zines pair together to offer sweet summer balm, a deep well of resources, and a space for sweet reflection.

If you’ve already receive this newsletter, you are automatically entered!

If you would like another chance to enter, head over to our Instagram to tag a friend, like the post, and follow us by end of day on Tues, July 23rd. Look out for a dm or email in the next week to see if you’ve been selected to win!

Episodes to spark the fire, to remind you of your connection to the sun, to tap into the dark soils from where we grow, and to encourage the pursuit of deep, rooted justice.

The natural world is, in fact, not separated from any one of us, and in detailing her work with Herban Cura, Antonia brings her insight on connections to plants and land within urban settings expanding the horizons of intimacy between humans and plants across human-imposed boundaries. As Antonia shares more about her New York City and familial Chilean roots, she reminds us of the value of connection to places for spiritual, ancestral, and medicinal means.

Cultural and ancestral knowledge are vital to everyone’s survival in a world marred by colonial violence. What healing can be found within our own backyards, our own lineages? Perhaps the plants will lead us home once again – as they always have.

“With a prayer to imagine beyond the current structures and systems, and kind of weave ourselves into, and be wrapped inside of, the invisible cloak that is interdependence, that is mutual aid, that supports us to reach towards each other and reach towards a vision of mutually flourishing life.”

This powerful vision is shared by this week’s guest, Dori Midnight. In this sweet, meaningful, and meandering conversation, Dori discusses magical and liberatory practices, ancestral Jewish healing traditions, and the necessity of reclaiming Judaism from Zionism in the name of collective liberation.

She shares sweet stories of garlic and cedar, the generosity of belonging, and the blessing of our collective and intricate work as we stretch toward liberation.

Across Turtle Island, seeds have long been passed down through the generations — accompanied by ceremony and prayer, reverent seed cultures, and sustainable food growing practices. Through eras of colonization and acculturation, however, we’ve seen the consolidation of seeds into a handful of corporations and the production of a soulless industrial food landscape. This system is failing us and, as centralized infrastructure strains and buckles, we turn to the embrace of our community and the nurturance of seeds at the local and village level.

This episode is all about renewal and reanimation, as our guest Rowen White shares her thoughts on Indigenous food sovereignty, seed restoration as rematriation, and what it means to bring seed relatives home.

We are reminded in this episode that we are more than our colonial traumatic memory; we are, in fact, part of the one living reality of the natural world. According to Dr. Ward, cultivating a spiritual practice of awareness of our embeddedness with the world allows us to transcend the conditioning of the colonial mind.

Harkening to the potential for anima mundi, the creation of a new world soul, we are invited to lead in the direction of the positive deconstruction of the current world order and to be vigilant in putting our minds and behaviors toward creating generative possibilities for the planet and generations to come.

• What forces, values, and ideals drive you?
  
  

• How do you regulate your nervous system?
  What structures of these times keep our nervous systems dysregulated?
  
  

• What is your relationship with fire, heat, and passion?
  
  

• Who do you turn to when times get to be too much?
  Who turns to you when times get to be too much?
  
  

• How do you balance community support, dedication to your ideals, and the practices of regulation and boundaries that keep you healthy and safe?

A Closing Poem

from bell hook’s Appalachian Elegy

4.

earth works
thick brown mud
clinging pulling
a body down
hear wounded earth cry
bequeath to me
the hoe the hope
ancestral rights
to turn the ground over
to shovel and sift
until history
rewritten resurrected
returns to its rightful owners
a past to claim
yet another stone lifted to
throw against the enemy
making way for new endings
random seeds
spreading over the hillside
wild roses
come by fierce wind and hard rain
unleashed furies
here in this untouched wood
a dirge a lamentation
for earth to live again
earth that is all at once a grave
a resting place a bed of new beginnings
avalanche of splendor