02 tell us why you are here

on strangers, species loneliness, whales, and rivers of tears

Audio Recording

Two things to note before you listen:

(1) For the best experience, I recommend listening in a quiet place where you can have your eyes closed at times, especially for the deep story-telling parts: i dream of a whale (10 min 50 sec) & a river of tears (41 min 20 sec).

(2) I did not include the resources in the audio, so if this piece moves you and you are looking to go deeper with the material or are looking for support in terms of grief ceremony & ritual work, make sure to check out the resources at the bottom of this page!

Thanks so much for being here and for your willingness to dive deep with me <3

Maddy

PS I am not currently able to do bi-weekly recordings as I announce in the audio version ~ but the next issue will be coming as soon as I’m able!

Introduction [transcript]

In my last piece, Places I’ve Been, I attempted to give kind of an overview of the journey I’ve been on the past 6 or 7 years that I’ve been largely absent from my work in the world as who many of you have come to know as Mustang Maddy.

I’m going to start releasing some pieces on different chapters of that journey, going more in-depth, zooming in on particular moments of this journey to bring you all along, sprinkled with some real time stories and musings as well as life continues to unfold here.

So, that being said, I will probably be skipping around a little bit and before we get into today’s piece, I wanted to orient you. To give you a sense of where I was during this time, I had already experienced some really big and intense breakthroughs along a healing path I was walking. I had peeled back a lot of layers around personal trauma, familial and relational pieces, doing a lot of work also around recovering the divine feminine in a sort of Jungian approach and deep dive into the history of patriarchy and internalization of patriarchal values and repression of the feminine…

But by the spring of 2022 my low points were once again becoming more sustained. They were taking a toll on my ability to even function day to day and I felt like I was losing stamina. At this time, I was in the process of making plans to go to a long term treatment facility. But at the last minute, I backed out and went on a camel trek and felt better than I had in a long time. And feeling better whenever I was in nature was always a theme for me. So I really held onto this thread. I also felt like I couldn’t leave my horses, and didn’t have things set up to feel okay with being gone at a treatment facility. So I had a little burst from the camel trek, and there were a lot of things needing done at the ranch so I just kind of tried putting my head down and getting to work, keeping my hands busy. And of course that approach didn’t go very well and I started to really spiral downward that summer after the little burst the camel trek brought me.

I wrote about that time,

“But the depression came back, as it always did. Slowly at first, starting with tears like a leaky faucet in the evenings. Soon the leak went from a slow trickle to a full on flood again until I was drowning in my own tears. I couldn’t seem to get out of bed in the mornings, a demonic knawing at my insides so painful it took all my energy just to keep breathing. Depression is not a passive state, preying on those who are self-indulgent, weak and lazy. Depression is an active state of fighting for your life, with one part of yourself trying to push you off a cliff and the other part of yourself trying to get you to hang on just a little longer, with slipping fingers and a tiring grip.”

Around this time, late summer, I was reading a book called Dawn Again by Doniga Markegard (who was recently on Warwick Schillers podcast, actually, for those of you tuning in from the horse world). And in that book she talked about feeling lost, feeling hungry for something missing, and experiencing depression, all of which led her to going to a school called The Wilderness Awareness School in Washington, sharing how life-changing it was for her. And I just knew this was the thread, something in me knew I needed to do this, too.

Here’s something from Doniga’s book I had highlighted. It’s from a section where she’s talking about how, despite growing up with opportunities in childhood camping and backpacking, she was feeling the “call of the wild” even stronger than ever.

“This kind of calling was once something that did not need to be found. It wasn’t even a call; it was a way of life. It was there when a young child would learn the basics of life and survival: shelter, fire, water, and food. Children who were born into a traditional Indigenous tribe or clan would have known the plants, animals, birds, and all life that surrounded them, because it was their home and their survival depended on it…. I yearned to find that deep connection to the earth. Going for hikes and walking on top of the land was not allowing me to truly experience it. Needed immersion, training, and a community of people that would keep me motivated. I no longer believed endless resources for limitless extraction existed. I was questioning everything: the food I ate, the house I lived in, and the clothes I wore. I knew that the apples I picked from our front yard came directly from the earth. The vegetables we grew and the chicken eggs from the coop all came directly from the land and soil. But where did everything else come from? I had never thought to ask that question before. Where was the food that I picked up at the grocery store grown? What about the cotton that was woven into my clothes–how many stops did it make before it was lying against my skin? I started to see I was disconnected—Disconnected in such a way that I was harming the life that I loved, the only thing at the time that felt authentic and important.”

-Doniga Markegard, Dawn Again

When I looked up the school, they were running what’s called an Immersion Program that fall through the following spring, so a 9 month immersion. I went to work filling out my application, which took me a few days – the depression made it really slow going (especially when it got to questions like why do you believe you would be an asset to the program?). I finally got it done, but then felt really disheartened when they were full. It felt like the only thread left to follow, and then to realize it’s not even an option was devastating.

But then a few weeks later, I got an unexpected call. It was admissions at WAS. They said they had a spot open and asked if I would want to take it. The only catch: they would need to know in the next 48 hours. The next immersion program began in just one month.

I knew I didn’t have a choice. I honestly didn’t know if I would make it without some kind of life-changing turn of events. All I knew is that this thread was the only thing bringing me any hope in my life at that time that I could survive this. So I said I’d take it. And got to work moving to Washington with an off the track thoroughbred, a mule, a camel, and a zebra, our 4 dogs, my boyfriend, Beau, and, hilariously, the only animal of his– a cat named Taco. And off we went.

Image: the herd I brought to Washington

After a 27 hour drive and being up all night due to a heat weave (I wanted to haul animals at night because it was so hot) we pulled into where we were to stay in Washington precisely one hour before our first day of class was to begin. I unloaded the horses in a sleep deprived frenzy, left Beau to get fencing set up and drove to school a few miles away.

And so here I am in Washington for the WAS Immersion Program. We had that first day to go over logistics and a little orientation, and then there was a weeklong kind of initiation, opening ceremony for the class, and that’s where I’m at as I’m writing this piece. It’s September of 2022.

So with that, let's dive in to this week’s issue.

i dream of a whale

(*For the best experience, I recommend listening with your eyes closed if possible; this piece is @10 min 50 sec)

I am standing barefoot and blindfolded. My hands rest on the shoulders of the blindfolded stranger in front of me, and I feel unfamiliar hands resting on my own shoulders from behind me. Anticipation builds as the line of blindfolded humans begins to step, ever so slowly, through the cedar and fern filled forest. With every step, I feel the old shell of myself fall further away, left to decay alongside the moss, mushrooms, and decomposing maple leaves that sprinkle the forest floor. I have no idea where I am, or where I am going. All this is kept from me. I only know that I am no longer where— and who— I once was.

The strangers and I begin to smell the welcoming scent of cedar incense and the sound of singing voices. Tears stream down my cheeks like quiet rivers. Part of me doesn’t know why I am crying; part of me knows exactly why I am crying.

Singing stops, blindfolds are untied, the fire is lit. We are asked to state our name and why we have come here.

Voices begin to tell their stories. Grieving voices, describing the loss of a lover, the loss of a dream, the loss of an identity:

“I thought I had life figured out, only to realize I am completely lost.”

“Life is great, it is all great… and incredibly boring. Something is missing.”

“I am trying to reconnect with the child who grew up too soon.”

“I am here to heal.”

“I want to know who I was before the world told me who to be.”

“I am here to not just meet a raccoon, but to become one, to eat like one, explore like one, to smell like one. I am here to return to my wild self, to take life by the teeth.”

“I cringe at the thought of a wild self, so maybe that is what I will explore.”

"I am here to ask questions of the trees and learn how to listen.”

A woman across the circle from me says that a dream has brought her here. She closes her eyes and tells us that in her dream, it is summer and she is at a creek. Everyone is partying and having a good time by the water, but she is concerned when she spots a huge whale floundering in the shallow creek. She knows the whale must get to deeper waters, and she tries to get others’ attention but no one else seems to care about the whale. She watches the majestic animal flop and flail in search of deeper waters as it slowly shrivels up and deflates, and awakes consumed in waves of grief. “This is why I am here,” she whispers, hand over heart, eyes still closed.

Now it is my turn to speak. But tears and a convulsing body are my only language. All I am able to utter is this: “I am here to remember what it means to be fully human.”

Image: art by Jess Hough @MoabJess

strangers and golden arches

We no longer live in a sensuous intimacy with the wind, rivers, rainfall, and birdsong…There are no daily encounters with woods or prairies, with herds of elk or bison, no ongoing connection with manzanita or scrub jays. The myths and stories about the exploits of raven, the courage of mouse, and the cleverness of fox have fallen cold… Often, in my practice I hear someone talk about feeling empty. But what if this emptiness is…a hollowness that comes from a prolonged absence of birdsong, the scent of sweetgrass, the taste of wild huckleberries, the cry of the red-tailed hawk, or the melancholy call of the loon? What if this emptiness is the great echo in our soul of what it is we expected and did not receive?

- Francis Weller, Living a Soulful Life and Why It Matters

The next day of orientation, 38 feeling-less-like-strangers-and-more-like-fellow-adventurers all huddle into Cedar Lodge, the singular indoor classroom on the WAS campus. We settle into our seats and look at the slideshow dancing on the wall in front of us as our program director stands beside the projector. He gives us instructions. “I am going to show you quick glimpses of images of various animal and plant life in the area, and I want you to write down who it is. If you don’t know, write down your best guess.”

Image: Wilderness Awareness School campus

I write down the number one on my paper and wait for the first image. A small black bird with a white chest looks at us from the screen. I have no idea what kind of bird this is, so I leave the first one blank. Second image: A tree with reddish skin and needles like lace. No idea. Leave it blank. Same for the third image. By the fourth, I am defeated and let my pen rest and stop trying. And then, when he gets to number 10, the images change. Now it is a Mercedes logo. Murmurs. I write down the answer without hesitation. Next the golden McDonald’s arches. I write down another answer. They continue, and I have answers for each one of these images.

When the slideshow is over, his point has been made. I feel tears again. This, this is why I am here.

Jon Young, the founder of WAS, has said, “A culture is working when it connects people to people, people to themselves, and people to nature.” But our society is geared towards getting us to connect with things, not people.

If you want proof, ask, why is it we know the name of the golden double arches by heart but can’t identify a western Redcedar? Those golden arches bring up memories of happy meals, indoor playgrounds strewn with slides and plastic balls, the smell of french fries and the promise of a vanilla milkshake. But Redcedar remains a stranger to us. Redcedar, once the warm embrace into the bosom of a loving grandmother, once a source of wisdom and council, of warmth and fire, canoes for travel, spice for eating, and healing salve for the indigenous people who have lived and tended to this land since time immemorial, the Snoqualmie people, is now forgotten by the dominant culture of settlers disconnected from place, chopped up into a million pieces, unrecognizable.

We know those plastic golden arches of McDonald's better than we do the bark of a RedCedar.

We know the Star-wars theme song better than the song of the sparrow.

We do not know where the watershed of our community flows, much less the state that it is in. We do not know the soft petals of the wildflower blowing in the summer breeze and the medicine she carries.

We do not see the importance of the beaver or the way the marshland and estuaries offer a nursery to the salmon before they swim to the sea.

Or at least I didn’t. And I know that not many people around me did, either.

The birds singing the sun up in the morning are a distant backdrop to the words of human speech, and we never consider they might have something important to say. As David Abram has said, we have become a “single species only talking to itself.” Our own language reflects this. Francis Weller, in his Soulful Life lecture series explains that we have long forgotten words like “ammill,” a devon term meaning the sparkle of sunlight through the frost and “pirr,” the light breath of wind such as will make a cats paw on the water. He goes on to add that in the 2007 junior dictionary, terms such as acorn, beach, bluebell, buttercup, dandelion, fern, ivy, heron, lark, mistletoe, nectar, note, otter, pasture, willow were deemed irrelevant to our youth and thus omitted and replaced by the words blog, broadband, bullet point, celebrity, chat room, mp3 player, and voicemail.

There are community, relations, and family all around us but we do not even know the name of our own kin. Is it any wonder we feel lonely, when we stroll through the woods and are surrounded by strangers? Under these conditions of isolation, species arrogance, and disconnection, how is it any wonder that we are sick? Could it be, as Francis Weller has proposed, that we are dying of a great loneliness?

It is well known therapy to go for a walk in the woods, but what about greeting our neighbors, knowing them, and not just by name like a mere handshake, but knowing them with deep intimacy as we learn to recognize the bark of an Alder tree with only fingertips and closed eyes, become grateful for the alarm call of the Robin, are nourished by roots of wild carrot when we are hungry, are soothed by willow bark when in pain, and show our care as we study the track of a coyote to learn his mate has a limp on her back left paw?

something is wrong with this water

The talk in Cedar Lodge continues now with a hum in our hearts and we are introduced to the Pacific-Chorus Frog. We are told, “The Pacific Chorus Frog is a good example of an indicator species. An indicator species is a species that tends to be particularly sensitive and can reveal the health of an ecosystem. If the pH is just a little off, the Pacific Chorus-Frog won’t be present due to the pollution.”

I can’t stop thinking about this frog. Maybe I am like the Pacific-Chorus Frog. I once thought something was desperately wrong with me for not being able to cope like others did, but maybe my sensitivity is actually my strength. Deep down, all of us know something is wrong with the water, but some of us are able to keep swimming in it while others, perhaps with their extra sensitive gills, simply shrivel up. Maybe instead of being called too sensitive, or being scowled at with scorn for not being able to keep up, and dismissed in the name of “good vibes only” policy we should slow down and listen to the sensitivities of the indicator species.

If we listened to such warning signs, warning signs Sioux elder & author Vine Deloria describes as “the shape of the sky, the cry of animals, the changing of seasons” with the same gravity we heed “traffic lights and the wail of the ambulance and police car” I believe we would find that, like the whale in the woman’s dream, our Souls are asking for more depth, deeper blue waters where we are meant to thrive. But so many of us have settled for shallow creeks instead of the ocean that is 36,200 feet deep. And I think this is the enormity of the wound–the wound the size of a whale, the wound that is 36,200 feet deep. We know this somewhere etched deep in our bones, and yet we wonder why we feel deflated, why the life force inside of us has become dry and shriveled up, why we are dying inside a little more everyday, why we are breathing just a little and calling it a life.

Why is it that some of us are screaming for help and dying off like pacific chorus frogs, while others are getting drunk on booze, working away busying themselves, numbing themselves in shopping sprees, or becoming ultra focused on their “personal growth” in denial that the whale is there floundering and numbing out the pain of the shallowness? Is it really that these people are less sensitive? I do believe that there exist people, and always have, who are more sensitive and function as healers, story-tellers, and shamans in tribes the world over, who had and have a place in these cultures. But one doesn’t need to have a deepened gift of sensitivity to sense the depth of pain in the planet and in ourselves (because we are nature, too– another piece on this specific topic coming soon). The whale is impossible not to notice, like the elephant in the room, except bigger. The blue whale is the largest mammal on Earth, larger even than the elephant– in fact their tongues alone weigh as much as an elephant. Their tongues! And the whale specifically chose to show up in the dream, not the smaller but equally important salmon, for example, trying to reach the Ocean and flailing in a shriveling up river. Something more seems to be going on in the whale’s message. The whale seems to be pointing to more depth than the analysis that some people are just less sensitive than others.

Martín Prechtel has said that all wars come from unmetabolized sorrow. Could it be that the war on the earth and the original peoples of place come from grief, trapped and unshed tears, unable to flow in this culture in much the same way rivers are dammed and no longer able to reach the ocean on these lands? Could it be that the pain of the Earth wants to speak through a great many more of us, and does live in us, whether we acknowledge it with awareness or not?

Dr. Sarah A Conn writes,

“When people are unable to grieve personal losses openly and with others, they numb themselves, even constricting their muscles in order not to let the grief show. This can become chronic, leading them to see, hear, feel, and breathe less. The same process of numbing and constriction occurs with our loss of connection to a sense of place in a viable, thriving ecosystem. Many of us have learned to walk, breathe, look, and listen less, to numb our senses to both the pain and the beauty of the natural world, living so-called ‘personal lives,’ suffering in what we feel are ‘merely personal’ ways, keeping our grief even from ourselves. Feeling empty, we then project our feelings onto others, or engage in compulsive, unsatisfactory activities that neither nourish us nor contribute to the healing of the larger context. Perhaps the currently high incidence of depression is in part a signal of our bleeding at the roots, being cut off from the natural world, no longer able to cry at its pain or to thrill at its beauty (Ecopsychology 171).”

In this case, perhaps what is needed to wake the partying people out of their drunken slumber to the whale is not whacking them on the head in punishment, or accuse them of not being “sensitive enough,” for it is indeed their sensitivity that has led them to harden and self-protect and this will likely just cause more hardening, but rather holding space for them to metabolize their sorrows and hardened grief, to let their rivers of tears flow again, so that the rivers may once again reach the ocean, so that the lands may once again turn green and fertile. Perhaps attending to this personal loss is what will open the gates again to the less conscious seemingly invisible suffering whale – the suffering of all our more than human kin.

Now let’s shift our attention back to the indicator species and those who are trying to get the whale back to the ocean, the ones who feel this pain as part of themselves, as if their own lungs are suffocating and gasping for air just as the whale’s are. The screams of the woman, the screams of the whale and the screams of the Pacific-Chorus Frog have not only been ignored, but have been actively silenced because the people who keep partying and the heads of corporations poisoning the waters gaslight the folks able to consciously perceive such suffering and dire danger by telling us in a myriad of different ways and messages that there is nothing wrong with the water, there is something wrong with us.

New Age spirituality, books such as The Secret, toxic positivity, and misused law of attraction frameworks convince us that if we are sick, there is something in ourselves that is causing our suffering instead of acknowledging that we are whales flailing in creeks, responding appropriately to an extremely dire situation.

Conventional therapists hover over the suffocating whale telling her she just needs to develop self-care practices and heal abandonment wounds from her family of origin and she would feel better. Therapy becomes all about me—my stories, my wounds, my history, my dreams, my brain. We’ve colonized the psyche with ownership in our desire to possess it all – the rivers, the mountains, the prairies. But what if emotions aren’t ours, what if they don’t belong to us? William Blake has described emotions as “divine influxes,” movement into something sacred. Rumi has said emotions are ours to tend to, to become a good host of, but not ours to possess.

But when these feelings are said to belong to us and us as humans only, when they are taken out of the context of the surrounding ecosystem, the central question becomes, “How can the whale better adjust to living in the creek?” But the question I believe we need to be asking is, “How do we move the whale back to the ocean?”

Dr. Terrance O’Connor has asked this very question in his practice. “By helping people adapt to a destructive society, are we doing more harm than good? We sit in our offices helping parents raise children, divorcees get their bearings, couples find ways to deepen their relationships, while outside the air gets fouler and the oceans’ ecosystems break down. In a year’s time, if we are successful, the parents and children are doing well, the divorcee is enjoying her independence, the couple has developed a more satisfying relationship. Meanwhile hundreds, perhaps thousands of species, have vanished forever from the Earth. Each hour, five square miles of rainforest are destroyed; by the end of the year, this area of destruction is the size of Pennsylvania… We are facing an unparalleled global crisis… What is the meaning of therapy and what is the responsibility of therapists in such a world (Ecopsychology pg 150)?”

Dr. O’Connor, along with other therapists engaged in the work of ecopsychology, believe that the goal of therapy should not be to help people adapt to a destructive society, to help the whale better adjust to living in the creek. Instead, the aim of therapy should be to discover the place where our personal tributary of tears meets the river of tears coming from our more-than-human kin, such as the whale–to see how our personal grief is intertwined with the Earth’s cry, to see how our own painful personal relationships plagued by control, denial, and abuse are the very relationships that are driving the poisoning of our waters, the disappearance of forests, the depletion of soil, the mass extinction of the condor, the western black rhino, the great auk, the golden toad, the passenger pigeon and so many more who have fallen cold, to recognize that our own survival and the survival of the Earth depend on us healing these patterns.

Dr O’Connor speaks to a moment where he was giving a talk titled “The Mature and Healthy Intimate Relationship” to a group of divorced people. In the book Ecopsychology, Dr. O’Connor writes,

“Midway through the talk a woman asked, ‘Last week we had a speaker who said that some people are satisfied with very limited relationships. So why should we want this mature relationship? Why should we bother?’”

Dr. O’Connor writes that he responded with his thinking that the benefits would speak for themselves, but that the question kept nagging him until he eventually lost all concentration and responded in the following way:

“Let me say something about the status quo. The status quo is that the hole in the ozone layer is as big as the United States. The status quo is that some scientists are predicting that by the middle of the next century global warming will result in most of the coastal cities in the united states being below sea level, and will make the grain belt a wasteland. The status quo is that acid rain, besides destroying the lakes and forests is now considered to be the leading cause of lung cancer after cigarette smoke. The status quo is that thirty-five thousand people die of starvation everyday. Also everyday, two or more species become extinct, not due to natural selection but due to deforestation and pollution. By the year 2000 this is expected to accelerate to one hundred species a day (update in 2025, up to 150 species go extinct daily, so the prediction was pretty spot on). In other words, mass extinction. What does this say to you? To me it says the status quo is that the planet is dying. The planet is dying because we are satisfied with our limited relationships in which control, denial, and abuse are tolerated. The status quo is that we have these petty relationships with eachother, between nations, with ourselves and the natural world. Why should we bother? Because healthy relationships are not an esoteric goal. It is a matter of our very survival and the survival of most life upon this earth (Ecopsychology pg 151).”

Dr. O’Connor continued to write how powerfully the energy in the room had shifted after his ‘outburst.’ A man even stood in the back talking about the destruction of rainforests. He writes, “The greater part of the audience had come in concerned with their own loneliness. As we began to look at all of our personal concerns from a global perspective, we could see that the patterns of control, denial, and projection that sabotage intimate relationships are the very patterns that endanger the world. To change these patterns is to change not just our social lives but our relationship to the planet.”

Dr. Conn adds to this conversation:

“The challenge of an ecologically responsible psychotherapy is to develop ways to work with the ‘purely personal’ problems brought by clients so that they can be seen not only as unique expressions but also as microcosms of the larger whole, of what is happening in the world. The goals of therapy then include not only the ability to find joy in the world, but also to hear the earth speaking in one's own suffering, to participate in and contribute to the healing of the planet by finding one’s niche in the earth’s living system and occupying it actively (Ecopsychology 171).”

But what I share here, what Dr Conn and Dr O’Conner share, is not something reflected in society at large. It took me years and years of digging and traveling to come across such a perspective, one that validated my feelings that something was wrong with the water, one that acknowledges the whale indeed needs to be returned to the Ocean. So instead, exposed to only the dominant narrative that something is wrong with us and not the water, most of us convince ourselves the creek is good enough. After all, it is all we have ever known— for we have never seen the Ocean, we have only dreamed of Her.

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches

by Mary Oliver

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives --

tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging

from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides

with perfect courtesy, to let you in!

Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!

Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint

that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?

Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot

in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself

continually?

Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed

with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left --

fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away

from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is

the mystery, which is death as well as life, and

not be afraid!

To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome

with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine

god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,

nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the

present hour,

to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,

to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened

in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

The Panther

by Rainer Maria Rilke

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else. It seems to him there are

a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

lifts, quietly—

An image enters in,

rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.

a river of tears

(*For the best experience, I recommend listening with your eyes closed if possible; this piece is @ 41 min 20 sec)

When I close my eyes, I am back in the hut on our first day of orientation. The fire is lit, the people are gathered, the blindfolds are lifted. It is my turn to speak.

Tell us, who are you and why are you here?

I answer:

“My name is Madison. I am here not only to learn the names of my neighbors, but to learn the song of the Pacific Wren and the call of the loon, to know what the bark of a cedar tree feels like in the wet toil of a rain storm, to grieve the disappearing salmon and the way their nursery of wild branching estuaries were carved into a singular channel, to care enough to look at the track of the coyote who lives in the field near my home and know that his mate has a limp on her back left paw and whisper that I hope she feels better soon.

I am here because I know this water is poisoning me, and not only me.

I am here because the shallowness of this life is suffocating me and I am hungry to be nourished by deep and wild waters, because I am tired of breathing just a little and calling it living.

I am here to look in the face at all I and my people have lost and let my wailing river of tears help to carry the whale back to the Ocean.

I am here because because I believe in the dream of the Ocean, for I have never met her but I know deep in my bones that she is somewhere out there, arms open wide, waiting to caress my skin with her salty waters and move me to tears with her turquoise waves as she sighs in relief from not having to come to shore searching for my watery soul, as she whispers, welcome home, welcome home.”

Image: Alexandra Blakely’s WAILS book with illustration by @seedsofspells

Resources

Books

Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind

Book Edited by Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D Kanner

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

Book by Francis Weller

The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise

Book by Martín Prechtel

My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization

Book by Chellis Glendinning

A Language Older than Words

Book by Derrick Jensen

Other

Podcast - Emerald Podcast by Joshua Schrei, “For the Intuitives” Part 1 & 2

Podcast - Journey On Podcast with Warwick Schiller Episode 122: Doniga Markegard

Grief rituals and grief work folks - Francis Weller, Laurence Cole, Alexandra Blakely, Holly Truhlar, Siobhan Asgharzadeh