Threshold Crossings

Dear friends,

For someone whose life’s passion and deepest enquiry is about how to guide people through an initiatory stage of life, I sit writing on another very particular kind of threshold, one that I didn’t imagine I would experience in this life. Motherhood.

Any day now, I will be birthing a child into the world, alongside my partner Dan and his two children. This precipice is characterised for me with qualities of numinosity, uncertainty and the unknown, trepidation and fear, excitement and delight, and a knowing that life will never be the same again. Not lost on me are the similar expressions and experiences I hear from those that I guide into and through the journey of initiation into true adulthood. Both big river crossings of different kinds.

About six years ago, I asked the dream-maker for a dream to illuminate the question of motherhood for me. The dream I received was suitably veiled, the key image a huge black spider who crawled all over my egoic middle world agenda for manifesting a child. It reminded me of the grandmother spider image of old, who weaves the universal quilt in her web and within it the destiny of all. I wasn’t to know the path ahead for me and motherhood, only that it was in the hands of Mystery.

And after years of grieving and letting go of the idea of becoming a mother, upon meeting my beloved, the grandmother spider wove a child for me and us into its quilt. Quietly and mysteriously in the vanishing window of time left for such a project.

And so I wanted to send a little farewell note to my community of wild hearts as I enter into this portal. The next few months will see my work take a back seat as my centre of gravity shifts towards the home and the hearth.

I am curious about how this journey will shape, challenge and grow me. Already I feel the questions arising about how to create more family-oriented opportunities for deep connective nature-based experience such as Vision Quest. What could it look like for children to also welcome back the initiates, and sit around the communal story council fire. The challenge excites me, and feels true for the kind of soulcentric community that I want to seed for the future.

The question is real in me as I also prepare to co-guide Nature’s Apprentice’s first Vision Quest Guide Training in December with my friend and colleague Caiyloirch Rupert Marques who is truly one of the most talented Quest guides I have had the pleasure of sharing the guide seat with.

It’s also an opportunity to hand over responsibilities to others for continuing the work of Nature’s Apprentice during these first tender months. Nature Based Leadership Graduate Yonke van Geloven will continue to curate the Rewilding for Women program in the Dandenong Ranges.

Emily Coats who is completing a year long apprenticeship with me will take over central operations, covering everything from admin to her growing mastery of fire-by-friction, which she will be teaching in October. Along with other interstate and local teachers and collaborators, Emily has just launched a Rewild Immersion for adults in early November in the Dandenongs. It’s a rare and precious opportunity to steep in the transformative power of earth skills, deep nature connection routines, community and mentoring. I’m hoping bub and I will be making day trips to visit :)

Don’t forget about our ongoing Community Soul Councils. The next one will be on September 10 at Darebin Parklands, Melbourne.

I look forward to seeing you all on the other side, and hear stories of your own threshold crossings and wild wanders,

With love,

Claire