About 18 months ago I was contacted by a young woman who I had come to know through her participation in the Nature Based Leadership Training. I had always known her as a passionate and confident activist, leaning in to deeper connection with the earth and herself. A leader. In an uncanny way, she reminded me of myself at the same age.

But something had changed when we spoke this time. Her entire centre of gravity had shifted. The life of activism, partner and community had become disenchanting. Rather than pot luck community dinners around a campfire she wanted the fire all to herself, the trees and creatures of the night her wild companions.

A message from Nature's Apprentice facilitator Emily Coats….

This year I finally made it happen - the long awaited dream of going bush for up to a year, and letting the dirt, rain and silence soak into my skin. 

One of my many intentions for the year, along with building my own shelter and practising skills like fire-by-friction, was to go entirely without a smartphone. What would happen to my brain? What new and forgotten faculties would wake up?

The 141 bird species in our journal is more than just a list. It’s a reflection of our love of this wild world.

I feel like the English language needs a new word. I can’t find one to describe a state of curiosity in nature that feels more like enchantment infused with eros. Something that is like a life force. The ‘philia’ words (biophilia - love of nature or ornithophilia - love of birds) don’t do it for me . They feel too bookish. I want the word to feel on the tongue how it feels in the body.

We did it. Two months of wild camping and wildcrafting with three kids. It took enormous effort to peel ourselves away from school and work life. But I knew we needed it. I needed it. No longer able to disappear for vast stretches of time in the bush alone, it needed to be a family experience. And how beautiful, when after the first week of defragging and defrosting, we found ourselves under a canopy of stars, weaving and whittling by the fire night after night. Recounting the day’s adventures and the new birds to add to our list. No-one within coo-eeee. Pipi stew and fish for dinner, eaten by hand carved spoons. I literally felt like I was drinking in the wild with a deep thirst.

A letter from Dan Skye, Nature's Apprentice Vision Quest Guide….
 

Dear World,
I am deeply humbled and very excited to be next year offering a year-long men’s program of deep nature connection practices, circle work and earth-based ceremony within a community of men ready to really show up in their lives. And these are a few words to explain why…

Antler, Bone and Eagle. Belonging. How do we come to know our own story in this wild and mysterious life? How do we create practices and communities, both human and more-than-human, to support our unfolding?

Greetings on this winter solstice week. I truly thought the sun was not going to rise on the weekend, still dark well after 7am on the southern slope of a mountain outside Melbourne. I took myself out in the half-light to roam the forest, and was treated to the display of the Bulen-Bulen, the Superb Lyrebird  fanning its tail and singing its entire medley of bird calls, in a bid to attract a mate. This male Lyrebird display is one of the hallmarks of this Wuring (Wombat) season, signalling the beginning of its courtship. 

This week I listened to an incredible story on a What’s App voice memo. It was recorded by one of my closest friends, and told of a powerful numinous encounter in nature, nested within a series of synchronicities that, in a day of powerful revelation, revealed to her the complete picture of who she truly is at a soul level. The story completed a larger tale that started some 7 years ago, when she began to more closely track the mysteries, or perhaps more true, mystery began tracking her.

A curious thing happened the summer just passed. It started with the finding of one curly yellow feather on the land at home - a cockatoo crest feather! Then my partner found another - a coincidence? Then 10 year old Nadia found two more in the neighbourhood. A pattern. Within a few weeks, our family collected eight! We wove them into a birds nest onto our seasonal altar. And started asking questions. 

I sit looking out on a still, parched landscape. It seems to me pensive, quiet, barely holding on until the rains finally arrive. I can feel the land in my body too; dry, also longing for the softening of wet. Friends up north have battened down the hatches against a cyclone, steeling themselves against the winds. It’s the extreme times when we often feel more keenly our innate connection with animate forces and the Wild Other; our empathy not a mental exercise but a felt sense as we naturally tune in to our larger field of belonging. 

Rewilding practices for me are more than ecological literacy and ancestral wild skills, it's part of a broader spirituality, one a Wild Love. 

One of the pleasures of my life is hearing of people’s visions and dreams emerging; when the veil of self-doubt and criticism lifts, and they start to truly see their innate gifts and passions, and imagine ways to offer them as service to the Great Turning. It’s a beautiful thing to witness! And quite normal really, for this is the way throughout time we have become fully fledged adults, through the journey of discovering and enacting our gifts in the world. 

Only in our current culture, bringing the visions to fruition is a tough ask.

What kind of education is most vital for our kids?

Recently, I had the pleasure of offering some stories as one of three speakers on the annual John Paul Memorial Lecture, presented by Trust for Nature, which focused this year on the human-nature connection (you can watch here). The final question I was asked by the senior ecologist Nicki was ‘If there was one thing that you could change that would improve people’s nature connection, what would it be?’ I often get asked a similar ‘one thing’ question during speaking gigs and I focused to hear the question afresh. Of course it won't be one thing that turns the tide of disconnection, but what would I start with?

What almost kills you with delight?

Yesterday was even busier than usual. It was my turn to cook dinner for 20 people (part of a larger village experiment my family and I have embarked on). I had someone pop over for an anchoring conversation about their life path, as well as the usual toddler care, washing up, work emails and school pick-ups. Oh plus I was hosting some friends for a wildcrafting circle that evening. On a day like that it’s easy to feel I don’t have time to attend to life outside these compelling tasks. I remembered the Mahatma Gandhi quote that always makes me smile “I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one.”

What dreams have visited you this solstice week - in this time of deep quiet and stillness, of shimmering frost crystals, water snaplocked into tiny mirrors?

Winter solstice has offered me a recurring dream. I'm on a Vision Quest, but one beset by people, and I search for a place in the wilds to be on my own.

Solutions don’t generally come from the middle, they come from the edge. Mythologist Martin Shaw talks of this, of genius living not in the centre but on the margins. If we ignore what the Mexicans call ‘the river beneath the river’, the soul of the world, Martin says, then we’ll end up going around in whirlpools of our own neurosis, individual or cultural.

How can we stay alive to the magic of our homes?

I’m a creature of place. While some seem truly like global citizens, I’ve always been the opposite - a citizen of specificity. Of place. A citizen of a water catchment, a sheltering mountain, of plant friends and mottled morning magpies on my verandah. I’m a citizen of well trodden wandering trails and a swimming hole and a dusk emerging wombat across the road. I’m a citizen of parsley patches and berry patches and soil that is borne from my garden scraps. I’m a citizen of community, of neighbourly reciprocity and friends’ houses nearby that I make tea and toast in.  

How can we tune our nervous systems to the hum of timeless wandering day-to-day?

Last week, I spent a week in a place I count amongst my home country, near where my family holidays near Myall Lakes National Park. As soon as I arrive, my heart and hands rise to meet the screech of the little lorikeets, the sturdy blackbutt trees, majestic paperbarks behind the dunes, the spring dollar birds, the migratory whales, the skittling bug-eyed hermit crabs, the sacred headland. All the creatures. All my relations. I greet the place with the knowing that they know me, at least a little.

How do we make ourselves available to mystery?

Over the last 18 months I received a couple of dreams of an unusual kind. Rather than numinous and symbolic, these two dreams seemed instructional, both telling me that I should move to the Northern Rivers of NSW, even offering helpful details such as a monetary range that I should spend on a house in a community.

This time of year leads naturally to the question of what kind of ancestor will I be? What will be my legacy?

This autumn more than others, I’ve really felt the presence of the ancestors. It’s fitting that I would, this time of year. My Celtic ancestors would have celebrated Samhain, the ‘day-of-the-dead’ (popularised as Halloween), as autumnal leaves fell and dark descended for the winter.

It is often said that the four day solo wilderness fast that is known as Vision Quest is the ultimate act of surrender. Certainly the times that I have chosen to sit on the earth in this way have required me to let go in a very real way… as my physical energy diminishes, as the hours creep by under beating sun or driving rain. It’s surrender in a very visceral, unromantic way. There’s no other way through the eye of this particular needle.

However, while Vision Quest has strengthened my muscle of yielding, in the last few months something has required more surrender of me than even this ceremony - motherhood.

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.