Terra Sapiens Remembering

Mission | Inspiration | Calling

“How do we love ourselves back into the world to the depth and extent that we recognize ourselves as a part of rather than apart from Nature?”

In an interconnected world, structures built upon the hard illusion of separateness are destined to rupture, wobble, groan, tumble down, and shatter magnificently. When this happens, disillusionment is a breakthrough. In that breakthrough is the opportunity to remember ourselves as a part of something vital, life-emergent, relationally intelligent, and sacred. The opportunity arises to consciously align with the ecological systems of which we are an integral aspect. We can remember our identity and reclaim our service as earthly wisdom keepers - as terra sapiens.

Zebra swallowtail butterfly (Eurytides marcellus) sitting on a person's hand with a fence and road in the background

Terra Sapiens Remembering serves as an invitation to come home to the earthly place of your belonging. It is a relational meeting space catalyzing generative transformation through connection with ancient wisdom and exploration of contemporary challenges arising from generations of nature-dissociation. It is a call for severance from life-depleting systems and re-membering all that fosters vitality - the vital force of life. It is an offering made upon return from the depths of disillusionment, grief, and recognition.

Terra Sapiens Remembering is not about romanticizing, restoring, or reliving the past. The world does turn, thereby necessitating resilience through adaptation, transformation, and realignment. Terra Sapiens Remembering is about recalling the earthly wisdom in which the human spirit is rooted. It’s about attuning with the life forces that want to emerge when held by cosmologies of reverence, relationality, reciprocity, and regeneration. It’s about consciously shaping a wisdom-rooted future.

Bear Medicine

I saw you there in the

humid oak-poplar wood

of late summer morning.

Lanky young bruin

with perfect posture

and amble,

deftly trampling the

delicate ostrich ferns

with each

magnificent

pawfall

as you made your

way, intentfully

and agape,

up the rocky mountain slope.

I waited,

patiently,

like someone who had

just found an unyielding

faith in long-rumored miracles.

Your journey and my journey

will intersect this day.

“Bear medicine,”

some would say.

And we did have our moment.

Yes.

Standing still.

Fully aware of the other’s earthly presence.

Looking deeply into each other’s sight-full eyes.

Breathing each other’s privileged breath

in a way that even a poet shouldn’t

try to explain.

And, there, on sacred ground,

I couldn’t contemplate ‘bear medicine.’

Couldn’t feel it tingling the hairs on my arms.

Couldn’t sense it transforming the course of my days.

Couldn’t bring myself to walk,

for even a second,

between the thin-veiled worlds.

No, no as we moved on from that moment,

You climbing Northwest,

Me climbing Southwest,

All I could think about was this:

What is human medicine to a bear?

Is it powerful?

Is it kind?

Does it leave you feeling grateful and graced?

Or, is it…?

Or, does it…?

This is what you left me with.

This question:

What is human medicine to a bear?

This question.

This question that has stilled me

in the dark silence of myself,

seeking the wisdom of thoughts

I’ve never before known.

Yes.

Bear medicine.

from Wild Life: New & Selected Poems

Ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapilla) in someone's hand

The Ovenbird

The ovenbird flew, lost of course, into my large window. How a tiny warbler can make such a bang is uncertain. Had it seen sky? Had it seen forest? Did it believe, with confidence, in illusions? Was it moving through the air in joy, or terror? I looked for a sharp-shinned hawk but didn’t see one. I beat the local cats to it. Not broken, but battered, its little heart needing to find its way back to body and right rhythm.

Some scholars say that Robert Frost knew the ovenbird as himself. In its singing, in his verse, it learned not to sing. The Oven Bird is the poet’s sonnet, true, but also an apprenticeship to the craft of surrender. Masters don’t execute mastery; they give themselves over to the unmasterable. They are the diminished thing.

The ovenbird is a creature of the forest floor, a keeper of spent leaves. Leaves are camouflage. Leaves are name-sake nest. Leaves hide insects and thus must be lifted and sorted and restrewn for another day. The ovenbird knows humus as the root of humility. We, too, are of this root. Though, we forget.

“Teacher, teacher, teacher!” cries out the ovenbird when he returns each spring from his southern winter haunts. What teacher and what learning? I wonder if the ovenbird is most honest and most brilliant of us all. What would it be like to live as if every answer was insufficient? I’m considering if it is.

I became the momentary perch, my long fingers held in the curve of tiny feet and the newness of relationship. I felt the grip of nameless infants. We are all beginners, aren’t we?

from RidgeLines: A View of Nature and Human Nature