WILD WISDOM 2023

A Six Moons Soul-Centric Journey for Womxn into the Heart of the Wild

EXPLORE OUR SCHOLARSHIPS BY APPLYING HERE

Join a group of trailblazers, earth-mystics, beauty-makers, the good kind of trouble-makers, justice seekers, and truth-tellers, supporting you to live your most authentic life, with the earth under your feet, courage in your heart, and the river of life carrying you through the depths of your  life’s unfolding.

 Wild Wisdom is an Opportunity to…

• Reorient your arrow towards what has heart and meaning to you

• Let die what no longer serves you

• Nourish wholeness and belonging

• Build skill sets to be a confident backpacker and camper

• Grow your knowledge, connection and personal relationship to Earth as teacher, resource and friend 

• Foster earth-based skills and crafts while learning about our diverse California ecosystem 

• Grow your own unique soul-centric leadership to offer the world

• Trust your inner-knowing and grow your wisdom

...all so that you may contribute the best version of yourself in your relationships, work, and play!

 Elements of Our Time Together

• Plant Connection: Connect with the spirit and medicine of the magic, beauty and sentience of the plant world.  Invite a deeper relationship with one plant per season to build a lifelong friendship.

• Animal Connection: Learn the basics of animal observation and tracking, connecting with the spirit of the wild ones who live amongst us.  Let a local wild animal choose you to be an ally and study with them for our time together. 

• Earth Skills Building: Build a personal relationship with fire, including responsibly creating, tending and honoring fire. Gather and prepare wild medicine and food. Weave a pine needle basket to hold your prayers and intentions, carve a spoon from a wood block, use plants to dye natural fibers...

• Backpacking Skills: Become more confident in your ability to access wild spaces through expert guidance including what/how to pack, navigating, and living well in the backcountry.

• Ancestral Honoring and Relationship Building: Create and/or deepen your cords of connection with your personal ancestry.

• Nature Solos: Relish in wild time spent with the more-than-human ones. Deepen your connection practices and the personal intentions for your life, including a sacred 4-day solo over the summer solstice and full moon.

• Grief Tending: When we allow ourselves to “ride the wild edge of sorrow” and be held in the grief of what has been lost or what has not come in its expected time, we can support one another to allow our tears to water the soil we later till.  

• Community Building: Grow deep, joyful, and powerful connections with the group of wild womxn taking this journey together!  Weaving our stories and sharing our skills, we learn from and support each other.  We can’t do this life thing alone!

• Song Sharing: When joining voices in community, we not only discover a pathway to communion and release, we cultivate wellness, mindfulness, empathy and joy.

• Personal Intention: Guided by earth-based ceremony and deep listening, we invite attunement and curiosity on the journey of discovering your unique & personal gifts and how to give them to your people and the earth.

• Your Voice of Wild Wisdom: Increase contact and intimacy with your one true, unfiltered self, the place that holds the essence of your unique being, gifts, and imprint.  As we embrace our true selves, our wisdom and confidence grow.  

• Support in Integrating Your Wild Wisdom into Your Life: Bring back what emerges in the wilds into your daily life through identifying small, achievable steps that support integration.

 The Journey

Our in-person gatherings are intentionally placed on or close to the quarters and cross quarters that mark the passing of the solar year and seasons, beginning in the heart of Springtime.  We will meet in various wild and beautiful locations , exploring the diverse ecosystems of California.  Trips will include backpacking, car camping on beautiful private land and a few day-long retreats, all on Northern California.  A keystone of our time together will be a multi-day Earth Communion Time, (aka wilderness “solo”) over the summer solstice. 

We will also have touch points at the new moons. When we are not in person we will have a Zoom call or other form of digital check in and intention setting for that moon ~ using the lunar rhythms to feed our intentions and prayers.  Check out the detailed 2022 Schedule and Itinerary here.

We Welcome You

Healing Space For Womxn:   Wild Wisdom is a womxn centered experience, connecting participants to their innate power and the sacred feminine of the earth. Through our time together, we open a healing space to reclaim our deep connection to our bodies, the natural world and a community of womxn. This supports healing from wounds of patriarchy and sexism that have historically kept womxn separate from the earth and each other. We recognize that the word womxn is expanding and gender fluidity is a welcome part of our journey together.

Physical Ability:  In terms of physical ability - we accept participants that can carry a 30-45 lb backpack for up to 7 miles over rugged terrain at elevation. 

Diversity in a natural ecosystem creates strength and, we believe, that at our best, this is also true for human systems and communities.  We hold the vision of a multi-cultural space where we can share across difference and each be lifted up in our identities.  And yet, as we acknowledge the trauma of separation that this country has been built upon and that many of our ancestors have faced (slavery, genocide, prejudice), we know that diversity and difference in a community often stirs up wounds from our past. 

Your two main guides, Sarai and Caitlin are both white, mostly hetero, cis gendered women.  On our team we include the support of 2 BIPOC guides, 1 as an elder and 1 as an assistant. We are committed to creating an open space and support for all womxn who feel called to join us, and acknowledge that there can be discomfort for folks who are from identities that are marginalized in our culture at large, in having your core leadership not share your life experience.  

Part of our application process is ensuring that each participant is committed to creating a space that is inclusive and celebratory of our multiple identities.  At the start of our program we will create group norms to support the creation of a space where all can claim and celebrate the beauty and power of who they are and also surface when there are tensions. We are happy to talk with you more about this in your interview and answer any questions.

The Grounds We Stand On

We recognize that as we revitalize and experience the joy of our innate connections to this earth, we also face the complexities of the historical context we have been born into, both of our personal ancestries, and the ancestry of the lands on which we stand.  Wild Wisdom supports the healing of settler-colonialism and the complex web of reclaiming our connection to this beautiful earth.

We are in the continued journey of learning how to best stand in solidarity with California first nations people in efforts towards rematriation - the return of indigenous knowledge, ceremony and pathways to the mother/land.  The recent historical context of California, and the people of this land is complex, brutal, and riddled with painful stories of conquest and oppression.  We recognize that the places we are forming new connections with have been tended, loved, and lived upon for generations by the original inhabitants of those lands.  Towards the aim of rematriation, we intend to grow connection with local indigenous organizations and offer a percentage of our proceeds to projects happening in the territories where we hold Wild Wisdom programs.

In our 9-month journey together we explore and reconnect with our own earth-connected (and earth-disconnected) ancestors. What traditions were or were not passed on? What animate and spiritually connected relationship did our predecessors have with land? What traditions might we unearth related to that connection? Most of us face the legacy of both connection and disconnection to earth in the stories of our lineage, both being a rich source of learning and healing of our ancestries and those yet to come.