Rewilding the Human Heart

A Journey of Reunion

“What we need is a great, powerful, tremulous falling back in love with our old, ancient, primordial Beloved, which is the Earth herself.”  Martin Shaw

Hello Earth Lovers, and Welcome to Rewilding the Human Heart!

I am happy that you found your way here today and hope you will join me in this exploration of humanity’s wild and deep roots in the living earth. We will explore joyous hands-on ways to deepen our relationships with the Elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Air and Ether as well as the Realms of Nature ~ Mineral, Plant, Animal, Human and Unseen Beings. Let’s engage with these beings not only in the outer terrain, but also in our own interior landscapes, practicing many embodied, celebratory ways to give honor and thanks.  Through meditations and active imaginations we spark internal inquiry; how do these elements and realms live inside our own souls?  I hope you participate in this journey with me! Engage with the experiential, artistic and philosophical explorations; make note of your thoughts, feelings and questions.  Please Subscribe and share in the comments sections how these many ways of making relationship with the more-than-human world move through your being!

Subscribe to Rewilding the Human Heart! All subscriptions will be free, with no nagging to upgrade and pay.  You can ignore the “Pledge” button. Please invite your friends, as well, to enjoy the festivities.  Send them this link and we will travel together.

Here are beginning thoughts:

“It is August 2024.  I sit in the shady garden; oakleaf hydrangea scent drifts, as summer breezes ruffle poplar, hickory, and wild cherry leaves high in the forest’s umbrella. It is a green ocean and I sit beside its fragrant shore, tracing the patterns of wave upon foliate wave. The close by woodland paths I walk are humped with bright green pincushion and fern mosses. Wild agrimony, affectionately called fairy wand, and shy hillside blueberries nod as I pass. These are good bio-indicators of healthy water, soil and air environments. Yet only a few hundred yards further up the mountain black oaks, pine, and maple have recently been logged by the local mill.  We trade this complex web of living species and organisms ~ forests contain 80% of the world’s bio-diversity ~ for pulpwood: Fourth of July paper plates and pellet stoves in China. 

We are told we have few years left to find solutions ~ to change the story.

How have we gone so wrong, and how do we begin to turn the tide?  There are many things to do, ways to be involved. Paul Hawken’s book Drawdown gives us 100 of the best ideas that can be put into practice right now, to not only stop carbon emissions, but also to re-sequester carbon back to a safe limit.  If we can reduce carbon emissions to this level, it could give us time to develop the consciousness we need in order to not simply fix problems, but to actually heal the deadly mess our wrong-headedness has created. 

A more hidden yet equally crucial question is who can we become, as a solution to this global crisis?  Clearly, it is who we are as human beings that has put us, and our one home the earth, in this dangerous predicament.  It is who we are that commits ecocide and therefore suicide.  If we attempt to “fix the problems” from the same consciousness that has constellated the disaster, regardless of the good intentions, will any of these solutions turn the tide, or will they founder in wrong-thinking?  Clearly, our paradigm of human domination is the root of these problems.  It is important to explore how we have come to this deadly point in human consciousness.  With this understanding, we will learn new and ancient ways of being human, in right relationship with all life.  These will arc out in resonant fields and work in conjunction with all the good actions that must be done. We ourselves must become new again; we need to envision a truly sustainable future for all beings. What is important is not simply what we do, but also who we are as we act.

We are shaped by the way we think; the nursery of thoughts is the collective human story, passed generation to generation.  For the last many hundred years this has been a story of human ascendency: a story of our separation from the great round of Being. It is a story of shattered relationship, of domination, exploitation, and extraction.  We witness the destruction and wreckage that has come as its logical result. 

It is time for us to rediscover the primordial story of humanity’s place in the cosmos.  I believe it is crucial for us to retrace our steps, return to the place our human way of thinking diverged from the millennia-long-earth-story: that of symbiosis, cooperation, and collaboration.  This organic form of growth has, through the miracles of synergy, evolved life from single-celled ancestors to ever-higher, more multifaceted expressions of Being .  We need to pick up the thread of this ancient story ~ still held by wisdom-keepers around the globe ~ make reparations for our wrongs, and step forward into a new chapter. 

We do this by committing to the ageless principle of Oneness.  By committing to the earth, Gaia herself, the One Being for whom all waters, landforms, winds, and species compose her living body, our home.  We do this by finally acting on the realization that our astonishing and uniquely human way of thinking ~ our dazzling human brain ~ is given to us as a gift to be shared for the benefit of all life.  The plains Indians’ powerful greeting and prayer Mitakuye Oyasin, an affirmation that All Beings Are Our Relatives, carries this image of the great Circle of Life.”

And here is a poem to inspire your dreams:

“Effaced

cascading leaves are

emerald waves

on an afternoon breeze

each shade of green

sings itself 

in a foliate sea

walk

drawn into

verdant depths

fall into

unbounded detail

perfumed loam

feather moss

dove’s song

merge with

fungal strands

all healing ginseng

chanterelle mushrooms

breathe in symbiosis with

emerald  beingness

communal singularity

pregnant wildwoods

disappear into fecund alchemy.”

Subscribe to Rewilding the Human Heart! All subscriptions will be free, with no nagging to upgrade and pay. 

Excerpts from my book of poems A Litany of Wild Graces: Meditations on Sacred Ecology

https://www.sharifaoppenheimer.org/sharifas-books

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash