About Us

"Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things."

Mary Oliver, "Wild Geese"

 

 

Wild Soul offers programs, retreats, thought, and inspiration to help us discover our authentic selves and the "wider we" of the more-than-human world, especially where our interdependent living planet and cosmos intertwine with our souls.

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In The Practice of the Wild (1990), poet and essayist Gary Snyder defines wildness with a constellation of evocative words and phrases: free, spontaneous, self-propagating, self-maintaining, flourishing in accord with innate qualities, self-reliant. This vision of wildness resonates remarkably with author and educator Parker Palmer’s definition of the hidden wholeness within each of us that is realized through the inner teacher, our “inner source of truth, named in various wisdom traditions as identity, true self, heart, spirit or soul. . . . Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient” (A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life, 2009).

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As a conservation or ecological practice, rewilding is about allowing natural processes to work according to their own innateness, including when healing degraded or damaged habitats. This kind of rewilding is founded in trusting wildness, whereby we have faith that nature is able to flourish, as Snyder says, through self-reliance, self-propagation, and self-maintenance of its intrinsic life and character.

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Likewise, trust is at the center of "rewilding" ourselves, that is, allowing our true natures, our souls to flourish in the world we live in, to align our inner selves with our outer lives—which comprises our relationships with friends and loved ones, our community, our vocations, our avocations, our purpose and calling—or our “soul and role,” as Parker Palmer says. We do so through the Courage & Renewal® approach and the Circle of Trust® developed by Parker Palmer and the Center for Courage & Renewal. A Circle of Trust is "a process of shared exploration where people can find safe space to nurture personal and professional integrity and the courage to act on it," as the Center for Courage & Renewal defines it. As Parker Palmer says, the process is succinctly described as "solitude in community."

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Our individual soul's relationship with the earth and cosmos plays a central role in what we do, but the work of Wild Soul also focuses on many other aspects of human life, from creativity and artistic expression, to education, to growing into elderhood, to the nonprofit world, to social justice, to spirituality, and more.

Join us in engaging your whole, authentic self with courage and support as we explore the questions of your life!