Dear Friends
Disenchantment is everywhere. We seem to have fallen out of love with so much that the contemporary world stands for. In the face of a relentless barrage of awful news and an evermore uncertain future, when more and more is asked of us and it feels that we get little of meaning in return, it can be hard to find the magic in our lives.
And yet, magic is still there; in the return of spring flowers and the first green leaves, in the smiling eyes of those we love. In fact, for all that the world is a tough and frightening place right now, that magic is often with us; in birdsong, in shared laughter, in the way sunlight falls over the land.
Magic is, of course, a tricky word. But at Wild Rites we have started to talk about enchantment – and the possibility that we can re-enchant ourselves by connecting deeply with the world around us.
Over the past 500 years or so, western culture has privileged reason and the rational intellect as the primary ways of engaging with and understanding our world. As a result, we live in a “secular age”. The goddesses and gods, the spirits of place, the shaman and the cunning folk, the notion of a divine spark, have all been driven away. We are left alone, as individuals, with our own minds as the only place where meaning might exist.
At the heart of Wild Rites is the understanding that - in fact - meaning resides everywhere, in everything and most especially in nature. Ceremonial objects can be imbued with meaning. Animals, plants, trees, rivers, the rocks we sit on and the cold wind we brace ourselves against all hold meaning for us and have messages to give us.
Can we allow ourselves to step into the enchanted web of meaning that we share with our surroundings? A web that we are intimately part of and whose presence and intelligence we actively co-create as we open and offer the gifts of our psyche to the world around us.
At Wild Rites, we lead ceremonies that guide you to a state where your psyche becomes porous, so that aspects of your soul are released to resonate with the wild landscape. This allows a deeper relationship to develop, not only between yourself and wild nature but also between you and the world at large. And it is in the depth of this enchanted relationship that you can begin to see your soul mirrored back. This mirroring is key to what Wild Rites offers, as we guide you through ceremony to see what nature is trying to tell you about the state of your soul and your emerging self.
The word porous is important here. What Wild Rites offers is not the Garden of Eden. We are not promising you an experience of a return to nature as an ‘innocent’ dwelling in paradise. That would be to regress, to lose our sense of self and purpose, merely to feed on honeydew, as Coleridge would have put it. Rather, through shared council and the deep ritual of medicine walks, we seek to guide you into a participatory relationship with wild nature. A relationship whose insights and meanings you can take back into your everyday life.
Call Of The Wild Soul is a four-day long ceremony, which brings us into relationship with more of our Wholeness. Over our time together, we build a ceremonial container that enables a softening of boundaries and helps you to recognise that you can choose to be more porous, so the buffers between your consciousness and the Unconscious, the inner and the outer, begin to soften. This softening enables you to experience aspects of soul outside yourself, amidst the wild landscape where we work. Or, we could say, to enter a state of enchantment.
We then invite you to go out and gather and retrieve these soul parts from the landscape, facilitating a return of that which has been repressed, forgotten and disavowed along with your latent potential. This allows you to move to a state of greater Wholeness and integration. At Wild Rites we do this whilst honouring your ego (we consider this essential) and supporting you to integrate into consciousness that which you retrieved.
As we all dream of a different, better future, perhaps by becoming a little more porous and entering into the enchanted, we can begin to understand what we have to offer the world as our Whole Selves and to bring that into being?