Feral friends,

One of our naturalists observed that clarity of vision consists in layers of light and sound. That is, wavelengths, angles of Sun by day and season, effects of clouds and humidity, the amplitude of soundscapes in the depths of silence, and the way light and sound are influenced and reflected by the world of objects around us and by the brilliance of our loves, lovers, and beloveds. And by the depth of our desire. The spiritually-minded might speak of luminosity. 

(Naturalists of our consort and coterie find it difficult to separate the aural and visual fields as both sound and light express frequencies and waves; this distinction may be an artifact of civilized cognition belonging more to the experiences of the displaced and alienated than to the ferities of love and evolutionary wisdom — possessing of taste and fragrance and skin.)

A recent spring morning on our favorite pond bathed us in fragrant luminosity. The thin clouds gave us soft light that at once penetrated, comingled, shimmered and reflected the water. The song-breath of songbirds and blossoms and of frogs, raptors and waterfowl (suddenly a caterwaul) painted sonic waves of sunlight on our faces. The freshly verdant greens of vernal leaves transformed photons into spinning sugar-balls of long chain chlorophyll sending cascades of energy and light into an ecosystem of longing. 

The surface of the pond gave us the lens by which to gaze into our true and primal yet seldom-seen selves. We became lighter by lumens in the growing wake of dawn (and the wake of our canoe) as we floated the music of morning. Our skin, the organ of all senses and the connective tissue of the cosmos, vibrated with the each and the All. 

Prompt: Luminosity can be experienced anytime in daylight (including moon-shine) but can  perhaps most easily found in wild nature. Silence invites immersion. Still yourself in a nature-space almost free of human sounds beyond your heartbeat and breathing. Listen to wild frequencies of music and light. Open wide your relaxing gaze to the textured layers of color and translucences. Bare as much skin as bug-bites and decorum permit and maybe a little more. 

Flex your meditative vision by moving from soft gaze to focused attention; from light itself to the effects of light on a leaf or flower, a flitting bird or soaring, basking turtle or passing cloud. Breathe deeply, taste the day. Play with Moon and Sun. Adapt your yoga to sexed-up amphibians and hormonal warblers. Drift the polyphonic seas, let passerine messages grab you by the ears.  Enter nature and the nature of being. Be lit and colored and become color and light. Be filled with this primordial moment, with the riotous exuberances of spring and the bashful hues of cottonwood murmurs, with forest and meadow ablaze and blooming. 

— Jack Phillips 

May photos by TNS members: Our favorite pond (Fremont County, Iowa) on the first Sunday in May, Ally Karsyn. Western painted turtle (Chrysimis picta), Washington County, Nebraska, Finn Soderberg. Frog Moon (May 2026), Robert Smith. Dutchman’s breaches (Dicentra cucullaria) Cass County, Iowa, Becky Colgrove.

Feral friends,

In winter  — the solar dawn of the New Year — our wont is to read cosmogonies on ice, or if the ice is thin, on the bank or in the woods above the pond. Funny that creation stories are always local and tell the stories of a people and a place every bit as much as cosmic births and spins. 

And in the telling of ancient stories we make them ours, fitting in pockets or satchels, native birds in attendance laying their songs over bobcat/fox/coyote tracks and spoor. And turkeys. Thus we weave with them our presences in a braided lai of the land. And the deep silence that lets Nature have her say. In these crystal moments she reveals her cosmogonic essence: every moment is a new creation, a burgeoning forth of being. Try this:

As you stand or sit in stillness in the woods or meadow or beside a pond or creek, close your eyes with every in-breath and open with every out-breath. Slowly. 

Slowly…. Let the wild world become new with each opening. Let your body and eyes and breath call into being something new. Listen for sonic births, rhythms, rings and vibrations. See them on the water or in naked canopies, trembling leaves and raptor skylines. Changing blue. Every moment: new. The nature of wildness is becoming. 

Behind a cloud the cosmos dreaming.

With the breezes ripples tune their ice-harps.

Beneath our feet rustles write stories.

In a single breath a woodpecker drumming.

After a period of contemplative stillness, write a simple cosmogonic micropoem. One line, a single phrase like my examples above. Write your little cosmogonies throughout the winter as wild silences find you. Tuck into your notebook or pocket, save them up to weave a world and let yourself be woven.

— Jack Phillips

_{Photos: Solstice dawn deeply ponders silence. Southern Loess Hills, by Jack. Wasp’s nest slime mold bejewels a log as Pawnee dawn wakes the day. Tribal lands in Saunders County NE, by Katie Thompson. A Harris’s sparrow paints a winter day in Washington County, NE by Finn Soderberg. Below: writing winter cosmogonies with UNO MFA students with TNS poet Angélica Perez, Fremont County IA.}

_{*One may think that aha (!) I have misspelled this word, but it is indeed correct as a feature of botanical anatomy, the first root to emerge from the seed. But the radical nature of our work is rooted in the Earth community making the perfect cognate and homonym as radicle is a root and radical means to be rooted, each of course emerging from the Latin root (ha!) radix meaning of course root. May our gratitude ever be all of the above.}

Feral friends,

We’ve once again reached the closing days of autumn planting, gentle and reflective sowing of acorns we collected just over the next hill. Funny that so many planters forget that trees come from seeds and not nurseries and that trees over the eons have been planted by rodents and birds and with them, contemplative humans with radical faith in tiny nuts. Autumn sowing is perfect before the ground gets too stiff in rhythm and synchrony with the phenology of oaks. 

In this simple act we join the cosmic dance and the ancient stories of wild Earth — knowing that when we plant an acorn or hickory nut or any wild seed we are planting devotion and gratitude and ourselves. Every acorn releases a cascade of energy — some becoming mighty oaks and countless others feeding the creatures of Earth and human bodies and souls as well. Acorn flour makes tasty pancakes.

Not every acorn produces a radicle, that serpentine first-root that finds Mother Earth. No matter any which way it lands, the radicle responds to gravity with tiny rolling weights in the tip. The task of the radicle is to join the web of life in soil and sky becoming One. Likewise, our radical gratitude pulls us in the direction of ecological intimacy and cosmic connection. An acorn contains vast potentialities and the hundreds or thousands produced by a single tree (in the millions over a lifetime) release countless energetic currents, a tsunami of life and fertility into which we are spilled and drawn. Each of us contains innumerable potencies and possibilities.

Planting an acorn is radical because it breaks through the hard shell of greedy and impatient human ego and finds fertile ground in community, welcomes the primal dawn with fellow creatures past and present, and shares a fate and future with all that breathes and moves. We devote our creative energies to our communal flourishing with simple gratitude and a boundless faith that fits in our fingers.

Let our gratitude be radical with every day in every season. 

Jack Phillips 

New-autumn friends:

With relaxed gaze we imbibed the watercolor pond through drifting fog under gray-flannel sky, releasing our softened energies to the looping raptors and green darner dragonflies (straggling their annual migration) and with them we were carried over the waters until we caught up with ourselves in canoes. We sat in silence to receive the blessing of this pond, this day, this place. 

This…

We invite you to take the tonic of the new-moon Equinox and the freshly-come Autumn. Taste and savor each day as a creature of the wild and spinning Earth wherever you find yourself.

Drink deeply. 

— Jack Phillips with The Naturalist School

_{Photo: TNS members drinking the wild silences of Iowa’s Loess Hills.}

Feral Friends,

Everything in our world vibrates just ask your local physicist, mystic, or bee and those of the genus Bombus pollinate blossoms by buzzing and quivers trembling free the pollen 

preciously kept beyond their comically stumpy tongues. (A swami once told me that bees buzz in accordance with the Om ॐ but alas — ! — he got it backwards as bumblebee frequencies precede 

and preceded hominid imitations.) Let us peel back the petals clasping tightly our souls let our deepest potencies be bumbled free by Bombus vibrations, or if you prefer, your

multicolor chakras but it takes only one, this time of year try goldenrod or snakeroot white or sunflower yellow or native thistle-purple.

Time for plan bee.

— Jack Phillips

_{A few days before Autumnal Equinox, members of The Naturalist School conducted a bumble bee survey on Pawnee land in cooperation with the Xerxes Society’s Bumble Bee watch. Many native  bumble bee species are endangered or threatened. They are vital to local ecosystems, agriculture, and to human life, community, spirituality and culture. All specimens captured during our survey were gently chilled, identified, photographed, recorded and carefully freed. All photos by Kristin Zahra.}

Feral Friends,

A few weeks ago after yoga by the pond, we made paper maché bowls with our friend Sarah Rowe as part of her Water Ledger project. Sticky with paste, petroleum jelly and goo, I wondered if this mess was a retting of tangles for the weaving of a world, for the resorbing of a primeval web, for the spinning of hyphal fibers and limnic glumps slipped into the soul-soak while hoping they stick to the mold. 

_{A quiet cove in our favorite pond explodes with the green fires of summer — feeding the births of new earths with every dawn and igniting our own acts of sticky creativity. (Photos by Jack Phillips, Southern Loess Hills, Iowa.)}

Perhaps the act of cupping that mud  — by recreating the dome of the sky, the womb that exponentially expands an endless membrane woven and strung of astral webs and cytoplasmic constellations, of primal currents, viscous fecundities and floes and the watery abyss below— with shredded bits and glue and with human desire loosed by a good wetting, was the binding of something entirely new with the gloopy creativity of the cosmos. 

Make a new world on a summer afternoon. Use plenty of goo.

— Jack Phillips

_{Water Ledger, an Exhibit by Sarah Rowe at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Courtesy of Sarah Rowe.}

Feral Freinds,

The dark-night canoeing of my youth was humid and ranic. That is, crooned by members of an ancient and slippery clan that we, regulated by the Interagency Taxonomic Information System, have assigned to the family Ranidae. In my affection for them, I learned that bullfrogs were Rana catesbeiana, but that name has disappeared along with my boyhood ponds as human progress demanded culverts and flood control and suburbs and a new, better genus for bullfrogs.

Oddly, the new name was coined in 1802 by the author of the old name in the same year, biologist George Shaw. For some reason he proposed two different genera, but one of them, the genus Rana, has recently been stamped “invalid” by the ITIS. So now, we shall properly address the American bullfrog (taxonomic serial number 775084) as Lithobates catesbeiana. But they are still Rana to me, a nickname for a childhood friend.

With a sibling or buddy or two, wooden paddles sliding and pulling silently in inky water parting duckweed and spongy algae, big male bullfrogs would sing like bulls with frogs in their throats. The volume up close was astonishing; we could approach much closer than we would have been able on foot. Our flashlights would sometimes catch them ballooning their throats, making a bubble as big as themselves, already way too big for a frog.

A canoe was a magic carpet for us. We could float between worlds on a skin of space between water and sky, unbound by earth and almost invisible. Big snapping turtles would crawl into our torchlight, searching the silty bottom on tiptoe for carrion. Brassy carp with eyes always down, seemed to glide on finny wings for smaller morsels just right for rubbery lips. Bass would lie in ambush, barely concealed in pondweed. Above, bats and nighthawks fluttered and looped, coming close for the drifts of moths circling our lights. Fireflies glittered the shore. Chorus frogs and cricket frogs and crickets sang in metallic bells and whistles and little strings. Leopard frogs snored. Bullfrogs, having acquired evolutionary basso profondo, performed with unabashed bravado.

That was July. On hot summer nights when school days seemed distant in past and future, bullfrogs intent on procreation filled my imagination with songs and finally asleep, my dreams under canvas or under the stars if the mosquitos weren’t too bad. Sixty years later, they still sing for sex and territory and for all of us. The hot period immediately following the solstice, season of Rana, can be observed with a canoe or with rubber boots or old sneakers, or from a hammock within earshot. With little regard for daybreak or high afternoon sun, bullfrogs will perform for any audience throughout the day and season. 

Get thee to a pond and happy Rana to you,                                                                                                    

Jack Phillips.                                         

Photos: American bullfrog by Troy Soderberg, scenes from Rana by Jack Phillips.

Prompt: Birding with New Eyes by Jack Phillips* (to accompany interview with Jeff Koterba, KVNO, February 18th at 0900: https://kvno.org/jeff-around-town/).

.

*Creighton University School of Medicine, University of Nebraska Omaha MFA, and The Naturalist School

When it comes to birding, what could be more important than becoming kin? Entering an intimate relationship means more than learning their English and scientific names. Of course that is important too — but that can come later. What matters most today is the quality of our attention.

Prompt: Please put your binoculars and notebook away and your phone on nature mode. That means OFF. There are no experts here, no apps or field guides will help you with this. See the birds with native eyes, with fresh brains. Birding in the raw. As small children we saw birds and other creatures with pure fascination. Let us see nature with our young and curious eyes!

Find a bird and learn their ways. Walk softly and silently and slowly or just be still. You can walk in the woods or stay close to camp or close to home — anywhere with wild birds and not too much human-generated sound. You might see lots of birds or very few. 

Take time for a bird-while. Wait for a special bird to appear. You might get just a moment with your new friend or a few minutes. Or your bird might briefly leave and then come back to see what you are up to or follow in your bird-wake. The duration of time that a bird will allow you to observe is a “bird-while” — a unit of time relative to distance introduced by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Focus your eyes then relax them; let this bird emerge from the surrounding habitat then melt back in. Let their rhythms and colors, mannerisms and personality and sounds soak your big wet animal brain. Ponder how your hopes for this bird reflect your own, how the care of this wondrous creature is the care we need as well, how the fate of wild nature is a future we share.

Create and hold the space for wonder and reciprocity. In the communal space between members of the Earth community, we can experience each other as kin. In that shared gaze your image is taken into the eye and brain and body of your bird as you invite their image into yours. The space between you becomes a new reality of giving and receiving, a mutual and unique expression of primal energy. In this way your bodies and being are co-mingled, in that moment a new creation. 

Your bird will reveal their name. Listen to bird-language silent and spoken. Do not write it down, just take it into your heart. Let your bird write the first line of your poem. After you get to know each other, gently reveal your name with the soft animal muscles of speech. Later as you sit at a table or on a stump, record your encounter in poetic words or colors or shapes or some of each. This could be the beginning of the most important field guide your will ever own!

When you are back home you can use a field guide to learn the colonial English and scientific names for your bird. You might even look into the Ioway, Otoe, Pawnee, Omaha, Potawatomi or other local indigenous name. To demonstrate, here are a couple of my entries from this winter’s poetic field guide:

Kawakaw

Kawakawa kaw/ raucous onyx cousin/preening purple into sunlight

Notes: Kawa-Kaws swarmed an owl this morning along the frozen creek that feeds the pond. One of them seemed a little more interested in me than the others, but then decided to sit alone in the bright sun preening with a curious eye on me. So beautiful! So iridescent! Research: Pawnee: KaKa, Otoe: Káxe. Colonial name: American crow, scientific name: Corvus brachyrhyncos

Churra-churble 

Churra-churra/ blue the north, rufus to the sun/ — paints the day in churbles.

Notes: I saw a bright little friend perched high in the bare canopy. At my approach they flew but quickly returned to resume a sun-facing bask. So I likewise turned my face to the sun and closed my eyes. My inside-eyelids took the color of that rufus breast. That must be how they got their colors — straight from the morning sun and winter sky. Research: Scientific name, Sialia sialis, in taxonomic Greek meaning “a kind of bird.” What a dull name for a striking little eastern bluebird! I much prefer the name revealed to me. A Pawnee man told me that blue and red birds are messengers. What message was intended for me?

_{Photos: Blue Jay and northern cardinal; black-capped chickadee (Washington County, Nebraska) by Finn Soderberg. Wild poets in Fremont County, Iowa by Jack Phillips. Eastern bluebird in Saunders County, Nebraska by Neal Ratzlaff.}

_{Wild body-poets Ally Karsyn and Angélica Perez floating in a sonic sea of Equisetum hyemale (tall horsetail) in February. The rough texture and high silica content and its utility for scrubbing cookware has earned the moniker “scouring rush,” but to the poet it is better called crackle-pop pony-weed — useful for composing body-poetry.}

Feral friends, 

In a deep ravine (affectionately a canyon to us) we push our way through bouncy equisetum forest tubular horsetails bend with silica clicks a sunny patch 

bids to lay we upon this bed of rushes pitter-patter pony-weed aerial shoots flumes and furrows (everything here is ephemeral but slowly so: ice, 

bone, path, and spatter) bending trachea popping back to vertical obedient to sunlight like we, prehistoric presences tending 

green fires of summer so distant from spring a fickle twist of evolution gives them tender defiance but requires of us better socks.

Write a wild poem with your wildest body. See directions below. 

— Jack Phillips

_{Ephemeral art by Angélica Perez and Ally Karsyn using feathers from a northern flicker (Colaptes auratus) and a shell from a western painted turtle (Chysemys pitca) — most likely the results of natural predation in our deep ravine.}

*How to write a body-poem: 

1. Dress warmly, hike for an hour or so.
2. Find a native place free (or almost free) of human sounds: no chainsaws or traffic, phones off, no flight-path overhead. Take a drink of water, then leave all your belongings on a nearby log. If comfortable, leave some skin exposed (but not all of it, this time of year) for better listening. 
3. Still yourself at the edge of a sonic river, then go for a soul-swim.
4. Let other-than-human presences write the first line, or alternate lines, or all of the lines. 
5. Faithfully inscribe this poem upon your heart. Repeat daily or as often as needed. 

…and in so doing, in this deep surrender to the rising dawn and climbing sun, we take the character of light as does our sister Moon. Rays of warmth. Creative energy. Giving of self that transforms the gift and the giver, feeds the soul of Earth and those who hunger on the shortest days of the year.

Learn to spin and ring with cosmic snails. Make simple works of ephemeral art to vanish with the making. Bind the days behind us to unravel those to come, one by one. Wear the winter sun with warblers who find it summer-enough here. 

Find a wild place in a deep ravine or a city thicket with nobody else around — only cheeps and flits, rustles and russets — away from traffic and your blankety-blank phone. A place where possums bask and the last of the smilax holds her green, where the blue sky slides on naked branches and noonday sticks to fungal jellies.

Open wide the thinning season, take the sun with wilder kin.

Right here.

— Jack Phillips

_{Credits and notes: golden crowned kinglet and witches’ butter fungus in late autumn by Troy Soderberg, young opossum by Neal Ratzlaff. Ephemeral art with flamed tigersnail disjecta membra by poet Angélica Perez. This Latin phrase refers to scattered fragments that are reassembled to make a whole as in the case, for example, of the reconstructed works of the ancient poet Sappho. This piece by Perez recreates the life of an individual snail with scattered shells from many snails, at least that’s how I saw it when I happened upon it in the woods. The poet Perez may have and most likely intended something else entirely, or nothing at all. (Making wild art simply makes us wilder.) Summer enough; a phrase borrowed from Henry David Thoreau, with which he described the northern songbirds that migrated south to New England, finding it more summer-like than their home breeding range.}