Feral Friends,

I was almost a teenager when the White Album was released and I recall hearing the singles on local AM radio. And a new invention, the transistor radio, made it possible to listen on the dock whilst fishing for bullheads.

The White Album arrived on the heels of the Beatles’ retreat in India to study Transcendental Meditation (another late 60s hit) and the song While my Guitar Gently Weeps, by George Harrison, reflected his eclectic embrace of eastern philosophies on the eve of the band’s nascent dissolution. 

This may seem an odd thing for a naturalist to dwell on but I do have a point. Even at that tender age — probably the most wild and open time of my life — I wanted to feel, with the wild creatures I counted as best friends, the earth spinning and rounding and the vibrations of frogsong. As I watched the clouds through the canopies of cottonwoods I was convinced I could actually feel it. I didn’t have much luck with girls, but I cherished the persistent scent of pond on my skin and the surprising things I found in my hair and that is probably why. I believed in a world beyond turntables and incense, in the creek behind the drive-in and in the woods that somehow still remained.

Nonetheless, Harrison’s words cut me to the heart the first time I heard them: I look at the world and I notice it’s turning … you know the rest.

Funny I still think of that, and even sang it once to a workshop full of arborists who were more interested in how to spray for beetles. Or Beatles. But here our future lies: to feel connected to all living things and to the planet Herself, to feel the cosmic wind in our faces as we spin and round and ride the big blue ball together, all together, our desires and futures as One. Even chlorophyll spins, powered by the sun, on tiny orbs in everything green. 

And not only do we spin and ride, we swing. The good stuff, the wild music, lands between the beats — in primal moments where we rediscover ourselves as creatures of the Earth. Go barefoot in snow. Wake before Dawn (before the kids or the tweets or the pings) to greet her. Find a wooded ravine to wait for Noon (she comes in crows) or if you can’t get away, let the sparrows dance for you outside your window. As daylight fades, watch a fox or the neighborhood cats pull the rounding Moon and follow the slipping Sun. Listen for an owl and if you don’t hear one, just watch the stars slide through the treetops.

Feel the planet turn. 

— Jack Phillips

_{Photos: top, Wolf Moon (Robert Smith); Bobcat (Felis rufus) tracks and barefoot saunter by Courtney Stormberg. Fremont County, Iowa.}

_{Silent contemplations with Grandmother Oak, Fremont County, Iowa.}

Feral Friends,

Paling skies and lower suns (lingering moons pass the second cup of coffee) ask of us a lighter form of verse — taking the length of fingers without mittens. A young and woodsy wanderer confessed the lines are slow to come if ever, but happily for us a poem can take a palette of forms: the act of slipping the thorny thicket or gathering leaves/feathers/shells/pods in your hat or stuffing nuts into woodpecker pokes (an old oak) — secret treats for creatures — or planting saplings grown from sacred acorns. Opening your soul to deep silences. The ephemeral arts of wildness.

Embrace the poetics of the Wild. Wear good socks. Bring a snack to share.

Jack Phillips

_{Sacred Oak sapling, Saunders County, Nebraska. We collect acorns from pre-settlement oaks revered by the Pawnee Nation for replanting on their most holy bluff — the site of ancient creation stories. We also plant locally-native trees and shrubs, grown by our co-op nursery for our planting projects through the our region.}

_{Poetry break during tree planting with local poet Angélica Perez.}

Join us in our wild and sacred work! To learn more, wander this website or contact Jack Phillips at thenaturalistschool@gmail.com . Please support our work with a donation of any size. Just click on the “Donate and Join Us” tab above.

_{Neomorph gray tree frog (Hyla sp.) documented and photographed by TNS member Kristin Zahra in summer 2023. With our program partners we conduct ecological surveys to make data available for research and to develop conservation plans.}

Feral Friends,

On the eve of Indigenous Peoples Day, the Sacred Hoop Collective gathered at Prospect Hill, burial site of founders, pioneers, Buffalo Soldiers, former slaves and their descendants, and immigrants from the world over. It is Omaha’s oldest cemetery established on an indigenous burial site for the Omaha and other First Nations. We asked, what does it mean to honor ancestors and generations to come, to live as kindred with more-than-human creatures and indigenous presences original to this place?

We burned sage, did yoga, honored the Earth, read original poetry, prayed, and even wept a little. And laughed. Then we planted an sapling grown from a wild acorn — one we collected from a local Mother Oak. The sacred hoop of the cosmos is made of many little hoops. On that day we made our own.

Make a sacred hoop with those you love and even those you don’t. Live as kindred with the wild and the not-so-wild creatures with whom we share this home. Plant something wild and watch it grow.

— Jack Phillips and The Naturalist School

_{Photos by Jack Phillips (above) and Kristin Zahra}

Wild friends,
Upon emerging a snapping turtle drags up deep time and teachings that reveal to us our oldest nature, an identity and way of being that exceeds our form and vision. Quietly approach to read the duckweed and muck and the graphics of scutes on her back, lines and colors and scales on her skin to receive a message of ancient wisdom. Find yourself in her eyes.

Learn turtle. Become a pupil of pond.

Jack Phillips

_{Chelydra serpentina is often feared, loathed and misunderstood — blamed for eating game fish and ducklings and sold for soup. They are in truth quite docile (dangerous only when perturbed or balanced on a paddle) and vital to healthy aquatic habitats. They are messengers of the deep wisdom of how to live on this planet. Except for the occasional photo-op and ecological research, we approach with silence, reverence and awe — leaving them undisturbed or gently returning them to their homes. Please do not harm or eat them!}

_{Photos: Hatchling snapping turtle (Saunders County, Nebraska) by Joseph Phillips; small, young adult snapping turtle by Kristin Zahra (Fremont County, Iowa). Below: poets listening to turtle-songs and reading the Chelonian teachings of time (with Jack steering the canoe).}

Henry David Thoreau once complained of “promiscuous company,” those that trumped and chattered their way through woods intent on a social yuk-yuk and riparian entertainments and for some people nature is just for that. But not for us.

Like Thoreau and for generations of silent seekers, the silence of the woods is not the absence of noise but the presence of birdsong and the sweet music of turtles just ahead of our canoe, a sanctifying promiscuity that makes holy the walker (and her feet) and the earth and waters beneath, the sacred act of paddling devotions making every ripple a pondish chant. Frogs and flying dragon rattles. Spiders on duckweed a fingerling wiggle below. Solstice looking back at you.

Let summer have her say. Hold your tongue and she will speak through you. Then throw a blanket and have some pondy tea.

Jack Phillips

Feral Friends, sometimes the morning is so perfect in a place with little human imprint or racket that the world appears as it is, naked of poetry or science, writing her own dances and all we can do is breathe and be. Beauty shows her face. Virgin light finds our eyes. We are reflected wildly in the other, find ourselves in the primal gaze.

Find yourself in wild silences. Leave your phone in the car.

— Jack Phillips

_{Jumping spider (family Salticidae) hiding in a spring blossom of pawpaw (Asimina triloba) in Fremont County, Iowa on 30 April 2023. Photo by Tess Houser.}

One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as “natural resources” is to class them as fellow beings — kinfolk.

— Ursala Le Guin

The Weight of Waking [poem]

Those of us who fall restless around equinoxes and solstices know moon-rounds and the slides of sun do addle and stir every living thing and those that come to life in a squint or a poem 

slip over stones made smooth by time and turtles, ancient ambers and vernal sapsuckers aroused and fuddled, we wake as one. And here our future lies: 

in mating owls (woot-woot) chitter doo-wikitty Carolina wrens kon-ka-ree blackbirds bud-breaks hylas’ kreeek (the first frogs 

and after) caterwauling coons, in dreaming (we) of bloodroot/faerie-cup/mossy seductrix tiny cotyls tips and midges, the weight of creation no more than an eyelid.

*

[invitation]

And for this we saunter our Sunday mornings in the Southern Loess Hills and sometimes the Nishnabotna and the Kitskatuus river (known in settlement times as Platte). Come along with us or find alone a wild and quiet place to wake and walk and spring lively.

 – Jack Phillips

_{*Why poetry? The constraints of language even in wild company can make the sounds of soft muscles (though native to our species) a means of distance and separation. Free verse and unfettered speech can uncivilize us a bit, rewild our tongues on the path to recovered creatureliness  – naked of form – to embrace the skin of rhythms, the taste of vowels and the feel of harder sounds. I especially enjoy the fricatives. No one needs to see your writing. Just sing it with the frogs.}

Photos from our Saunters — just before and just after vernal equinox — in Fremont County, Iowa: blue-winged teal, turkey vulture, Troy Soderberg. Scarlet-cups, filamentous algae, Angelica Perez. 

Let’s be silent together tracing down, listening up

coyote quiet slide in throat, bone cold promise of spring

echoes lichen, desire, dripping from lips, prayer, guesses

about prey and last night’s music, connections from scratch

some deep at least four ice inches thick we are in the midst of it

made of it, the middle of everything

_{Photo and poem by Tessa Wedberg. Sunday Saunter, 22 January 2023 in Fremont County, Iowa.}

The sharp sound of beaks and bubblers

Softened by frog spots and sparrows

Suspended in time, like the air trapped beneath our feet

Gliding along the surface like boatmen

With the help of nature’s breath

A crack and car’s rumble return the body I occupy 

Jagged contours – nature-made armors – protect the fragile leaf.

Words and images by Kristin Zahra, on a frozen pond in Fremont County, Iowa.

***

A little time passed,     a little bit passed quickly.

A goldeneye came, a straight-flying bird     it fluttered about

Seeking a place for its nest,     considering a place to live…

So then the mother of the water,     mother of the water, virgin of the air,

Raised her knee from the sea,     her shoulder blade from a billow,

For the goldeneye as a place for a nest,     as an agreeable dwelling place.

…On it she builds her nest     laid her golden eggs,

…Suddenly she twitched her knee,     make her sinews tremble;

the eggs tumbled into the water, are sent into the waves of the sea;

the eggs cracked into pieces,     broke into bits.

The eggs did not get into the ooze,     the bits not get mixed up with the water.

The bits were turned into fine things,     the pieces into beautiful things:

the lower half of one egg     into the earth beneath,

the top of half of another egg     into the heavens above.

The top half of one yolk     gets to glow like the sun,

the top half of one white     gets to gleam palely like the moon;

any mottled things on an egg,     those became stars in heaven,

Anything black on an egg,     those indeed became clouds in the sky. 

***

Feral Friends,

Every year to welcome the Solstice we gather on a pond or near one (sometimes a river) to read from the Kalevala, the compendium of ancient Finnish creation stories. Solstice is the perfect day and the beginning of the new solar year; this year doubly so, as the new moon comes tomorrow. A far-north cosmogony works well in Iowa when our glassy pond moans and cracks to give birth to something new. May we find ourselves cracked open and blessed and the frozen soul freed – brightened and warmed – under the mottled sky.

A yolk for the sun and eggwhite moon,

Jack Phillips

_{***Photos by Kristin Zahra, Fremont County, Iowa.}