Between the Equinox and Solstice the sun slips a little to the south — revealing familiar things in unfamiliar light.
See the world with autumn eyes. Love each day and the wild family with whom we share this turning earth. Give yourself to beauty. Walk quietly into deep nature.
Turn off all devices.
— Jack Phillips
Photos by Billie Shelton, southern Loess Hills (top) and Bridget McQuillan on Pawnee Land in eastern Nebraska. Bottom: an early November toad (Anaxyrus woodhousii) just a few months old, preparing to hibernate with Robert Smith.
In younger days I spent some time with Egyptian Monks. A long-beard told me that the sun will rise without my help and that goes for you and me both, brother. But I did notice that everything we did in meditation and ritual closely followed sunset and sunrise, lunar and solar events and points amongst and between, guided by the cosmic rhythms of the Sahara skies and ancient astral liturgies of the Wadi Natrun.
Biological processes are governed by internal circadian (24-hour) clocks in each and every earthly organism from Monks to microbes. Monkeys. Truth is, each distinct cell in our bodies follows a daily rhythm ranging from roughly 21 to 28 hours and together they can adapt to seasonal cues and stresses and hormonal ups and downs that make life flexible and fertile on this spinning marble, the sharps and flats in the melody of days.
So perhaps everything that breathes and beats, all that vibrates fast and slow over eons and out-breaths, acts and moves together and on each other— cyano-bacterial blooms, heron struts and bobs, bobcat whiskers woodchuck whistles, slow clams, marrows and jams, Cassiopeia and the Pleiades sisters, bucksnorts and gnatcatcher wheezes and gnats. Ginger snaps.
Do yoga by a pond and fix the leak in your blowup kayak with your feet in the water, have your friend read to you a poem with a catbird sing-along, listen to caterwauls and cottonwoods when you’re fresh out of monks or maybe make your own. Follow the asceticism of hop-toads and the wisdom of widow-skimmers and the liturgies of whippoorwills. Trust your own ears and skin, soften your eyes on the verdant world we live in, give your palms to the sun or your fingertips to the inky night and give a little push.
Let the chewinks chant the first line.
— Jack Phillips
Photos: scenes from our summer 2024 ecospirituality retreats by Jack Phillips.
After some light yoga and the circular reading of a poem, putting colors to paper and guided by a mother oak above, we mapped our vision of a world to come.
Later as we glided on our duck-weed pond, a young snapper joined us not so much to chart a virgin territory as to celebrate a new summer — the first summer of a wild and sacred world we can choose to live in with our love for nature, for each other, and by the stretch of our imaginations. And of course crayons, a paddle, maybe a little yoga, and a growing circle of wild friends.
And with luck, a curious turtle. Make a map of the world you want to live in. The light is just right.
As you know, it is not enough to simply say that the heart of human consciousness is wild, but that wild nature — the more-than-human world — is rooted in consciousness as well; that the human spirit is part of the wild world and the other way all around. But sometimes artists ignore ecology and ecologists make little time for poetry or pondish yoga. When they hang with us they are quickly recovered.
The wild creatures of our favorite waters are known by those who study them and by those who count them as kin. Their many names and endless forms most beautiful and their complex relationships are wonders to behold. Entering their lives through contemplation and discovery, we find magical realms in which we find our deepest and most original selves.
When we are surrounded by flits and midges, all that wriggles and writhes in the myriad mysteries of freshwater nature, a thousand eyes upon us reveal more than a thousand presences. Let us learn their names and their names for us, their secrets of living and being. Let us discover our clearest reflections.
Find yourself in a pond.
Jack Phillips
Members of the Naturalist School have been collaborating with Creighton University biologists since 2022 on a study of a small lake in Fremont County Iowa. Dr. Joseph Phillips (top photo, on right) is the primary investigator. Our study includes winter invertebrate research, aquatic plant surveys, night-trapping aquatic insects, and monitoring amphibian populations. Angélica Perez (with mother turtle) is a TNS Fellow and a project research assistant. Below: TNS Fellows Courtney Stormberg (left), Angélica Perez, and Kristin Zahra (right) conduct an amphibian survey in Saunders County, Nebraska.
Photo credits: Angélica with turtle: Robert Smith. Bullfrog tadpoles: Betiana Simon. All others by Jack Phillips.
Feral friends, the full moon of April is the Pink Moon.
(If you squint) she takes a rosy hue as she comes into heat splitting sepals into rainbow minnows opalescent secrets into orbital bodies
freshwater clams, pumping hormones into sonic frog-bladders/inflatable toads, raspberry finchings swollen hips with underbelly blushes and
lights her pawpaw lanterns, breaks the day into pinkish splatters.
Go outside and get a little pink. It’s a good color on you.
Jack Phillips
*An odd result of spending one’s life or most of it in the woods and always dreaming thereof is that it becomes easier to write in poems. And you are unlikely to find a complete sentence out there anyway, so you might as well just follow a snail or travel a web, wait for chewinks and chick-burs and a tikky-tick tree frog. Sometimes it comes as a simple line or maybe as haiku, sometimes a rush of images that shakes out into lines or splatters into prose. Write in a way so as not to be seen by others, rather in a way that helps you to see. When you read it, a reflection of your wildest self will appear.
Photos: Dutchman’s breeches, Dicentra cucullaria (known to some poets as big-girl fancypants), in Fremont County, Iowa; wild prairie crabapple, Malus ioensis in Dallas County, Iowa by Jack Phillips. Bottom: pawpaw, Asimina triloba in Fremont County, Iowa by Robert Smith. This time of year, everything looks pink to me.
A few months ago we were asked by a local museum director to present a poetry workshop on Black Elk Speaks. But he objected to my proposed title, ”Through the Rainbow Door,” because we would not be permitted to promote a “gay” agenda. Of course I was referring to the “Rainbow Door” in Black Elk’s Great Vision — the center and axis around which the entire vision and the Lakota cosmos revolved — as entrusted to John G. Neihardt. (Neihardt, the first poet laureate of Nebraska, had been given the name Flaming Rainbow.) I changed the workshop title to something less dangerous but that didn’t matter; the director had no idea what we really had in mind.
Beyond embracing diversity and treating all persons with respect and dignity, our agenda was even more radical. As Black Elk rides a singing horse through the Rainbow Door, he enters a cosmic reality in which barriers are breached and healed; all living things sing together and in so doing, call forth a renewed reality of kinship and peace. The cosmos burgeons forth in birth and rebirth in the passionate flowering of fertile Earth — with the Sacred Hoop spinning around the Tree of Life in a musical, tie-dye dream.
It was an outrageous day of yoga and barefoot incantations, cicadas and birdsong and making art, of laughter and food and little catnaps under maple and ash and mourning doves, a woodpecker wearing medicine feathers and a phoebe chasing a swallowtail. The wild things of the neighborhood drew near as we conjured and called upon ancestors and animal spirits. We read indigenous poetry and wrote some poems of our own, made a rainbow of souls on the museum lawn. A perfectly subversive day.
Happily for us, one need not be a mystic or shaman to find the Rainbow Door, or even a young Lakota boy in a fevered vision. A sacred portal might reveal itself in a full moon or eclipse, in equinox or frogsong, under a Grandmother Oak, at the center of a spider web bejeweled at first light or between the flutish notes of a sexed-up thrush. In Black Elk’s words: “the center of the world can be anywhere.”
But not just anywhere. A sacred hoop is made of desire, of hunger for love and friendship and kinship and healing, of honor and respect for Earth’s creatures in a place where sacred songs can be heard in crickets and rainfall, in rustles and grackles. Tadpoles and turtles. In sticky mud with duckweed ankles and dragonfly rattles. On holy ground where we can feel the lusty beat of the cosmos in the soles of our feet and the fires of sacred love within our wildest selves, a door opens. In a fertile place where the primal presences break through, make a sacred hoop with your radical companions or alone with the creatures who will meet you there.
See you ‘round,
Jack Phillips
*Photos: Sacred Hoop gatherings with The Naturalist School, 2023/2024. Photos by Jack.
Perhaps because it was the first sunny Sunday in weeks or the way the heavy silence embraced us when we paused our crunchy meander or the ferity of passionate friends so wildly in love with nature. Or the way the churry-churry bluebirds a beep-beep-beep nuthatch a distant kaw kaw crow bounced their chides and chortles through the oaky basswood hickory-woods where the last humans to pass this way were none other than us a year ago this month. For whatever reason, azure rufous underbelly snow a bluebird makes haiku, always a poem when you least expect it or by now, perhaps we do.
Just walk, wait, love winter deeply. Let the wild things bring the poems.
— Jack Phillips
Photos: eastern bluebird (and poem) by Troy Soderberg; wild artists on frozen springs, January 28th, 2024 in Fremont County, Iowa.
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 nurseryfor 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.
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.
