Wild Winter | Your Seasonal Rewilding Journey
Recovering ancient, seasonal wisdom to cultivate
psycho-spiritual soul formation and sustenance in our modern lives.
Take a seasonal journey into the dark this Winter, reconnecting to an ancient and sacred rhythm that pulses within our human soul and that of the wild and precious Earth.
Wild Winter is a seasonal online course delivered in the stream of Celtic spirituality that aims to foster our inherent literacy to read the wild world as sacred script. When we remember that the Holy is here—blowing in the wind, present in the darkness, stable as mountains—our souls are invigorated and our lives become more rooted and integral in our places. If you want to live a life that engages the wild edge, this place of enchantment and mystery, of reconnection and sacred service, this journey is for you!
The seasons uniquely speak to us, still offering up a primeval wisdom with an elemental tongue. Within the stream of Celtic spirituality, we are reconnected to the mystical truth that Creation was the first scripture. For billions of years, Earth’s cycles and seasons proclaimed Divine Mystery with the elements as a pen and and the seasons as the paper. Now more than ever, we are being called to learn to read this wild and holy writing once again, for the sake of our souls and the anima mundi, the soul of the world!
Wild Winter is a season-long course; however, it is more like a retreat experience than an intellectual exercise. And while it’s seasonal in nature, it is perennial in design. You will be able to return again and again to this content, much like a seasonal devotional that will connect you to the spirit of Winter. You will be guided through the vast topography of somatic ecology, specific to the seasonal correspondences within the Rewilding Wheel, a wheel of life that aims to reconnect you to the sacred ecology of your bioregion.
Spiritual ecology, Christian Animism, and applied mythology hold additional theoretical frameworks as you will also be introduced to shifts in perception and invitations into practice that will deepen your sense of place during this Covid time of displacement; and leave you more connected to the seasons and wild others, an antidote to our collective feeling of disconnection in these times as well.
Give yourself the gift of a journey into the
sacred wilds of Winter this season.
Course Description
Wild Winter helps you recover the ability to read the ancient script of nature found within the wheel of the year. How does this season of Winter speak to you? What can we learn when we lean in and listen to the conversation between the sacred energies of the cardinal direction North and the element of Air? How is our soul’s journey activated when we ground our spiritual formation in a place? By applying a spiritual ecology framework,
Wild Winter invites you to the integral the work of recovering a worldview that sees the seasons, and all of the natural world, as part and parcel to the health and flourishing of our human and community health. An ensouled and animated Earth will be our guide and the Rewilding Wheel will be our form as we explore how the journey through the Winter season is also a mythological one, inviting profound engagement with our soul and the anima mundi, the soul of the world!
Wild Winter offers you six professionally produced modules via an on-line course platform. It will leave you with the felt sensory experience of being out in the wilds of Winter. Each module contains 2-5 segments that will guide you through the quadrated seasonal learning: Winter as Teacher, Air as Guide, North as Prayer-mat, and Mountain as Sacred Landscape.
Wild Winter offers additional theoretical teachings around spiritual ecology, somatic ecology, applied mythology and animism within the Christ tradition as additional frameworks for this work of recovering our heritage of experiencing the world as an enchanted and holy place. You will be provided with reflection questions and personal application prompts to deepen your experience within the course content, offering you creative challenges to help live the teachings. Rewilding prayers and practices will also be shared so you can immediately begin to integrate your learnings into transformational spiritual practices. You will have access to a supportive community where you can discuss course content and join in themed conversations on a private platform with others on the journey.
Wild Winter is a self-study, on-demand journey, one to which you can return throughout the whole season of Winter and in years to come. See this as a virtual retreat space where you can tap in to ground into the mysteries of the season and come away renewed and refreshed. You can join this offering and begin working with it at any time; you’ll have access to your material for the lifetime of this website.
Wild Winter aligns with the content of Waymarkers’ Rewilding Retreat programs, a Whidbey Institute offering that has historically been offered in the legacy forests of a small Pacific Northwest island buttressed by the Salish Sea. Now, no matter where you are, you can rise rooted within this earth-based stream of spirituality!
What You’ll Learn
How to move through the Wheel of the Year
What Rewilding is and how it can improve our soul’s vitality
How to apply Biomimicry as a spiritual practice
Sacred attributes of the elements, and how the element of Air can inspire our journey
How the cardinal directions inform our prayer practices
Seasonal qualities of Winter and how they apply to our own seasonal life
How to re-story your soul formation through a mythological worldview
Rewilding practices to reconnect your spiritual life to the ground beneath your feet
How Divine Mystery speak through nature as symbol and archetype
Somatic Ecology as a way of mapping our inner-world based on elements throughout nature
Spiritual Ecology as a philosophy and framework for your journey
The Curriculum
Module One: Winter As Teacher
Segments include: Winter as Season; Winter as Darkness (Dark Positive Spirituality); Winter Solstice | Standing Still Like the Sun; Emotional Quality of WinterModule Two: North as Prayer Mat
Segments include: Cardinal Directions; Wisdom within the North; Bioregionally Located Seven Directions PrayerModule Three: Rooting Deeper
Segments include: Biomimicry—Patterning the Wisdom of Winter; Spiritual Ecology; Rewilding PracticeModule Four: Air as Guide
Segments include: Elemental Knowing; Air | Holding All Things SoulfullyModule Five: Mountain— Landscapes of the Sacred
Segments include: Sacred Bioregionalism; Somatic Ecology-The Mountain Within, The Mountain Throughout; Rewilding PracticeModule Six: The Mythological Journey
Segments include: The Post-Heroic Round | Cultivating Poets and Prophets; The Sage Returning Home; Restorying Your Life
About Your Guide
Mary DeJong is a spiritual ecologist, ecotheologian, wild soul guide, urban naturalist, and practitioner and guide of place-based pilgrimage. She specializes in the spiritual companionship of "rewilding" and has instructed other spiritual directors and companions through Spiritual Directors International. Mary facilitates retreats and pilgrimages in the Pacific Northwest and in Iona, Scotland that strengthen the unique and mystical interconnection of participants, the sacred, and the natural world. She has studied and practiced within the Celtic Christian spiritual tradition, her own maternal line heritage, for over twenty years, and is influenced by the lives of Celtic saints, and the lands that guided them.
She holds a post-Heroic Journey framework that calls us to emerge as poets and prophets, instead of hero’s, an applied mythological worldview that is connected to her training in the emerging field of ecopyschology. Mary's theoretical and praxis focus within deep ecology, ecotheology, ecopsychology and specialization in Thomas Berry's Universe Story delves into why place matters, the sacramentality of creation, and how together this informs the development of our ecological self. Mary terms this work “sacred eco-awakening” and sees this as a critical and holy endeavor as it allows us to come to grievous terms of our human history and to posture ourselves once again side-by-side with the whole of creation.
“Seeds grow in the dark—so do we.
Let’s stop making such a virtue out of the light.
Let's turn toward what’s in the shadows and breathe it in,
breathe it here, meeting it face-to-face until we realize
with more than mind that what we are seeing
is none other than us in endarkened disguise.
Seeds grow in the dark—so do we.
Let’s not be blinded by light
Let’s unwrap the night
Building a faith too deep to be spoken
A recognition too central to be broken
Until even the darkest of days can light our way.”
― Robert Augustus Masters
Who is this for?
Spiritual seekers who want to connect their path to Earth wisdom
Environmental activists who want to strengthen the sacramentality of their work
Healers who desire earth-based modalities of connection
Mystics who yearn for new experiences of Divine Mystery within their bioregional context
Artists and creatives who want to explore the inspiration of the elements
Teachers and guides in need of Earth-based spiritual guidance
Curious individuals who want to deepen into practices that will connect them to their lineage
and land-locatedness
The Investment
Wild Winter Course: $125
Purchased and delivered through Teachable.com | Wild Winter is non-fundable based on the nature of this on-line course.
Curious about other Wild Seasons offerings? Continue your journey through the Sacred Seasons!
Save $260 with the Wild Seasons Bundle - Includes all four seasonal courses