Getting into Pink

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.}

through the rainbow door

Feral Freinds,

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.

Blue Haiku

Feral Friends,

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.}

Living Rounds

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.}

Secret Acts of Wildness

_{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.}

Making Sacred Hoops

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}

Learning Turtles

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).}

Promiscuous Company

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

Asimina à la Salticidae

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.}

Kindred Spring

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.