Kendra Ward

A DEEPENING INTIMACY WITH ALL OF LIFE

When you’ve lived in the same place for a little while, summer is a reunion of old friends, a relief to see them healthy and well, returned to shared homelands. It's a relief to see the dragonflies back on their favorite warming rock, a relief to see the plant families of chicory, red clover, mugwort, and milkweed in the fields again. A relief to see the osprey returned to their twiggy nests, a new babe already in tow, a relief to watch the bats come to dance in the dark, a reminder that for now, something fleeting and precious is still right with this world.

In the latest episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast how we explore the element of Fire in all of its expressions of peak aliveness. We eat us some sun, unravel the delicate, spiraling organs of our hearts with a little anatomy lesson, ponder the mysterious taoist term wu wei, and we call back that ancestral knowing that the heart is the true key to experiencing direct perception, direct connection with the living world. Lots and lots of heart medicine for you here in this episode. Thanks for listening!
www.kendraward.com/podcast

MOVING BEYOND ECO-ANXIETY

Perhaps our human worry is the last thing the earth needs at these trickster crossroads. This is the core inquiry of Chara Armon, PhD., founder of The School for Humans and Earth: how can we actively move from eco-anxiety to eco-inspiration?

Because how we view life on this planet and our place within it as human beings, directly determines how we choose to contribute or not. With a dash of neuroscience, a sprinkling of informed optimism, and a wallop of animist celebration, our conversation is an exploration into how humans might still be good medicine for this planet.

Here are a few of the highlights from this most recent episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast:

🌱We explore some of the mysteries of what it means to “feel at home,” and how it’s entirely possible for home to be small, local, and delicately close while at the same time varied, vast, and shared by many places, even the entire planet Earth.

🌱Our nervous systems are entrained to the earth and vice versa. In this way, our individual flourishing is intertwined with the Earth’s flourishing.

🌱Perhaps one of the most radical acts we can make is to use our love and creativity instead of fear and extinction-mongering to lead us forward. When we feel hopeful about our future we are more likely to take action or feel motivated to explore how we can hold a frequency of regeneration.

🌱It is from the seeds of animism that all world religions have grown. When we feel into our animist roots, it’s surprisingly pleasurable and intrinsically sane.

You can find the entire episode at kendraward.com/podcast
Thanks for listening!

A WILD, UNDOMESTICATED HEART
A conversation with Jen Hudziec about the Intimacies of Summer

In celebration of the summer solstice, End of Life Doula, Ancestral Lineage Repair Practitioner, and Ritualist, Jen Hudziec is back on the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast to talk about the unabashed sensuality of summer, the joy of loving and being loved back by the living world, and using pleasure as an essential earth-honoring skill.

Jen also shares some of her insights and experiences as a Fire Walk instructor, working with fire as an ancestor who demands our full dedication and attention. At the end of our conversation, Jen guides us in a beautiful summer solstice meditation.

Here are the highlights:

🌼Skin of the earth, skin of our bodies, skin on skin, Jen’s body-felt sense of summer and its sensorial pleasure arises in liberation! Not just a freedom from all of the layers of winter clothes but also in deepening her relationship with the fluid, floating, levity of water.

🌼Co-opted by our hyper-sexualized culture, Jen describes her experience of freeing pleasure from only being equated with sexuality. Her personal shift came through a relationship with the Divine Feminine, when she began to experience true intimacy as beginning from within to then be shared outwards.

🌼Jen describes the pivotal moment in a Fire Walk ritual when an essential inquiry comes forward: Who is going to help you make it across? Are you going to try and go it alone or are you going to invoke the help of the people in your lineage who know fire intimately?

🌼Peering into their erotic inner worlds, flowers bring forward a certain kind of glorious witchery this time of year. Now we better understand that flowers aren’t just attracting bees by their colors and smell but also by their electromagnetic fields. So the really exciting part is when we start to tune into how our fields and those of the beings around us come into coherence with each other.

🌼Having descended from ancestors who were domesticated, who taught us to domesticate the land around us, domesticate our food growing methods, domesticate our bodies, even domesticate our hearts, Jen explores the question of what it means to have a wild, free, undomesticated heart.

You can catch to the entire episode at https://www.kendraward.com/podcast
thanks for listening !

CUDDLING THE LANDSCAPE

Eco-intimacies abound in the latest episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast! My guest, Saskia Von Diest, PhD shares her insights into the way of knowing and being that she calls, Ecofluency. Perhaps it is the most critical skill we can develop as humans, the ability to sit in dialogue and ask the Earth directly: what is needed at this moment on the planet? Because it's only when we ask and listen with more of ourselves, that we really begin to understand what nature truly needs.

Here are a few other highlights:

✨Saskia’s stories of growing up in the dramatic landscape of South Africa, nestling up with warm rocks and “cuddling the landscape.”

✨Without even realizing it, we are ‘enmicrobed' by the landscape where we live, swapping DNA and on a cellular level becoming part of the land.

✨With open-hearted two way dialogue we can negotiate agreements, create treaties, or set plans of intent with nature (even with more-than-human beings that we consider problematic).

✨Saskia describes the etymology of Ecofluency as ‘eco,’ coming from the Greek for ‘house’ or ‘habitation,’ and ‘fluency’ coming from the Latin for ‘free-flowing’ or ‘relaxed.’ Ecofluency has a quality of gentle fluidity: how relaxed can we be on our home, planet Earth?

You can hear the entire conversation at kendraward.com/podcast

Thanks for listening!

THE STORIES OF EVERYTHING...

A conversation with Carina Jean Lyall, from the Becoming Nature podcast, about hearing the many truths of the beings around us.

"Some stories were never man-made. Stories that arose directly from the Earth bring forth the wildest sense of truth-telling… Just as we can’t hurry to tie nature down, we can’t hurry to tie a story down."

I really appreciated Carina’s thoughtful presence and the way she resists rushing through to simpler answers.

You can listen to the entire episode at kendraward.com/podcast
Much gratitude,
Kendra

image: Eberhard Grossgasteiger

THE LAND KNOWS YOU BETTER THAN YOU KNOW YOURSELF

In her book, ‘Hagitude,’ Sharon Blackie says, "every place has taught me a lesson I needed to learn precisely at that time, because places, above all, reflect us back to ourselves. More than this, they teach us the many ways we might become in the world. Deserts, forests, coastlines, mountains, rolling green-fielded countryside, prairies; centers of human habitation from great, ancient cities to small country villages- each of them reveals something different to us about our patterns and potentials. Intrinsic, inseparable: me, the land, our stories; the physical world and the imaginal perfectly intertwined. ”

Paths lead us forward in acts of collective mark-making, while also leading us backwards into memory, as well as inwards, deeper into ourselves. In this one-year anniversary episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast, I reflect on this sense of pressing into the place where we live, all the while exposing overlapping intimacies between personal story and land story. This episode brings a deep curiosity to why we live where we do (out of all the places on the planet, why here?) And in what ways does this land already know who we are, what we could be, what we are moving towards?

You can listening to the entire episode at kendraward.com/podcast
Thanks for listening!
Image: Hans Isaacson

PROTECTING OUR INNER & OUTER WILDS

From a young age, author and herbalist Vanessa Chakour was struck by the archetype of Artemis as the original land protector and environmental activist. In the latest episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast, Vanessa further explains her draw to Artemis and all things misunderstood in nature, particularly weeds and wolves.

Here are a few more highlights from our conversation:

💚Vanessa speaks to the affinity she has had to wolves since she was young. Supposedly dogs are “man’s best friend” and yet we persecute their ancestors, denying them their place as ecological stewards in their own right, upholding an essential balance within the landscape.

💚Our culture maligns so called “weeds” because they are everywhere and no longer hold any perceived value for us. Vanessa speaks to one of her favorite weeds, Mugwort (or Artemisia Vulgaris), its connection to Artemis, as well as its talents at inciting labor and enhancing dreaming. Mugwort also subversively loves to grow as an edge-walker, acting as a boundary between wild and more domesticated spaces.

💚There are love affairs all around us in plain sight, such as Chaga and Birch or Monarch and Milkweed. It takes a certain courage to be that vulnerable, to feel like we can’t live without that other being, whether we are human, animal, or plant. Are we brave enough to let ourselves be consumed, let go and fully fall in love?

💚In certain landscapes there is a growing tension between nostalgia and how the land wants to evolve. By listening better, we can adapt to the way the land is shifting instead of clinging to nostalgia or our unconscious agendas.

Listen to the full episode at kendraward.com/podcast !!

LONGING TO BE SURROUNDED BY THE WILD...

Whether it’s a seashell collection that sits on your toilet, silky feathers tucked into your car’s dashboard, or rocks lining your kitchen windowsill, it is our human tendency to collect and extract everything around us. In this latest episode of Woman Who Rubs the Mountain, ,
author and plant spirit medicine teacher, Rachel Corby of Wild Gaian Soul and I wonder about the ways and reasons we pile up nature all around us. How can we be in the natural world and not turn it into yet another consumeristic activity, stress management plan, or means to fill some deep human neediness within?

Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

🌲When we have been brought up with a human “takey-takey” attitude this translates to: if you want it, you can have it. Perhaps our domesticated selves are missing our wild inheritance, trying to pile up nature within and around us.

🌲We explore some of the complexities of how we create harm without meaning to, often following our curiosities too far. Rachel tells a story of revelation and irony, being in the northern lands of Norway on a snowmobile in the search of disappearing polar bears.

🌲Without realizing it, we can bring a cloying neediness to the beings near us, only reaching out when our hearts are broken or it’s been a stressful day. Learning to express gratitude and extending ourselves on-goingly (instead of just when we are in dire straights) is the bridge to true connection.

Listen to our entire conversation here:
https://rb.gy/mtok3v
or at
kendraward.com/podcast

THESE OLD MEN AND WOMEN OF ARCHAIC EARTH
.. the 500 million year old Stone Elders that chomp quartz between their teeth, opened just one eye for me as I came bearing offerings this morning.

Living in the land (vs occupying or owning a place), I feel how I exist in the bodies and consciousness of these slow-moving, peace makers.

Some of us might feel pretty darn intimate with the place where we live, but Fearn Lickfield Director of the Green Mountain Druid School , is literally, ceremoniously, married to the land she calls home.

In the latest episode of Woman Who Rubs the Mountain, Fearn shares with us the precious story of how she courted and married Dreamland (+Ivan!), what it means to be a practicing, modern Druid, and how to consciously merge the traditions of ancient Celtic gods, goddesses, and far away lands, with the old knowings and ancestors of our current landscape.

Many thanks to Fearn and Dreamland for so generously sharing themselves with us this episode!
https://www.kendraward.com/podcasts/woman-who-rubs-the-mountain/episodes/2147874064

One of my current practices in living myself through the Five Elements is courtship. When courting, you study your lover's freckle patterns, their favorite foods, the sound of their voice before drifting off to sleep at night. You learn the way they feel, smell, taste, and sound.

I have been curiously taking this courtship to each element of the seasonal wheel in an effort to find some previously unexplored levels of intimacy. Being in the Water element / winter season part of the year, I have been wondering what the inner-language or secret imaginings of Water might sound like?

The sacred creek that runs off the mountain where I live was happily willing to play along. This is a little excerpt of our conversation...(you can read the entire piece at kendraward.com)

CREEK

Slippery fingers running through mountain cracks, drip, drip, dripping into muddy puddles to be gulped by thirsty Songbirds, soaking into the calluses of Cottonwood heels, washing the eyelashes, the lips of Earthworm, strengthening the invisible dwellings of Nixie and Water Nymph, feeding the pelvic basins of Marsh Marigold and Swamp Cabbage, petting the heads of Frogs in their silty hiding places, racing faster and faster with River, longing for the Lake, the briny Ocean and its deep sea-growl, where I pause to hear the cosmic spanda, caress Whale ni***es, intermingle with Mermaid saliva and Seahorse sweat, only to float off again, becoming pregnant Thunder Clouds and honeyed Spring Rain that fills tea cups, breastmilk naps, bathtub whirlpools, sinking, gurgling down the drain with an astonishment at the amniotic beginnings of us all.

My womb gathers the world's tears. My star-crushed blood is so old it knows the innards of every being. Change is my nightly lullaby, my porridge breakfast, my one, reliable drink. The only constant really, though you humans hurt yourselves horrendously in your relentless resistance against it.

I am poisoned, revered, dammed, cherished, devoured, dried to a drop and still I persist, change course, sink underground, ascend to the heavens, and make wild lunges towards freedom. I honor surrender as a regenerative necessity. I support transmutation as an essential survival strategy within this apocalyptic landscape. I uphold flexibility and its lack of absolutes, the way it always knows how to dip and weave, bend and bow towards what is most life-giving.

https://www.kendraward.com/blog/water-babies-at-heart

Water Babies At Heart A poetic exploration of the Water element (of the Five Elements).

SINK YOUR TAPROOT

deep into the Earth and let's celebrate all that our plant kin have to share with us. Sara Atemesia of Multidimensional Nature, helps us relax into our birthright of kinship with the plants around us. In this episode of Woman Who Rubs the Mountain, Sara and I explore entraining our nervous systems to giant tree meditators, radiating ourselves from the inside out like flowers, and honoring the many plantcestors who rest in the land where we live.

Here are a few of the highlights from our conversation:

🌎We consider what’s at work when we feel profoundly connected with the land of one place and how this might reflect what we most need at this time in our lives.

🌎Living close to the Redwoods, Sara frequently receives guidance from these giant trees. All trees offer us the possibility of entraining our nervous systems to a more sane, gentle consciousness.

🌎Plants use a spherical form of communication, teaching us to open up our periphery and practice listening through all of our senses.

🌎We may have a sense of our human ancestral lines, but what about our plantcestors? The land where we live contains the history of billions of plant beings, all with their own family lines, memories, and intelligences.

🌎So many plants have an affinity towards growing in disturbed borderlands. These plants have a special, potent medicine that they carry in the world, if only we could see them as more than weeds or invasive.

Listen in here:
https://rb.gy/zit9ru

'WATER IS NOT A RESOURCE, WATER IS SOURCE'

says Veda Austin. Water is the keeper of memories, carrying them through blood, through breastmilk, through body essences, floating the old road rivers back to primordial oceans, connecting us to the birth waters of that First Woman, our original ancestor. We all flow from her body.

Water is the Dark Enigma according to the ancient Taoists and here in the depths of winter (water's associated five element season), the lessons of the water element want to sink into our bones.

The latest episode of Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast is a full-on Water element love affair. Here are just a few reasons to listen in:

💦You dread the dark onset of winter every year and want to learn from this resistance,
💦You have been feeling utterly inundated with water in the place where you live and you want to come back into better relationship,
💦You are constantly running on a state of being wired but deeply tired, and you want to be reminded that the peace of water is your birthright,
💦You need to be nudged into remembering to connect with the waters of the land where you live,

Or you just want to celebrate the sheer astonishing beauty of water, the way it sparkles and tumbles over itself in the afternoon light.

Listen in at:

Embodied Elements Series: The Metal Element & Grief as Praise for Life [Episode 12] Each day the earth seems to be dipping her body downwards, inviting us to purposely step into the dark. Let us not resist, but willingly enter this long tunnel, this inner passageway with its smell of metals, its fertile stone blood. There is no reneging, no reversing the seasons, the elements,...

RADICAL INTROSPECTION
..hibernating in the caves of soul questions with Death Doula, Ancestral Lineage Repair Practitioner, and Ritualist, Jen Hudziec. Jen belongs to an ancient group of healers who hold space for other humans in that final right of passage we all makeㅡdeath. But we don’t have to wait until our last moments to explore our mortality or know our cosmic gifts. Perhaps this big thing called ‘meaning’ that we strive to define is already present in the beautiful nuances of our daily lives, it just takes stillness for us to realize it.

Here are a few highlights from this special winter solstice edition of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast:

🖤As a Death Doula, Jen calls on the Archetype of the Witness, to not just passively hold space but to be deeply present, really listening to when to take action, when to be still, when to advocate, when to let others advocate for themselves.

🖤Engaging in deep introspection through legacy projects or life reviews allows the soul to settle, letting its encapsulated essence be harnessed with intentionality to then be lived out in physical form.

🖤Let us be awed by the resiliency of our ancestors, remembering that the earth reflects this same resilience, having adapted through unbelievable change and tension. This is the story of our collective survival and ultimately we are more sturdy and buoyant together than apart.

Listen to the entire conversation with a bonus winter solstice meditation at kendraward.com/podcast

THROWING THUNDER⚡⚡⚡

Winner of the 2022 Best Indie Book Award! (Non-Fiction New Age/Women)

"Because from somewhere not so far away, we can smell the weather changing, the winds shifting. A deep stirring, feelings of a birth coming, the labor pains of some new world moving through the pillars of our sturdy legs."

A thunderstorm is on the horizon with teachings to share. Much gratitude for all of you who supported this storm of a book in the last year!

#

GOING SKIN TO SKIN

A Conversation about Eco-Soma and Sensory Bonding with Rivka Honeybee Worth

In the latest conversation on , Rivka and I explore experiences of fresh interplay between our bodies and the body of the earth, we feel into the presence practice of Futuring, and we consider the fields of possibility that arise from cell to cell listening.

Here are some of the highlights:

🌿The practice of Eco-Soma is about locating physical presence in space. There are meeting places waiting for us everywhere when we combine consent, conscious touch, and deep listening.

🌿Futuring is a practice that involves feeling into the potential of what we could be and radiating that outwards. New and old worlds circle into each other as the past, present, and future move through a spiraling, non-linear path.

🌿Cell to cell meetings provide access to communicating on an even deeper level, finding the sensory bonding places between the cells in soil, in plants, in our human bodies, and beyond.

Listen to the entire conversation at kendraward.com/podcast

Essentializing is the theme as we collectively walk closer towards winter’s gate. The quiet of the living world seems to go on forever with an unfractured mind. My senses, less overwhelmed now, have the space to wander, to notice the urgent interchange of lover cardinals, the labyrinthine patterns on tree trunks, the sound of a shooting star brushing against the cold skin of the night sky.

Perception is archetypal, ancient, our earliest knowing.

I seem to be particularly obsessed with a haptic style of perception, the tactile intimacy of finger tip against …. For some time I seemed to think this touch-based relationship building was based on me pressing against someone else. Palm against tree trunk, my hand initiating contact. But what if all this time it has really been bark rising to meet me, two bodies simultaneously moving, cresting in a fluid interface of human and tree skin?

Disrupting our deep conditioning that we are living on an inert Earth, perhaps you might explore this new way of seeing too. What if with every step, black dirt universes are pressing up to meet you just at the very moment your foot touches down? What if with every breath, the primordial wisdom of cloud beings is pressing towards the raw edge of your inhale?

Admittedly, attuning to this level of “sympoiesis, making-with, versus autopoiesis, or self-making” (Donna Haraway) takes a retraining, a slowing down. What if slowing down is not really a function of speed or timing, but entirely a function of presence? Ferocious presence perhaps.

In my latest conversation on the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain podcast, I had the great pleasure of exploring ferocious presence with my friend and colleague, Alana Layne Greenberg

We squirmed around together, pressing up against some initiatory questions like: What does it mean to re-embody indigeneity? What’s up with our collective obsession with the end of the world? How does our human body reflect the land body and vice versa (and are there any ways that we might take this sense of “mirroring” too far?)

Would love for you to listen to the entire, juicy conversation at kendraward.com/podcast

Alanalayne.com
kendraward.com

"In honor of Samhainㅡwinter's gate, the deepest down, the darkest everything, the fertile void, the waiting wombㅡI thought I would share a little from my on-going apprenticeship with Owl. The grandmother spirit, the physical feather, the night way wisdom of Owl has been working on me for many years now. With great luck (or serendipitous delight), last spring I spotted an Owl outside my kitchen window and this was the conversation that ensued:

~OWL

You see all those fretful Songbirds down there, moving from bush to bush? Here I sit. I am a hunter of live prey. When I swallow, I become downy fur, trembling veins, a precious heart galloping madly towards the smiling viscera of death. If dying is so common, why is it such a mysterious, troubled thing among you? There is no thought in this act, only quantum instinct, archaic wholeness, and the exquisite heartbeats of fluffy owlets every spring.



The sun goes down and still you watch me.



Soon I will wear the shadows of midnight silk. My ancestors' heads swivel backwards, learning from the past so that we can adapt into the future. The dark forests are disappearing and still we persist day and night, pressing northwards, westwards, taking over the territory of those weaker, even merging with them. You humans might call me invasive. I am not one of those picky eaters whose doom is dependent on one kind of fish or mouse. I gift mineral-rich packages of nails, teeth, scales and rough fur to the earth, bone-zombies left to be merrily reincarnated under the roiling soil.



Oh please, give up your relentless efforts to understand every private riddle and secret chamber of this world. You do not need to have all the mysteries perfectly pinned down, contained, and forced into the light. There are many realms you have been warned to leave alone: a horse’s intuition, the divine timing of spring ephemerals, and my owl’s sight, sharp as a stiletto, bent on tearing apart every comforting interpretation, every half-truth, every romantic, naive, trivialized idea of nature’s benevolence. Take your scientific studies of the rods in my eyes and all the other thousands of things you think you have figured out and let it be pulverized into midnight-dust by the Unknown..."

Check out the entire piece on the blog at kendraward.com
Image: Agto Nugroho

This weekend the Hunter’s Moon rose- defiant of the heavy hand of gravity- her body fleshy from a summer of eating honey and mullein flowers.

I swear I could see her every pore, her backlit goosebumps, awake with the cool air and conjunctive rapture. Her flesh, my flesh, the flesh of the living world covering every surface in some vast tissue of interdependent perception.

The change of season into autumn heightens our sensing bodies with unpredictable temperatures, lowering light levels, and the curiosity of wind, wanting to plunge itself into uncovered ears and necks. My pores are awake but thin; I am a wild pony who has not yet grown in her winter coat.

Themes of skin, nose, lungs, and immune system all arise this time of year. On the trembling edge of my awareness, I perceive the strange vulnerability of my lungs, so deeply protected in my chest, and yet entirely available to oak breath, possum breath, whale breath.

Barrier systems and protective shields are themes, both energetically and emotionally. East Asian medicine calls this our Wei Qi, the defensive energy that uplifts our immune system and acts as a sort of force field. In this Metal Element/autumn season, our Wei Qi is needing time and support to transition.

Your lungs want to know: have you been breathing? Like really breathing through your full bounds? Do you let yourself inhale and exhale everything, taking and accepting all that life brings you?

The fall winds tell me we are in the long exhale part of the cycle. There is a contraction happening, a falling downwards towards the ground, a letting go, perhaps even a soft sense of loss.

At the same time, the energies of the Metal Element offer a sleek sword of clarity, cheering you to cut back until you discover what feels absolutely essential. And in the process you might close your Facebook account, you might spend a year wearing only the clothes you like, you might decolonize your imagination, you might reach out and say it when something really moves you.

Let us forge our metal and cull the unnecessary.

If you are curious about the Metal Element themes of this time of year, take a listen to the latest episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain: kendraward.com/podcast

I have to say that I particularly enjoyed preparing this episode; I read you a little David Whyte, we hear from a couple of elder grief walkers, and we wonder about the true names of Wind. A few other questions we explore:

-What does the inherent wisdom of our lungs, skin, pores, nose, and immune system know already about themes of boundaries, barriers, and protective shields as we enter this season more deeply?

-What do our animal or plant kin tell us about migrating, gathering, fattening, bedding down, falling back to the earth?

-How does feeling into the Metal Element connect us with the
same mineral matrices in the stones, boulders, elder mountains around us, even the planets, asteroids, cosmos above us?

I leave you with this autumn wish:

May your people, plant, animal, mineral and beyond pull you back from the edge, push you up the mountain, raise you up while sometimes falling over, falling down, falling apart, all the while continuing, more supported than you can ever know.

In joy and gratitude,
Kendra Ward

An excerpt from the October 2022 newsletter- if you would like
to receive your copy of my monthly love letter, sign up here:
https://www.kendraward.com/blog