FOLLOWING THE NORTH STAR
endings and beginnings from a surrendered spirit
me in the super bloom. 2018.
My beloved friends,
I’ve been wanting to write this for awhile, and I keep coming back to this place of
LIFE / DEATH / LIFE
that orients so much of what I do in the world.
As someone who works womb to tomb (midwifery to deathwork and many things in between), being attuned to the cycles of life and death is essential in my life. This extends beyond my vocational world and in fact, is rooted deeply in my personal experience.
When I can sense the timing for transition, for dying, for birthing - I listen.
I don’t turn away or pretend things are different than they are. I choose to meet life fully and to surrender to the path that Spirit carves for me. I say yes to the call - wherever it leads me - and deeply trust the journey of this life.
For this next year of Beltane to Beltane, my attention will be away from The Wild Mystery Letter. I am going to keep it open and might share occaassioinally on here if I feel moved, as I love this space and what has been created here. But it won’t be where I am oriented. My north star is guiding me toward…
WILD ECOLOGIES: FIELD NOTES FROM THE NATURAL WORLD
Those who know me have seen this coming for quite some time. I was born and raised deep in nature, barefoot in the jungle and sea, the natural world surrounding me as a living, breathing prayer. My life is heavily oriented around the more than human - living in the Amazon rainforest, being devoted to a slow and ancestral way of being, and my work returning to where I started: the holy wilderness.
Wild Ecologies is “a field journal for the more than human world. Essays on ecology, animism, grief, ritual, myth, and the holy experience of being alive on a living Earth.”
This is why I’m here. To gather people around the fire and help remind them they are animal. To create a field journal of my unusually feral life and bring that medicine to those who long to howl at the moon, naked and unafraid. To share my love for flora and fauna through ecological writing that beckons us into deeper relationship with land-based spirit work. To be a pause in the intellectual noise and instead ring the bells for a return to communion with the ecosystem around us.
I really hope you join me over there. The flavor will be quite different, but I am almost certain that most people reading this newsletter do not have enough ecological musings in their life! Each month will have one free essay and the inaugural essay can be found here, called When the Field Opens.
There is also a paid subscriber option, which will unlock a second monthly essay on a deeper thread of the month’s topic, as well as a monthly curation of things to watch, listen, and read that are ecologically attuned. Your support is so deeply appreciated, and to already see a few paid subscribers over there from just one Instagram story brings me so much joy! Thank you.
Paid subscribers of this newsletter are getting an entire year of Wild Ecologies for free! (Although if you feel like supporting financially, I would love it and won’t say no!) Please sign up for the free version below and I will upgrade you automatically to the paid level.
Like I said, this isn’t goodbye to The Wild Mystery Letter. I can envision sprinkling in some personal essays here over the next year, and possibly bringing this back as a more dedicated project after the year ends. But for now, I am spread too thin to tend to both beings and Wild Ecologies is a long time coming. It feels so deeply right and I am delighted to see what unfolds.
Thank you for everything here, this isn’t goodbye and I truly love each and every one of you. I hope to see you over in my new space and I am sending wild blessings to you all 🌱
Xoxo Binyamina Aisha