RE-MEMBERING AND COOING

RE-MEMBERING AND COOING

This week marks the 1-year anniversary of the birth of Re-Membering: Poems of Earth and Soul and High-Cooing Through the Seasons: Haiku From the Forest. I marked it by actually taking my own books down to the river and celebrating Fall with them. I introduced them to Jeffers, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, and Jane Hirshfield and we all had a grand ol’ time dippin’ and divin’ in Flow and Fun.

I’m feeling enormous gratitude for the energies that flowed through me to bring them into the world, and all the people who saw in them something special and everybody who continues to find inspiration in them.

The 75 poems in Re-Membering are an unabashed celebration of the sensuality and mystery of wild nature, both inner and outer.

The poems in these collections (perhaps all my poems?) invite us to fully re-inhabit and say “Yes!” to our sensual natures, our animal bodies, our playfulness and creativity and grief, connection, mystery, and our instinctive LOVE for and BELONGING to this beautiful, sentient Earth.

May the poems in Re-Membering inspire your fierce and big wild nature hearts and be a small part of putting our shoulders to the wheel of The Great Turning.

—Ryan

“Bless Ryan Van Lenning for listening to the wild voices and bringing back the news for those who have lost their way. Bless him for reminding us of our original love affair with the earth and of what we know deep in our souls. His poems give wise counsel: let go of the debris, remember who you are, do not abandon your luminous thread.” —Lorraine Anderson, editor of Sisters of the Earth and Earth & Eros

“Ryan’s poetry speaks deeply and clearly to the awakening to our true interconnected nature, which is the only way we can transform our world.” -Molly Young Brown, Author of Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects (co-authored with Joanna Macy), Editor of Deep Times: A Journal of the Work That Reconnects

You can get both books through your local bookstore, on Amazon or Indiebound.

My book of mystical poems, Silence Begins Here, and book of love and erotic poetry, Wild Rose Hips, and Book of Rivers: Headwaters and Heartrocks will be out later this year. 🌿💚🙏🏽🌻🌲

Life Partner

What does it mean to walk with death?

You can walk with death
as an act of the imagination
having conversations with love
on the way to the death lodge

don’t think it’s not there
just because you made it up

You can walk with death
an uninvited guest
climbing hand over fist
with a closed throat
up the mountain

You can make of yourself an apprentice
at the feet of that brutal, beloved teacher
learning lessons sorely needed

For how can you really be here
saying hello to each blessed moment
without a goodbye
somewhere on the tongue?

This is how to pray, it says,
my first and only lesson.

Fall lives in the spring seed.

Finally, you can walk with death
as life’s partner
hand in hand, allied
like a ripe citizen of the earth

with, if not praise, then respect
holding it gently to one’s heart

Praise will come later
when the heart swells beyond measure

for this one who arrives at every hour
or any hour

So do not be surprised
by its walking onto the scene
with an beguiling smile

For is that not the way
of each bright new petal
and every astonishing sunset
taking your breath away?

Taking all breaths away
so there may be a new?

—Ryan Van Lenning

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You can get my books RE-MEMBERING: Poems of Earth & Soul, and High-Cooing Through the Seasons: Haiku From the Forest through your local bookstore, on Amazon or Indiebound, Link in bio. My book of mystical poems, Silence Begins Here, and book of love and erotic poetry, Wild Rose Hips, will be out later this year. Follow me @ryanreturntotheearth for ecosensual mythopoetic inspiration and @wildnatureheartfor my heart-centered nature connection & 1-on-1 inner/outer wilderness work.

A Sun God Worth His Shine

Have you ever seen such a stretch?

Such dawn to dusk dancing
with the widest arms possible?

Waltzing horizon to horizon
like some intoxicated sun god
I hold her,
It—

A sugared Heart
A spoon of love
A gaze long-lingered
A liquid touch
A peachy taste
An arched back
Words so wet with flirty wit

With earthy eyes and happy hips
dancing horizon to horizon
like some High Goddess

she plants seeds with each step
in the the soil of me
that sprout arms
to hold her—
even the dark parts
at the bottom I see as shining shadows:

Reactions born of wounds
The ancient distrusts
The golden grief of mistakes
or paths not taken
the Daphne and Artemis in her fleeing

But also the Persephone and Demeter in her growing,
and Aphrodite and Athena as well

She is no simple girl
but a feast of elements

and I gladly consume her everything

Shall I shine on peaceful open meadows alone?

No, I’m of giant appetite
savoring the world
in the whole
and in the pieces

visiting the buffets of peak
and darkest valley
devouring shadows

and when the dancing is done
at the end of one world

I rest and return
bigger and brighter
upon the morning

As any sun god worth his shine
will do

It is impossible not to love
in times like these

When there are so many horizons to explore

—Ryan Van Lenning

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You can get my books RE-MEMBERING: Poems of Earth & Soul, and High-Cooing Through the Seasons: Haiku From the Forest through your local bookstore, on Amazon or Indiebound, Link in bio. My book of mystical poems, Silence Begins Here, and book of love and erotic poetry, Wild Rose Hips, will be out later this year. Follow me @ryanreturntotheearth for ecosensual mythopoetic inspiration and @wildnatureheartfor my heart-centered nature connection & 1-on-1 inner/outer wilderness work.

Diving Into the Night

We dive into the night
as lovers
with lyrics of flickers
licking the moon

I rise with a flash
of your thighs
and those dive me eyes

Some forest of silence settles in
other than the sudden breeze escaping from your mouth
when I read the grand grammar
of your skin with my fingertips

That enormous growl springing from my throat
is born in my mammal
arousing your she-wolf

Let’s dive the sea together—
Give your lungs over to me
as we win a wet world
of heat
and runaway teeth
at the bottom of it all

How dark outside
breeds Light primordial inside
is a mystery

How can this be so firm
yet so soft at the same time?

Did we scream, did we drown, did we find
that inner shore?

I HAD MY HABITS

Did I go wild in the woods
or find merely
a measure of meaning
bright as a storm?

It’s not something one speaks about publicly.

Yet I recall growing dawns
on me like leaves
such rivers running through me

Something exquisite Becoming both green and grey
in the body. Oh, I could dance
and dance

and never reach the bottom of the tree.

The world was a ladybug, a lichen left to be.

All was rainbow, Everything
a universe
the poison oak a guardian
and ox-eyed daisies lazy free
the winter sky, abundant muddy me.

I had my habits—Living
on my in-and-out breath

Under a mushroom
Over a bough, bowed with moss.

Seasons saw me.

I drew a few to my hearth
Foxes from their hidden dens
Bears from hibernation
Falcons from their perches

Feral ones fleeing cages.

Conversations with the least of them,
the most of them.

I had no scrap of saddle
No undue doing
No yoke of note
but her sweetest voice.

Dropped my dreaming stone
in the creek
and fleshed it out so still.

Still…What eyes opened! What I opened?

Where else could my heart stretch so wide
But the path past the gates
away from the machine?

Will I ever find that clearing again
smack in the middle of things
wild in the woods?

FRECKLE

I want the slightest freckle to fall
off the smile-side of the season’s face

To land on me with a new breeze
blowing through
like a queen of love
sovereign of the land

One I only recognize after
it has turned the corner on itself
onto the next affair

I’d grin in recognition,
knowing that from its soft brown kiss
I’d gather mountains of meaning
and make a home

Then my eyes would widen,
as I laughed from inside
my fifth bone, I’d slow
my endless doings
that try to reserve a place
at the table of belonging

knowing a freckle is just a freckle.

Yet not less than a freckle.

Knowing I’d worship its art,
it’s soft beauty
that will fade with the invisible current.

Knowing the mottled-leaf of me
too will drop

And like you, autumn,
I’d take my turn