Your Wilder Nature: A Field Guide to Tracking Soul

Wild soul calls to us in wide open spaces, in the deep, and in our own animal mystery. It is a song of ourselves, authentic and unfettered, native to the earth. People long to connect with something bigger, something deeper. We long for the meaningful and mysterious. Yet today, so many of us are alienated, from each other, from self, and from the natural world. We experience loneliness and a disconnect in our personal lives. The earth suffers from our careless disregard. It is time to seek a new vision, for ourselves and for the earth. We are called to soulful inquiry and to heal the broken relationships. As both a clinical social worker and a wilderness rites of passage guide, author Daian Hennington, MSW, has over 20 years of experience supporting people in transition through life passages. Her book offers a way of connecting with soul in nature that can be practiced by anyone of any belief, any age, any culture, any physical ability. At once poetic and practical, Your Wilder Nature is a guide for tracking soul in nature through practices of awareness and observation, skills of orienting to self and the natural world, and outdoor safety. Through learning the language of psyche and nature, the reader is invited to explore a biodiversity of spirit. With an ecological model of lives interwoven, the book makes it is clear that every being changes and is changed by the give-and-take of relationship, and that to find ourselves in relationship with the earth is to be more deeply human.

Daian Hennington, MSW, is a guide into the borderlands of nature and psyche. A student of nature, culture and the spirit, she has studied with traditional, academic and other than two-legged teachers. She was initiated into her own wilder nature on a solo backpacking trip from Tahoe to Yosemite at the age of seventeen. As a practicing clinical social worker and ecotherapist, she has brought the healing benefits of nature into the clinical relationship for over two decades. Daian lives in the northern reaches of the Carmel River Watershed and offers workshops for self-exploration in the wildlands of California.