Conversations with the Wild Symposium

A 3-Day Online Symposium on Belonging, Relationship and Reciprocity

There is a world that has never stopped speaking to you. It speaks in the language of watershed and wind, of hawk shadow crossing a sun-warmed field, of mycelium threading the dark beneath our feet. It speaks in the older stories, the ones our bodies still remember even when our minds have forgotten. It has been calling us home for as long as we have been wandering.

This symposium is a response to that call.

Over three days, we gather a rare community of poets, mythologists, ecotherapists, Indigenous knowledge keepers, educators, memoirists, and nature writers — voices who have made it their life’s work to listen, to translate, to tend the relationship between human and more-than-human worlds. Together, and with you, we will explore the three qualities that make that relationship not only possible but sustaining: belonging, relationship, and reciprocity.

Who am I when my open heart accepts nature exactly as She is? Who am I when Nature does the same for me? When I listen to resonance and sense belonging, who do I become? When I experience relationship in my deep humanness, how does nature respond?  When we live reciprocally in a constant state of awe and gratitude, who might we become together?

This is not a conference about nature. It is a practice of returning to it—of embracing our own wild wisdom, aliveness, and creativity.

Each day opens with an invocation and closes with a writing prompt and a practice to carry the conversation from the mind into the body, from the panel into your own particular life and landscape. You will leave not only with fresh perspectives but with a different sense of where you stand in the family of things.

We ask not only what the living world offers us, but what we owe her. Not only where we belong, but what belonging asks of us in return.

Come with your questions. Come with your grief. Come with whatever wildness stirs in you.

The living world is waiting.

Three Days. Three Themes. One Conversation.

• Day One: Belonging — What places have claimed you? What wild regions resonate within you? And how does this resonance lead you to your place in the family of things?
• Day Two: Relationship — What are you in relationship with that you have never named? How does nature meet you when you stop moving long enough to be met? How do you forge relationship with river, or meadow, or some wild creature?
• Day Three: Reciprocity — What gifts are you ready to offer the world, freely and with love? What would it mean to participate in the renewal of Earth — not as a grand gesture, but as a daily orientation? What do we have to grieve before we can give?

This course is letter graded.

Instructor: Christine McConnell
christine.mcconnell@unco.edu