I am excited to welcome my friend and Iona soul guide, Mary DeJong, on today's podcast. Today, we will be talking about how Story connects us to the earth, ourselves, and each other as an expression and vehicle of the sacred. She will gift us with telling the Inuit story of Fox Woman Dreaming, a beautiful, but challenging story about belonging to self and each other.

*Show note: Fox Woman Dreaming contains an expletive within its story. This is important for the tone of what is being shared.

Mary is a spiritual ecologist, ecotheologian, wild soul guide, urban naturalist, and practitioner and guide of place-based pilgrimage. She specializes in the spiritual companionship of "rewilding" and instructs spiritual directors and companions through Spiritual Directors International and One Spirit Learning Alliance.

Mary facilitates retreats and pilgrimages in the Pacific Northwest and in Iona, Scotland that strengthen the unique and mystical interconnection of participants, the sacred, and the natural world. She has studied and practiced within the Celtic Christian spiritual tradition, her own maternal line heritage, for over twenty years, and is influenced by the lives of Celtic saints, and the lands that guided them.

She holds a post-Heroic Journey framework that calls us to emerge as poets and prophets, instead of heros, an applied mythological worldview that is connected to her training within mythology and the emerging field of ecopyschology. Mary's theoretical and praxis focus within deep ecology, eco-spirituality, ecotheology, ecopsychology and specialization in Thomas Berry's Universe Story delves into why place matters, the sacramentality of creation, and how together this informs the development of our ecological self. Mary terms this work “sacred eco-awakening” and sees this as a critical and holy endeavor as it allows us to come to grievous terms of our human history and to posture ourselves once again side-by-side with the whole of creation.

Find out more about Mary's work here:

Waymarkers Iona Pilgrimage: https://www.waymarkers.net/iona-pilgrimage

Rewilding Retreats (day retreats and April 2024 weekend long in the Cascade Mountains:

https://www.waymarkers.net/rewildingretreats

https://www.waymarkers.net/cascade-mountains-rewilding-retreat

Wild Seasons: https://www.waymarkers.net/wild-seasons

You can also find Mary on Instagram @waymarkers