The Holy Wild with Victoria Loorz

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Jon Young, award-winning wildlife tracker, storyteller, mentor, and author of influential books including What the Robin Knows. Since 1979, Jon has researched a single theme: why do some social groupings of people consistently facilitate deep nature connection, while others do not? Drawing from Indigenous wisdom traditions, mentoring lineages, and his own lifelong relationship with the living world, Jon has spent decades exploring how humans cultivate deep connection with nature, self, and community.

Together, they explore the lost art of mentoring and the ancient discipline of bird language as a doorway back to the connected mind. Jon reflects on the grandmothers and elders who shaped him, his decades of work with Indigenous communities including the Naro people of the Kalahari, and a vision from his annual self-reflection practice — one that carries an urgent message from future generations about what this moment is asking of us.

Connect with Jon:
Website: jonyoung.org
Book: What The Robin Knows
Mentioned in the episode:
Book: Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv
Book: The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
Book: Guiding Lights by Eric Liu
Connect with the Center:
Website: wildspirituality.earth
Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
Email: [email protected]
Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality
Timestamps:
00:00 — Introduction
03:59 — Interview Begins
05:07 — The Land Who Raised Jon
08:08 — An Enclaved Family
12:06 — Grandmotherly “Tricks”
14:10 — 10 Year Old Jon Meets Tom Brown
18:46 — The Naro People
22:34 — The Lifetime of Mentoring
26:37 — The 5 Needs For Mentorship
28:04 — The 10 Stones of Connection
36:24 — Needed Reflection
37:56 — Deep Bird Language
45:58 — Restoring Our Connective Capacity
49:05 — The Message from Future Generations
53:41 — Wandering Invitation
55:49 — Credits

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Martin Shaw, mythologist, storyteller, wilderness rites-of-passage guide, and author of seventeen books, including his latest New York Times bestseller, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us. Dr. Shaw is the director of the Westcountry School of Myth and founder of the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University.
Together, they explore the tension between wildness and discipline, myth and religion, exile and return. The conversation wanders through Dartmoor folklore, Orthodox liturgy, the role of beauty and ritual in a disenchanted age, and the deep hunger many people feel for forms of spirituality rooted in mystery, embodiment, and the living world. Martin reflects candidly on what has quietly shifted in him since reconnecting  with the Christian story the spiritual consequences of disconnection from land, and a story that didn’t make the final cut of his book — one that illuminates the challenge of this moment: how to ride the "age of the wolf" with courage and faith.

Connect with Martin:
Website: drmartinshaw.com
Website: schoolofmythopoetics.com
Book: Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
Book: Scatterlings
Mentioned in the episode:
Book: The Great Emergence by Phyllis Tickle
Video: Ivan and the Grey Wolf
Connect with the Center:
Website: wildspirituality.earth
Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
Email: [email protected]
Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality
Timestamps:
00:00 — Introduction
06:03 — Interview Begins
10:56 — Re-exploring The Old Stories
13:47 — Living Fidelity of Place
18:24 — Discipline of the Wild
20:42 — What’s Our Current Story?
24:41 — The Age of the Wolf
28:31 — The Religious Has a Place
31:22 — Eastern Orthodox Expressions
34:06 — How Jesus Changes Love
39:05 — Martin’s Wild Threshold
42:03 — Wild Invitation
43:36 — Credits

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Peter Kalmus, astrophysicist-turned-climate scientist, NASA researcher, author, and activist. Peter's radical integrity has taken him from searching for gravitational waves to growing his own food, refusing to fly for twelve years, and chaining himself to doors in acts of civil disobedience.

Together, they explore the layers of grief that come with truly loving a planet in crisis and the spiritual disconnection underlying ecological destruction. What does it mean to love the planet not as a cause but as a being? What might it look like to move from the urgency of fixing into the slower, harder work of reconnection? The conversation also wanders into meditation, ego death, the empathy required to grieve a forest, and the strange fertility of not knowing — inviting us to consider that staying in the unknowing may itself be a spiritual practice. This conversation is for anyone sitting with the unknowing of this moment, and wondering if that might, somehow, be exactly where they need to be.

Connect with Peter:
Website: peterkalmus.net
Book: Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution by Peter Kalmus
Substack: Climate Human
Mentioned in the episode:
Movie: Don't Look Up
Connect with the Center:
Website: wildspirituality.earth
Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
Email: [email protected]
Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality
Timestamps:
00:00 — Introduction
05:16 — Interview Begins
09:07 — The Choice To Not Fly
12:50 — Integrity Through Life Experiment
15:54 — Layers of Integrity Under Systems
17:11 — Civil Disobedience
22:33 — Unmoored
23:52 — The Discipline of Meditation
26:09 — Disconnection Belongs In The Cycle
28:12 — The Holy Local Tribe
30:20 — Aging Into Eldership
33:18 — Grounding Practices
39:33 — Loving Kindness For Yourself
42:57 — Trail Encounter with the Universe
45:36 — Encounter with Ego Death
48:51 — Expansive Meditation Encounter
53:08 — Wild Invitation
54:50 — Credits

In this conversation, Victoria Loorz speaks with Dr. Vanessa Wijngaarden, social anthropologist and founder of ANICOM, a European research project exploring intuitive interspecies communication across cultures and contexts. Vanessa reflects on her years living with Maasai communities in East Africa, where immersive fieldwork cracked open a radically relational way of seeing the world, rooted in the cosmology of Osotua, a word meaning "umbilical cord," in which who you are is defined entirely by your relationships. 
Together they explore what it might mean if animals, land, and the more than human world have something urgent and necessary to say to us right now, and whether we still have the capacity to hear them. Vanessa's research brings together indigenous knowledge holders, professional animal communicators, and hard scientists to ask whether other beings might be participants in knowledge making rather than objects of study. The answers emerging are surprising, humbling, and full of hope — and why recovering our ancient capacity to truly listen across species may be one of the most profound spiritual and scientific invitations of our time.

Connect with Vanessa:
Vanessa's Website: vanessawijngaarden.com
ANICOM's Website: anicom.uliege.be
Film: Maasai Speak Back (Trailer)
Article (osotua): Wijngaarden, V. & Paul Nkoitoi Ole Murero. 2023. Osotua and decolonizing the academe: Implications of a Maasai concept. In: Curriculum Perspectives 43(Suppl 1): 33-46. Special Issue: Narrowing the Gap Beyond Tokenism: Transdisciplinary Search for Innovative Approaches in the Integration of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Epistemologies in Higher Education. DOI : 10.1007/s41297-023-00190-2. Abstract and full text
Article: Wijngaarden, Vanessa In print. Secularization and decolonization of the academe: In conversation with African faiths and knowledges. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Decolonising Knowledge in Africa.
Article (lion and cat): Wijngaarden, Vanessa 2023. Interviewing animals through animal communicators: Potentials of intuitive interspecies communication for multispecies methods. In: Society and Animals 32 (5/6): 519-539. DOI: 10.1163/15685306-bja10122. Full text
Mentioned in the episode:
Wiki: Maasai Mara
Book: The Little Soul and the Sun by Neale Donald Walsch
Connect with the Center:
Website: wildspirituality.earth
Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
Email: [email protected]
Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality
Timestamps:
00:00 — Introduction
03:58 — Interview Begins
05:39 — The Land Who Raised Vanessa
08:30 — Osotua
11:19 — Building Trust in Relationship
16:56 — Humpback Whale Encounter
17:52 — Wallaby Encounter
18:26 — Fasting During Deer Encounter
20:23 — Normalizing Relationship
21:13 — Research in Animal Communication
25:17 — Starting with the Experiential
26:31 — Unseparating Professional and Personal
31:05 — ANICOM
34:44 — Lion Says
36:09 — The Theme of the Alive World
38:38 — Intuitive Interspecies Communication or IIC
39:23 — Conversation with a House Cat
43:08 — Restoration of Trust and Earth Power
51:01 — Victoria Falls Tourists
54:12 — Wonder in the Mountains
55:24 — Elephant Encounter
57:24 — Changing the Ethics of Relational Research
61:39 — Reciprocity of Approach
66:03 — Next Threshold
68:51 — Real and True
71:49 — Wild Invitation
74:38 — Credits

In this one-year anniversary episode of The Holy Wild, Victoria Loorz is joined by producer Stephen Henning for a reflective conversation marking the close of Season One and the threshold of what’s next. Together, they revisit the heart of the podcast, sacred conversation as a living practice, and explore how a year of dialogue has deepened their understanding of relationship with the more-than-human world. Along the way, they reflect on the challenge of language itself, and how learning to speak, however imperfectly, about encounters with the holy and the wild is part of restoring those relationships.
The conversation then explores the Seminary of the Wild Earth journey and the invitation it offers, not as a program to complete, but as a container for transformation through practice, community, and deepening relationship with place. Victoria and Stephen reflect on the process of discernment for those considering entering this immersive year of rewilding. They explore what it means to feel the pull toward this work, what it asks of those who say yes, and how to recognize whether this is the right season to step more fully into a life shaped by the holy wild.

Connect with the Center:
Website: wildspirituality.earth
Victoria's Website: victorialoorz.com
Email: [email protected]
Linktree: linktr.ee/ctrforwildspirituality
Instagram: @center_for_wild_spirituality
Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction
2:34 Welcoming in Our Neighbors
5:08 Reflecting on Season 1
11:27 Languaging About Language
20:39 Seminary of the Wild
25:24 Midroll
25:57 Rhythms of the Seminary
34:09 Discerning the Call of the Holy Wild
40:23 Stephen’s Dream of White Crow
53:07 Sacred Invitation
54:32 Credits