How connected do you feel to the song that is your life?

For the past two years Mungo Dalglish has been my fellow guide on the Solstice Wilderness Quest. He lives in Cheshire on the 27-acre Natural Farming and Permaculture project he co-founded. As well as joining me on the Quest, he runs mythopoetic & spiritual ecology workshops and retreats as well as being a NO HANDS® Massage therapist. I’ve asked him to write today’s thought:

Clearing –

Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose.

Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life

and wait there patiently,

until the song that is your life

falls into your own cupped hands

and you recognise and greet it.

Only then will you know how to give yourself

to this world

so worthy of rescue.

– Martha Postlethwaite

As the sun begins to climb from the deepest dark amidst slowly lengthening days, I am looking ahead to the ceremony I’ll be co-guiding with Mo Wilde at the other end of the solar year: the summer solstice threshold crossing. I am looking forward to the privilege of once again offering support and guidance and bearing witness to people proactively engaging in the story of their own lives. It touches me to offer this work, and heartens me that there are other humans out there who want to live more fully, and keep giving themselves to what's truly important in this life.

And so I ask you:

How connected do you feel to the song that is your life, and the wild world?

When did you last take time to pause, breathe, and reconnect with the deeper mystery that is your life (and all life)?

What will this next orbit around the sun hold for you?

For thousands of years people have walked into wilder places, alone and without food or shelter, to step outside the usual busy-ness of life, to slow down and listen more deeply within and without, in order to consciously choose their path forward, and to give their lives more fully to that which feels truly important.

In this way people have sought to find more clarity and connection, to be with the questions life stirs up, or to ceremonially mark significant life transitions or new directions. Even though such people walk out alone, they are supported by their community, with whom they prepare and to whom they return. In this way the human community has been weaving and re-weaving their connection with each other and with the wild land. Remembering: we are not separate from wild nature.

“These times are urgent. We must slow down” – Bayo Akomolafe

Mungo
4Elements Massage, Bodywork & Therapeutic Touch:
https://calendly.com/mungodalglish/
Wild Quest & Nature-based Rites of Passage Guide

The Solstice Wilderness Quest is a wilderness threshold crossing retreat and guided rite of passage in the beautiful fells of the Lake District from Wednesday 18 June - Sunday 22 June 2025. For more information about what is involved, please click below.

If you have any questions for either Mungo or myself about the ceremony or other aspects of the Quest, please get in touch at hello@monicawilde.com

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Update on Wildbiome 2025

We now have 120 participants enrolled in our second Wildbiome study! They have all been preparing over the winter with lots of dehydrating and working out their foraging routes for the start of the project in April. I’m very proud of the community we’ve already created. If you’re unfamiliar with the project, here is a quick recap:

In 2023, I ran a citizen science study of 24 people living only on wild food!

Why? Well, during lockdown, I lived for a whole year on the free, wild food found in Central Scotland and did gut microbiome tests. Living entirely off foraged food had a profound impact on my gut microbiome and health – mine and that of my friend, Matthew Rooney, who joined me on this unusual diet. Our gut microbes became very responsive to different foods. I returned to a healthy BMI and Matt, a type 2 diabetic, regained pre-diabetic blood status in just 9 weeks.

However, a study of two crazy people doesn’t make good science. So in 2023, I was joined by fellow members of the Association of Foragers in a citizen science research study. 24 of us ate only wild food for 3 months (Cohort A) or just 1 month (Cohort B). We were monitored against a reference control of 24 people eating normal shop-bought food. What we wanted to know is “If you are what you eat, what happens when you add something wild?”.

Encouraged by the test results (you can read the headlines here), I started working on repeating the study, but this time with more participants. Sadly, scientific testing doesn’t come cheap and we need your help to fund further tests for our 2025 participants. These tests help us assess the impact on microbiome composition and key health parameters of people eating an exclusively wild food diet. We are committed to publishing peer-reviewed results in an open-source academic journal so that many more people can benefit from our insights. This all costs money even though all the volunteers are doing this for free.

Your donation will help this unique opportunity to track the impact of a foraged diet. This study is important as it will make a huge contribution to what we know about the indigenous western human gut microbiome and how significant the loss of wild foods might be for our diet. Please help me raise the funds we need whether it’s the price of a pint or a coffee, or a generous corporate gift!

You can follow our progress on social media. We’re using the hashtags #wildbiome and #thewildbiomeproject or, if you’d like to read more about how it all began with my year living wild, my book The Wilderness Cure is available in bookshops.

Thank you.
Green love, Mo.