Cape Buffalo Drawing in graphite, 2025 by Clara Jordan

Welcome to The Wild Journey Home.

Today I’m having a special conversation with my daughter, Clara Jordan, a sustainability scientist, poet, and artist. In this episode, we recount a tense, awe-filled encounter with a Cape buffalo herd in Kafue National Park, Zambia, using it to explore how Cape buffalo—often seen as dangerous and uncharismatic—mirror women’s experiences of being stereotyped, judged, and misunderstood while remaining fierce survivors with their own beauty.

Clara reads our collaborative poem, “Claim Your Story,” which reframes scars, bracing, pain, and physical imperfections as living poetry and evidence of a life endured and fully lived. They discuss how the poem emerged from conversations about therapeutic yoga, women’s movement patterns, and the way stories are carried in the body.

Claim Your Story

by Clara Jordan & Nona Jordan

In this society, we are taught to submit our bodies to the quiet torture

Of unreachable expectations.

Perfection and sameness, parallelism, and flawlessness.

Darling, I know that it hurts,

But amidst this heavy burden that we unknowingly cower beneath,

I must share the message:

In your pain, I see poetry.

Beneath your braced and battle-worn exterior,

I see the glorious marks of fights won, and fights lost.

That raised scar is the braided fiber of a sailor’s rope

That has weathered many storms,

That tweak in your neck is evidence of a life lived

Looking to the horizon, seeking a glimpse of the stars.

Your shaky balance a humble testament to the cosmic rifts

You have stumbled across.

Each ache and twitch and scar carries verse and metaphor

Of the story you have written all of your life.

No woman can rightly say she is not a poet.

Because darling, I see the story of your life written in the way you move.

A memory of your past selves

And their dreams,

And accomplishments,

And hard-won lessons.

We tell our secrets in flesh and tissue, muscle and bone.

Did you know you are the greatest collection of poetry ever written?

Come Rest in Community

Paid subscribers of The Wild Journey Home gather monthly for First Sunday Sanctuary — a live yoga nidra with active imagination guided by an animal ally. Rest your way to clarity. Let your guides and allies light the way.

First Sundays of the month at 8am Pacific | 9am Mountain.

Become a paid subscriber and join the circle.

Thank you for listening to The Wild Journey Home.

Sacred Travelers: Elephant, Mynah Bird, and Mountain Painted in Acrylic, Nona Jordan, 2014

We were preparing to leave Hawaii.

Erick was heading to Burundi. Clara, Kelsie the dog, and I were heading back to Colorado. Uncertainty upon uncertainty — it was unclear if we would be able to join him in Burundi. So here we were: his assignment was pulling him one direction, the three of us heading another, and the life we’d built on Oahu dissolving like a sandcastle overtaken by waves at high tide.

I had been hoping the entire time we lived in Hawaii to be gifted a Mynah bird feather. They are ubiquitous on Oahu: brash birds that rove in gangs and endearingly do more walking through streets than flying. Though mynah birds were constantly present in our Ewa Beach neighborhood, finding a feather remained elusive.

One of those final days, before the movers arrived, Clara and I were headed out on an errand when I saw a Mynah bird lying in the road. It must have been hit, but it looked fully intact. To Clara’s surprise, I stopped the car in the middle of the road to look closer. The bird was dead, but whole.

She was beautiful! I was beside myself with excitement. Clara was riding on the coattails of my enthusiasm that I had finally found a mynah bird feather (a bit more than that, right?)

I gently scooped the bird up. While Clara, wide-eyed, wondered 1. If we were really taking the bird home in the car with us and 2. Were we really putting our errand on hold? The answer was an emphatic yes to both as we turned around and brought the bird home.

On the lanai, Clara and I honored the mynah bird - we marveled at her wings, her beak, her perfectly gnarly claws, and her beautiful feathers. With thankfulness, I took its wings with the kitchen shears we keep set aside for turkey — I lovingly put the wings in salt, wrapped gently in tissue, sealed in bags before we buried the tiny bird body. Then I placed the wings in a box headed to Burundi, thinking I would reunite with them in a few short months when Clara and I joined Erick.

I never caught up with those preserved wings, or Erick, in Burundi.

Mynah bird, your medicine is welcome here.

The Common Mynah is not native to Hawaii. She was a good idea gone sideways. Originally from South Asia, Mynah birds were brought to the islands to control pests in the sugar cane fields. But being the resilient birds they are, they arrived in a foreign place, adapted, and made it home. Mynah birds are actually Starlings, but the colloquial name “Mynah” comes from the Sanskrit madana and Hindi maina meaning cheerful, delightful bird but in Hawaii, the Mynah bird is seen as more of a nuisance than anything. But I did not tire of their noisy gatherings or the way they would strut across the street in traffic.

Mynah bird arrives and takes up the business of making the place her own.

The Anatomy of Wings

Recently I attended a dissection lab with Gil Hedley — a teacher whose work I first encountered (and deeply admired) in 2007. It was a full-circle moment to be in the dissection lab with him, to be sure. As we made our way through the layers of the body, with Gil teaching and inviting questions and exploration the whole way through, we eventually removed the front of the ribcage to reach the viscera. As I looked at the pearlescence of the fascia and the texture of the muscles and tendons strung between the ribs, connected in the center by the breastbone, it struck me that indeed, even the front of the ribcage looks like wings. The ribs arced out on either side like wings in flight.

I was instantly taken back to Hawaii, standing on the lanai, exploring the delicate body of the Mynah bird and her wings with Clara. The ritual to lay her beautiful body to rest. Finally, tucking her wings away in salt with gratitude and hope in my heart.

The flights we all take. The journeys that are fated.

Taking Flight

And now, in that inevitable way of children growing up, Clara is leaving for Boston. She is taking her leave, taking flight.

Uncertainty upon uncertainty, a life in the making. Like the Mynah bird, I trust that she will land and, as we have done as a family so many times, go about the business of making it her own.

I find myself returning to the wisdom of Mynah bird: that our leavetaking is inevitable, and arrival is the sacred work of adapting and making our way in the places we land.

And, those beautiful wings I sent to Burundi? They arrived safely in Zambia. Whatever we send ahead with love finds its way back to us eventually.

Contemplate Mynah bird for yourself.

If Mynah bird is making noise in your life, consider the leavetakings in your own life. What is ending and what is beginning? Where in your life are you, or those around you, taking flight? It’s time to orient and make the new space your own.

With reverence (and some sass), Mynah bird asks you to honor what is complete and to open your wings confidently to the next chapter. Trust that love tends the uncertainties as well as the comings and goings. Mynah bird assures you that you will adapt to the place you find yourself. And know the same is true for the ones you hold dear.

Join for succor in times of leavetaking

Paid subscribers of The Wild Journey Home gather monthly for First Sunday Sanctuary, a live yoga nidra with active imagination with an animal ally holding the energy. Join us for a luscious practice of deep rest that opens a doorway to clarity, wisdom, and your own guides — the kind of medicine the heart needs in times of transition.

First Sunday of every month | 8am Pacific | 9am Mountain

Subscribe now

It struck me that she knew exactly when to fight and when to rest.

In this episode of The Wild Journey Home, I’m reading my essay, The Fierce Feminine, on the medicine of the lioness and what she has to teach us about sisterhood, the nervous system, and the power of knowing when to hunt and when to lie down in the shade.

If you have been on high alert for too long, this is for you. This is for you if you tend to isolate. And if you want to trust that rest is part of the medicine, this is for you.

Read the original essay here: The Fierce Feminine

For you: Allow Yourself to Rest

The Anatomy of Reverence is a free 18-minute guided meditation for coming home to your soft animal body — let this track restore your nervous system and remind you of the incredible miracle that is your soft animal body.

Receive your free meditation here.

Or Come Rest in Community

Paid subscribers of The Wild Journey Home gather monthly for First Sunday Sanctuary — a live yoga nidra with active imagination guided by an animal ally. Rest your way to clarity. Let your guides and allies light the way.

First Sundays of the month at 8am Pacific | 9am Mountain.

Become a paid subscriber and join the circle.

Thank you for listening to The Wild Journey Home.

The Weaver: Mother Spider, multi-media piece, Nona Jordan 2024

Imagination is not just a realm for children and artists; it is essential for all of us.

In a world that constantly pulls our attention toward crisis, imagination can feel indulgent, can’t it? As if imagination is something that belongs to less urgent times, to women with more space than most of us feel we have at the moment. We tell ourselves we will dream again once things “go back to normal.” Once life feels more steady, or when we have finally caught up.

These perfect moments never quite happen, so what do we do?

What I know for sure is that imagination is not a reward to claim in calmer circumstances. The imaginal realm is what allows us to hold a vision of the lives and the world we long for, even as things are difficult. Without it, our choices narrow to mere survival: just getting through the next crisis. We stop participating in the future and become caught in a loop of reacting to the present.

Which is 100% relatable, because chronic stress blunts our ability to see beyond the next moment of just getting by.

Chronic Stress Impacts Our Capacity to Vision

Here is what I have come to understand about why so many of us have lost contact with our imaginal capacity.

When the nervous system is under sustained stress, our perceptual field narrows, and we move into reactivity, scanning for danger rather than possibility. The part of the brain responsible for creative thought, for soulful visioning, and receptive listening for inner wisdom, goes quiet. Imagining something genuinely different becomes almost neurologically impossible in that state.

This is not a failure of creativity or courage: it is physiology.

I know this story. My early life was chaotic enough that I simply could not envision one or two years ahead. When someone asked me about my five-year plan, I froze. I assumed something was wrong with me — that I lacked the ambition or clarity that other women seemed to carry so naturally.

It took years of learning about the nervous system to understand what was actually happening. There was nothing wrong with me. I was simply braced for the worst.

Loosen the Bracing

What consistently and reliably loosens that bracing, in my own life and in the lives of the women I work with, is rest. Not scrolling, or numbing out. Not the collapse that follows exhaustion — that is depletion, not restoration. We loosen the bracing and open to receive through intentional, structured rest. The kind that soothes the nervous system and softens the layers of consciousness enough for the subtle to surface.

When we allow ourselves to drop into that depth of softness, the spell of unrelenting urgency loosens its grip. Our innate and wise imaginal capacity returns. Right action becomes obvious, arising from presence and knowing.

Hope returns, too, as a felt sense of possibility in the body, that we have an important part to play in shaping our lives and the world we live in.

Rest is Not Optional - Especially Now

We are living in a time that asks an enormous amount of us. The temptation is to grip, to brace, to push harder as things feel more uncertain. This is such a reasonable and relatable response. It is also the choice that closes us off from the very support and capacities we most need.

Discernment. Creativity. The ability to sense what is true before we act. The courage to welcome the surprising truths our unseen allies and guides might offer, including our own deepest well of inner knowing.

This does not require effort, just coherence as you sink into a nervous system that has been given enough space to settle, to reorganize, and to remember.

I am unwilling to treat rest as something to earn after the real work is done, and you should be, too. Rest is the real work. It is the practice that restores us to ourselves, to our vision, to the capacity to participate in shaping the world we wish to inhabit rather than simply reacting to the one we are living in.

We need our imagination now more than ever — not to escape what is difficult, but to hold the vision for what is possible.

Join the First Sunday Sanctuary

Beginning in August, I invite you to a cocoon of rest, of visioning, of returning to yourself.

Become a paid subscriber to gather in this sanctuary — a standing monthly rhythm for you, for us. I hope you will join me in this magical, restorative space to connect with the imaginal realm. You will emerge restored.

Mark your calendars now for these life-affirming yoga nidra + active imagination sessions to settle into knowing.

Sunday, August 2, September 6, and October 4

More on what each gathering holds is coming soon. For now — save the dates, and let yourself imagine what an hour of deep community rest, held monthly, will restore in you.

Subscribe now

Monarch 2025, by Nona Jordan, in watercolor and colored pencil

Every transformation asks us to dissolve.

The monarch butterfly knows this better than any creature on earth. She survives her own immune system, dissolves her known identity, and rebuilds herself from cellular memory — emerging as something of impossible beauty and resilience.

In this episode of The Wild Journey Home, I’m reading my essay The Imaginal Self — on the medicine of monarch butterfly and what it means to stop attacking the future that wants to emerge through you.

This one is for anyone in a chrysalis moment. For anyone whose rational mind is attacking the new possibilities trying to take root. For anyone who has been, like me, like the caterpillar fighting her own imaginal cells.

Your becoming is inevitable.

Read the original essay here: The Imaginal Self

A gift for you

The Anatomy of Reverence is a free 18-minute guided meditation for coming home to your soft animal body — exactly the kind of tender, receptive state that allows your imaginal cells to do what they’ve always known how to do.

Sign up to receive it here.

Become a paid subscriber

Paid subscribers of The Wild Journey Home gather monthly for First Sunday Sanctuary — a live yoga nidra with active imagination guided by an animal ally. Our next gathering is Sunday, August 2nd at 8 am Pacific | 11 am Eastern.

Subscribe now

Nona Jordan, 2025, Portrait of a Flamingo in colored pencil

The Last Thing I Expected

We had just finished traversing the Namib Desert, a beautifully stark landscape, and I was looking forward to getting to our destination, Walvis Bay. As we got off the main road and drove into town, I was taken aback. Walvis Bay looked post-apocalyptic. The streets were covered in sand, buildings were worn, and the industrial equipment of the port dominated the landscape. The streets were devoid of life, the town eaten alive by the salt.

In this strange and unfriendly place, after dinner, we ended up on a path that hugged the bay itself. I was disappointed, but determined to make the best of it. After all, we were back in Southern Africa.

As we walked around the bend of the bay, the sun hung low in the sky as sunset approached. In the distance, I saw some kind of bird in the water. Big birds, actually. As we got closer, I saw there were hundreds of them. As we got even closer, I saw they were doing this funny little dance before sticking their heads into the water to eat whatever they had churned up.

Are these… flamingos?

Hundreds of flamingos dotted the bay.

I may have screamed with delight — you’ll have to ask Erick and Clara — but I do know I rushed to find a place I could get down to the water’s edge so I could get in the water and get closer to this bird I had never seen in real life. Because, listen, the kitschy lawn ornaments don’t count.

Flamingo, your medicine is welcome here.

Flamingos are the disco ball of birds, amIright?

Seeing a flamboyance of flamingos is a surprise in this setting — the long, elegant legs, that graceful, colorful body a welcome contrast to the sand-worn exteriors of Walvis Bay. My utter delight at seeing these iconic beauties made them the perfect exotic birds for such a run-down place. Bringing color, elegance, and a silly dance as the antidote to such a stark place.

The very word flamingo comes from the Latin for flame — named for the fiery feathers that capture attention wherever they go. The fire-like color comes from what they eat: algae and brine shrimp absorbed into the feathers themselves. Flamingo literally becomes her own brilliance from the inside out.

Flamingo embodies authenticity and audacious self-expression, even in bleak circumstances.

The Myth of Toning It Down

I have been steered away from technicolor self-expression my whole life - either by family or later my own internal censorship. I know I’m not alone.

In my adult life, I have run toward it and backed away, too many times to count. You would think by fifty-five years of age, I would have figured it out, but here we are. I still need the reminder that who I am in my fullness is what is needed now.

Flamingo is that reminder. No matter how bleak the situation or the surroundings, there is always space for the unexpected. That being your full, audacious self is not only personally delightful, but it reminds others of what is possible.

To love what I love on purpose and out loud is necessary medicine, for me and for others.

In these uncertain times, it’s easy to think that dimming your light and joy is the right response. That somehow making yourself smaller is more appropriate, more sensitive, more aware of the gravity of things.

I beg to differ.

Being fully yourself is always important. In uncertain times, even more so. This doesn’t mean you don’t care or you ignore the truth of life around you. But the bling, the joy, the delight are just as real — and make the rest bearable.

Contemplate Flamingo for Yourself

If flamingo has danced into your awareness, you are being asked to consider where you have been making yourself smaller and more acceptable for others’ consumption.

Where have you dimmed your light? Where have you held back your color, your delight, your particular brand of audacity because you weren’t sure the world could (or would) hold it?

Flamingo says: the world needs your audacious self now more than ever.

Make space for the unexpected. Love what you love on purpose and out loud. Dance your unique dance and invite others to dance with you.

You are not too much.

Let your aliveness light up the dance floor of life.

Speaking of showing up in full color:

Let’s gather.

Paid subscribers of The Wild Journey Home are invited to the inaugural First Sunday Sanctuary, a monthly live yoga nidra with active imagination. A practice of deep, nourishing rest that opens a doorway beyond the predictive mind to remember and clarify who you are and who you wish to be in the world.

You will leave with more clarity and a felt sense of your own guides and allies lighting the way.

Our first gathering is Sunday, August 2nd @ 8 am Pacific/ 11 am Eastern. As a paid subscriber, you will be invited to register to get the Zoom link. I’ll see you there.

This one is for anyone who has been bracing for the worst. For anyone who has made their life a little too small in the name of protection. For anyone who knows, somewhere deep down, that the very best things come from the full-bodied yes.

Innocence rescuing innocence in the face of uncertainty. Love nourishing hope.

Read the original essay here: Loving Life As It Is

A gift for you:

The Anatomy of Reverence is a free guided meditation for coming home to your soft animal body. This is the next step.

Sign up to receive it here.

The Wild Journey Home is a podcast of animal medicine essays — stories from the natural world that find us at exactly the right moment.

As a girl, I lived on a dirt road with very few neighbors, and most of them were a little odd. I ran wild through the woods, stomping in streams, foraging from backyard gardens, and picking wild blackberries until my fingers were stained dark purple. As a proper Gen X-er, I did in fact drink out of the hose. And straight out of the milk bottle (sorry, Mom.)

I was at home in the world before I understood what that meant.

Then, as trauma unfolded around me, some wisdom compelled me to hide parts of myself away until it was safe to emerge. It took years to find my way back. Birds were my portal to healing — or my gateway drug, as I’m fond of saying. Twenty-three years ago, as I stepped onto the path of sobriety, it was the birds that captured my attention. They were the first teachers waiting for me. More-than-human nature has been showing me how to live ever since.

The Wild Journey Home is devoted to a collective remembering of our innate, wild wisdom.

Here, you’ll find three kinds of writing:

Animal Medicine Essays — encounters with specific animals and the transmission they carry. The animals are always the teacher.

Embodied Practices — yoga nidra, somatic invitations, and tools for coming home to your soft animal body.

Life Thresholds — reflections on grief, transition, and the full catastrophe of being human.

To get started, here is one of each:

Loving Life As It Is — Puffin medicine on saying yes to love, innocence, and the uncertain future — even knowing it will break your heart.

Too Busy? That’s When You Need It Most — A 25-minute yoga nidra practice for when life is full to the point of overwhelming, and your practice feels like one more thing you don’t have time for.

Being the Change — On what it means to locate your power and act when the world is breaking your heart and the grief feels too large to hold.

If this resonates, the best next step is to subscribe and get both essays and podcast episodes delivered directly to your inbox.

Subscribe now

Pull up a chair. I’m so glad you’re here.

— Nona

Rhino Vision, in ink by Nona Jordan 2015

South Africa, December 2017

Our guide came to an abrupt stop on the dusty road. He turned to look at us and announced that we should get out of the game vehicle — a surprising invitation in the African bush, to say the least. Looking in the direction our guide pointed, I saw her: the rhino mother and her baby looking back at us with curiosity.

I get to approach the rhinos on foot? You don’t have to tell me twice.

The guide jumps out of the game vehicle with us. Together, we begin to make our way through the brush and tall grasses as quietly as we possibly can until we are standing a rock’s throw away from the mother rhino and her very curious baby, who prances around to position himself behind his mother, peeking out to evaluate us. The mother continues to graze, glancing at us with minimal interest.

I, however, am mesmerized.

I want to sear this encounter in my memory. As I drink in the presence of these beautiful creatures, I am jarred by the realization that the mother rhino has been de-horned. I ask about it, and the guide tells us that this was done preemptively to safeguard her life, so poachers don’t cut off her horn and leave her for dead.

Rhino, your medicine is welcome here.

Tears spring to my eyes. I am heartbroken and also filled with awe — here she is, here we are, and she is alive — with a baby no less. I am beyond words witnessing that life prevails.

Of the estimated 28,000 rhinos left in the wild worldwide, all five species are on the critically endangered list. Poachers get paid enormous sums selling rhino horns for their purported magical properties — the belief that power and healing live inside that horn, that if you could just possess it, something would be restored in you.

It infuriates me to think of it, and yet, in different ways, I do a similar thing. And I’m guessing you do, too.

The Seduction of the Magical Fix

We are well-trained in this grasping. From the time we are small, we are pointed away from ourselves — toward the expert, the product, the protocol, the cure. Toward anything, really, that promises to restore something we have been convinced we are missing. The wellness industry has built an empire on this conviction. I have contributed to that empire more than I care to admit.

How many times have I signed up for the aspirational cure — a course, a practice, a cleanse (the proverbial rhino’s horn) — hoping it would resolve what my own body was already trying to tell me? The reaching itself becomes a way of not having to sit with the grief of our imperfections.

But here, on this dusty road in South Africa, watching this de-horned mother graze with complete and utter indifference to what has been taken from her — I feel something loosen in me.

She is not diminished. Nor is she reaching. She is entirely, unmistakably herself.

The horn was never the medicine.

And believe me, like rhino, you are the magic you seek.

The Invitation

If rhino has ambled into your awareness, you are being invited to stop reaching and instead, come back. Consider what you have been seeking outside yourself that has, in fact, been yours all along.

Rhino is pure presence. Thick-skinned and unhurried, she is rooted in the ground beneath her feet. She knows her power, and she invites you to the same understanding of yourself.

Rhino medicine asks: What would it mean to come home to the wisdom that is yours and yours alone? What if the thing you have been looking for was never out there to begin with — what if it has been here, in this body, in this life, waiting for you to come home? What if you finally believed in your own wholeness?

Rhino looks you in the eye knowingly and affirms that you are not missing anything. You never were.

If you're ready to stop reaching and come home to yourself, Reverence Sessions are for you. Learn more here.

PS: I drew the artwork of a rhino after she appeared in my visions in Hawaii in 2015. Almost three years later, I was standing on a dusty road in the Karoo. Rhino, it seems, already knew.

There is a beach on Oahu’s west side that few people want on a postcard.

Electric Beach is rocky, and the currents are known to be tricky. It is not, by any measure, a tourist attraction.

However, once you push beyond the breaking waves into the open ocean, it is magic. Warm water from a nearby power plant creates an underwater oasis: dolphins, reef sharks, schools of tropical fish. And my favorite: sea turtles.

Once, I floated suspended above a turtle for what felt like a very long time. We drifted together in the gentle swell, both of us rocked by the same ancient ocean rhythm. She was completely unbothered by my presence. Any anxiety I carried about the difficult tides dissolved.

I have thought about that turtle many times since.

Especially in a neurologist’s office, years later, when the diagnosis arrived like a riptide.

In this episode of The Wild Journey Home, I’m reading my essay At Home Where You Are — an exploration of sea turtle medicine and what it means to carry home within yourself when the waters get rough.

This one is for anyone who has felt their shoulders creep up toward their ears lately. For anyone bracing against life. For anyone who has forgotten, just for a moment, that they already know the way.

Pull up a chair. Welcome to The Wild Journey Home.

Read the original post here: https://nonajordan.substack.com/p/at-home-where-you-are

If you enjoyed this episode, I have a gift for you. The Anatomy of Reverence is a free guided meditation for coming home to your soft animal body. You can sign up to receive it by clicking here.

The Wild Journey Home is a podcast of animal medicine essays — stories from the natural world that find us at exactly the right moment.

Subscribe now

What followed was both genuinely terrifying and, in retrospect, one of the most perfect encounters I could have had with an animal whose medicine I’ve been sitting with for years.

Hippo knows something most of us resist: that limits are not the opposite of freedom. They are the container in which freedom becomes possible.

In this episode, I share the story of that river encounter, what hippo has taught me about the magic that lives inside constraints, and something quite personal — the years I spent fighting my own hard limits around food, and what happened when I finally stopped.

The first rule of magic is containment. — Julia Cameron

Read the original essay here

If you enjoyed this episode, I have a gift. The Anatomy of Reverence is a free guided meditation for coming home to your soft animal body. You can sign up to receive it by clicking here.

The Wild Journey Home is a podcast of animal medicine essays — stories from the natural world that find us at exactly the right moment.

Even when we don’t know it. Even when we brush it off and keep driving through the fog.

Ram medicine invites us to pay attention to the breadcrumbs — the unexpected teachers, the practices that keep calling our name, the synchronicities we almost dismiss. In this essay-turned-podcast, I share a personal story about following guidance I couldn’t name yet, and what it taught me about devotion, the body, and the life we are being prepared for.

You can read the original essay here.

And if your body has been trying to tell you something you haven’t been able to discern yet, learn more about Reverence Sessions at nonajordan.com.

In this essay, I take you to the Kafue River in Zambia — and into the medicine of one of nature’s most terrifying creatures. Crocodile arrives when the unthinkable has happened, when life has broken apart in ways you didn’t ask for and couldn’t have planned. This is a meditation on wake-up calls, limitation, mortality, and the surprising invitation that lives inside the thing you most want to avoid.

If you’re navigating something unexpected right now, this one is for you.

Read the original essay here.

The Wild Journey Home is a podcast for women navigating the unexpected — written and read by Nona Jordan. Learn more at nonajordan.com.

Ginkgo Leaf in Graphite, by Clara Jordan

Clara was home this week — the last Spring Break of her college career. Erick happened to be travelling, and it felt very nostalgic (and oh-so-sweet) to fall into our familiar rhythm of inhabiting the same space. While home, Clara loves to spend time “arting,” and I love it when she does. She is brilliant with graphite and loves botanicals. This week, she undertook the humble ginkgo leaf.

A Timeless Tree

I’ve only seen a ginkgo tree once, at the Botanical Gardens in Helsinki, Finland. I gasped with delight when I saw it, because the ginkgo is a wonder in a far-north climate. Thriving in the Evolution Room, its presence is awe-inspiring. These trees, often called living fossils, can live well over a thousand years, and even when transplanted to unfamiliar places, they take root and adapt.

The ginkgo is a spiritual ancestor that has long graced the grounds of Asian temples. She is a wisdom keeper, a living symbol of longevity and endurance you can feel in her presence. After my husband and I returned from Finland, I depicted the ginkgo on one of my essential word cards, sensing that for me, the ginkgo holds the energy of harmony. She has a spacious energy that holds the best and the most challenging aspects of self and invites us to do the same.

Ginkgo, your medicine is welcome here.

The Cruelty We Reserve for Ourselves

While Clara was drawing, I kept thinking about my own propensity to think the worst of myself — and how often I hear this same tendency in others. You know: the instinct to cruelly judge our behavior. Why do we believe we’ll do better if we punish ourselves for the patterns and behaviors that have served and protected us through the years?

It can all sound so reasonable, too. These are women who are insightful and intelligent. They’ve done their work. They are accomplished. And yet when they look at themselves, they never give themselves the benefit of the doubt. They never see the good, the joy, the changes.

Are we so afraid that if we celebrate what is right with us — if we let ourselves feel the wins — it will all fall apart? That we’ll somehow devolve into the worst of ourselves if we stop being so hard and punishing?

I know this intimately, which is why I recognize it so clearly in others. And of course it does — who among us didn’t grow up hearing that our faults must be fixed through punishment, through relentless self-examination, through cruelty toward ourselves? But we know better now. We know that compassion, curiosity, and kindness — not indulgence, not collapse, but true tenderness — are far more efficacious when we are changing patterns and behaviors.

Balanced, Open, and Spacious

Harmony: Gingko Leaf in Watercolor and Ink by Nona Jordan

And then I look up, and there is Clara’s ginkgo leaf on the table: balanced, open, and spacious. I feel the grace, and I think: yes. What if we embodied the wisdom of gingko?

What if we gave our foibles — our past, our behaviors, our cringey choices — the benefit of our kindest eyes? What if we also gave our gifts, our goodness, our strengths, and our excellent choices our honor and acknowledgment?

I know that would change us. Maybe even the world.

The harmony of the ginkgo leaf isn’t a harmony that requires elimination. Let’s stop trying to cut away whole swathes of who we are. I believe that the wide, spacious embrace of balance is actually the understanding that we contain multitudes, and that is precisely what makes us so goddamn brilliant.

May you see yourself with softer eyes and a more spacious heart. May you embrace, with something akin to awe, the whole of who you are.

During therapeutic yoga training, the teachers invited us to focus on something entirely unexpected. They asked us to initiate movement not from muscle or fascia, but from the bone itself — to sense the head of the femur gently rotating in its socket, to attend to the subtle articulation where one surface meets another. At first, it felt too refined to matter. I couldn’t really feel it at all, because I was so accustomed to the sensation of muscular effort — to the sensation of stretch as proof that something was happening.

As I allowed my attention to drop beneath habitual patterns and into the structure of my body, things began to reorganize.

The muscles I had been overusing started to soften. The persistent bracing began to unravel, and long-held pain eased. Movement became more fluid, more sustainable, and far more intelligent.

When we move unconsciously, we often compensate — and what a brilliant, adaptive body we inhabit, always finding a way to keep going, to perform, to manage. We can brace, over-effort, and create the appearance of strength while slowly exhausting or injuring ourselves. But when we initiate from the bone — from the architecture itself — the body moves differently. Effort becomes intelligent, and our skeletal structure begins to bear weight the way it was designed to.

Bone-deep medicine, you are welcome here.

The Marrow of Renewal

Bones are living tissue that is constantly renewing. Within their rich interior, in the dark hum of marrow, blood is formed. Stem cells differentiate, and immunity is built. The birthplace of life and regeneration in the body resides in the magical structure that we call bones. Renewal is not loud; it is cellular and constant.

Across cultures and spiritual traditions, bones have long been held sacred as signifiers of continuity. In myth, when flesh returns to the earth, bone remains as the essential structure from which life is restored. In some traditions, bones are honored as vessels of ancestral memory, carrying the stories of what was once, what is, and what will be. In others, divination is practiced with bone, in the belief that truth can be read in what remains when adornment and identity have fallen away.

There is a reason we say we know something “in our bones.”

Bones speak to what is essential. They are the unadorned geometry of alignment. They endure longer than we will, and yet they are never inert. Even as they persist, they are alive with the work of renewal.

Bracing Is Not Alignment

We are living in a time when so much is falling away, when certainties are unraveling, and structures we relied upon are fracturing if not crumbling. It can be tempting to brace in response — to try and hold everything together with tension, to mistake bracing for readiness. I feel that instinct in my own body when I am not paying attention — the subtle tightening that masquerades as strength.

But bracing is not the same as alignment.

When I return to the subtle sensation of my bones — when I allow my pelvis to settle, my spine to stack, my head to balance perfectly at the top of my spine, when I feel my weight descend into my heels — steadiness, presence, and deep knowing emerge. I remember that support and structure are already woven into my design.

What Falls Away and What Remains

Even as things fall away, something new is being birthed. Nature does not dismantle without also reorganizing - and we are nature. Leaves fall and soil receives. Seeds soften in darkness before they split. What appears to be an ending is often preparation for growth that has been silently preparing itself all along. The more we remember this, the more ready we become to participate in shaping the life — and the world — we long to inhabit.

Hope, in this sense, is not a denial of difficulty or naïveté. It is a posture of alignment. It is a willingness to both witness and live inside the cycle of dissolution and renewal and trust that regeneration is already underway, even if it is happening quietly in the marrow where we cannot (yet) see it.

You are Invited

Place your hands along your ribs or rest them on your thighs and imagine the work happening inside your bones at this very moment. The blood, forming, cells differentiating, structure holding, and yes, renewal is underway.

You are architecture and ancestry and regeneration. When everything unnecessary falls away, what remains is bone — and bone, as it turns out, is not the end of the story, but the ground from which life begins again.

Does this speak to you?

This is the energy that has been moving through me as I gather the next circle of Soul Nourished: Bone Deep. It is an invitation to strengthen the inner scaffolding that allows us to meet the moment we are living in — through a steady rhythm of embodied practice, seasonal energy medicine, and sacred connection.

If something in you recognizes this is for you, I invite you to join us.

Learn More About Soul Nourished

Wildebeest in pencil, 2026 Nona Jordan

We were driving on a dusty gravel road through Etosha National Park in Namibia when a wildebeest came charging out of the bush directly toward our rental car. From the back seat, Erick saw it first and shouted. Thank god for that ninja driving training I took years ago, because I had maybe two seconds to swerve and hit the gas.

The wildebeest and the car missed each other by a hair’s breadth.

For those first shocked moments, Erick and Clara were convinced the wildebeest had intentionally charged us. But I wasn’t so sure. I kept thinking about what I knew: wildebeest don’t typically attack. They’re herbivores. Yes, those horns make them look fierce, and the males will fight each other for supremacy or to defend their herd, but they don’t go after cars.

The wildebeest was alone.

That’s what kept circling back to me. Wildebeest move in herds—sometimes called a confusion of wildebeest, which might be the most accurate collective noun I’ve ever encountered. They follow the rains in a great circular migration through multiple countries in Africa, covering more than 1,800 miles each year. They move together, that massive swirling confusion of bodies and dust and survival intelligence.

But this one was by itself, crashing through the bush. I don’t think it even saw us. My guess is that it was running from something behind it, so focused on escape that it couldn’t register what was actually in front of it. It was running blind.

Running blind is the norm when we’re alone with our fear.

I’ve watched this in teaching and coaching around money for fourteen years now. The pattern is always the same. Someone is struggling—drowning in debt, unable to charge what they’re worth, frozen in business decisions, caught in the same spending cycle they swore they’d break. They’re running from something behind them: childhood messages about money, past failures, the shame of not having it figured out by now.

Because they’re running alone, they can’t see what’s actually in front of them. They can’t see the support that’s there, the resources available, the next right step. They’re so focused on escape—or on hiding—that they crash.

This is what isolation does. It makes us dangerous to ourselves.

But there is wisdom in the confusion.

Later in our trip, we went out on horseback through the Namibian bush. We rode right through a large herd of wildebeest grazing peacefully alongside giraffe and impala. I could have reached out and pet them; we were so close. The wildebeest barely looked up. They were calm, resourced, moving slowly through the grass together.

This is what they do when they’re in their confusion—they follow the rains as a collective. It looks chaotic from the outside, all those bodies moving in different directions at once, but there’s deep intelligence in it. They know things together that no single wildebeest could know alone. Where the water is. Where the grass is greenest. When to move and when to rest.

The confusion is their safety.

This is what happens in Get Right with Money.

Women come in thinking they need to get their act together before they can show up. They think they need to have it figured out, to be less of a mess, to be ready. But that’s the isolated wildebeest thinking—that running alone and seeking escape is somehow safer than being seen in the confusion.

What actually heals us is entering the confusion together. Saying the true things out loud. “I’m drowning in debt.” “I can’t charge an amount that reflects my value.” “I have no idea what I’m doing.” “I’m terrified of looking at the numbers.” This is where the wisdom lives—in the messy, vulnerable truth-telling that happens when we stop running alone and join the herd.

Here’s what I know is true after all these years: your nervous system cannot regulate itself in isolation. You cannot think your way out of money wounding. You cannot white-knuckle your way to a different relationship with resources. The transformation happens in community, in the confusion, where you can finally see what’s actually in front of you instead of just running from what’s behind.

The confusion is where we find our way to water.

Those wildebeest grazing peacefully weren’t trying to go it alone. They were following the collective intelligence of the herd, trusting the confusion to lead them to resources. And it does. It has for millennia.

You are invited to stop running alone with your money wounds and worries. Stop thinking you need to have it together before you can show up. Enter the confusion. Let yourself be seen in the mess of it. Trust that there is wisdom here, in this gathering of women who are all making their way to resources and safety.

The confusion isn’t what you think it is. The confusion is the medicine. It’s where we remember that we were never meant to do this alone.

Contemplate wildebeest for yourself.

If wildebeest have shown up in your ecosystem, you’re being asked to examine where you’re running alone. Where are you so focused on escape—from shame, from failure, from being seen—that you can’t see what’s actually in front of you? Where are you dangerous to yourself because you’re isolated with your fear? Wildebeest medicine asks you to join the confusion. To trust the herd. To believe that the messy, chaotic-looking gathering is actually where safety lives. Your nervous system knows things that it cannot know in isolation. The resources you’re seeking are found by trusting the collective wisdom of like-minded others. It’s time to stop running blind and enter the confusion where you belong.

Get Right with Money® begins February 13th, 2026. If you're done running alone with your money wounds and worries, this is for you. Moving with and through the confusion is how we become deeply resourced - in our bodies, in our bank accounts, in our capacity to move through the world a whole new way.

I'm Ready to Get Right with Money

But really, this is exactly when we need to slow down the most.

When my days are full to the point of overwhelming, that’s precisely when my practice feels like one more thing I don’t have time for. But here’s what I know to be true: that feeling—the “I’m too busy for this”—is a signal. I hear it as a reminder that I need my practice more than ever.

So on the days I want to skip practice, I do MORE.

I double down. I carve out extra time. I slow down just a bit more. And here’s the magic: it doesn’t steal time from my day. It creates it. More space. More clarity. More capacity to meet what’s in front of me.

What if this holiday season, your practice wasn’t another “should” on your list?

What if it became something you get to do? Something you want to do? A way to resource yourself so you can show up as the woman you want to be—especially during the most demanding times.

This 25-minute yoga nidra practice (audio below) is my gift to you. It’s an invitation to soften your body, sink into your breath, and rest in brief silence. Done regularly and with intention, it offers what we need most right now: clarity, energy, restoration, and joy.

To be loving, purposeful humans in this particular moment in history, we need this kind of quiet practice. We need space to listen deeply to the pulse of our own energy as the world speeds up.

Let’s prepare, shall we?

• Create a nest - Find a comfortable place to lie

  down and relax your body. Put something under your knees if that feels good. Use a small pillow under your head. Cover yourself with the softest blanket if you get cold easily. Allow yourself the gift of comfort.

• Get as comfortable as possible - Take any ponytails or clips out of your hair. Wear comfy clothes that aren’t restrictive at your waist and chest. Remove your glasses and shoes. Have your earbuds and device handy. You can stream the audio on SoundCloud or download it.

• Set an intention - What would you most like to embody? What would you like to experience? Ask for guidance or wisdom related to your intention and open to receive.

• Trust your body - This is about cultivating trust and resting in the safety that trust creates within us. If your body/breath wants to do something different than what I’m inviting you to do, go with your body, always.

Get comfortable. You deserve this kind of rest. Enjoy.

I would love to know what you notice and how you feel after you practice. Tell me everything.

May you have a beautiful, peaceful holiday season.
xo.nona

It was one of those times.

Erick was leaving for a year-long deployment to Afghanistan. Clara was seven, Kelsie was our faithful dog, and I had decided to move us back to Colorado while he was away. Our house in Virginia was a landscape of cardboard towers—boxes stacked high, our life sorted into categories: kitchen, office, bedroom… you get the drift. My heart felt fractured by the looming separation and the enormity of starting over without Erick by my side.

I was exhausted. The kind of bone-deep tired that comes from holding too much while trying to appear strong for everyone around you. I moved through those final days like I was walking underwater, going through the motions of packing and all the details while my soul lagged behind, still trying to catch up.

In the middle of that chaos, I found myself standing in what used to be my meditation space—now just another room filled with boxes. I needed something. An anchor. A way to remember that beneath all this upheaval, there was still something sacred, something steady.

In some way, I had anticipated this moment. I had set aside a small box of incense, a simple ceramic holder, and a little Ganesha statue in my travel bag. Three objects. Nothing fancy. Nothing that would make it into a magazine spread about beautiful spiritual spaces. But in that moment, they were everything I needed.

I set them on top of a cardboard box—my makeshift altar in a makeshift life. I lit the incense, breathed in the familiar scent, and sat on the floor surrounded by our packed-up existence. I sagged into my exhaustion. Let myself feel the grief of goodbye, and the uncertainty of what lay ahead.

I asked Ganesha, the remover of obstacles, to clear the way. To keep Erick safe. To guide Clara, Kelsie, and me as we made our own journey to Colorado. To help us all find our way through this long season of separation and change.

Those three simple objects became my traveling companions. Every day of our cross-country drive, I pulled them out—no matter what hotel we landed in for the night. Lighting incense became a quiet ritual, a way to stay present and rooted in my intention. That small act of devotion offered something deeper than comfort—it told my nervous system: You’re not alone. You are held. There is something larger than this chaos.

What surprised me was how that altar didn’t just hold my prayers. It helped me notice the helpers who appeared along the way. The hotel clerk who upgraded our room when she saw Clara’s tired eyes. The mechanic who fixed our car key with unusual speed and kindness. The little synchronicities that felt like gentle nods from the universe saying, We’ve got you.

That simple altar became a thread of continuity when everything else was in flux. It reminded me that sacred space isn’t about having the perfect setup or beautiful objects—it’s about presence. Especially when—maybe most especially when—everything feels like it’s falling apart.

Your altar doesn’t need a dedicated room or a perfectly curated arrangement. It just needs you. Your willingness to pause, to breathe, to remember that you’re part of something larger than the circumstances swirling around you.

Sometimes the most powerful altars are born from necessity. Created not because you have it all together, but because you need something to hold you while you figure out how to keep going.

That cardboard box altar held me through one of the hardest transitions of my life. It taught me that devotion isn’t about perfection. It’s about showing up—with whatever you have, wherever you are—and trusting that the sacred will meet you there.

Join me for the Sacred Altars Workshop

On October 30th, I’m offering a workshop called Sacred Altars—a 75-minute gathering to explore how to create and tend altars that feel nourishing, alive, and uniquely yours. We’ll meet on the threshold of Samhain, a sacred time of deep listening and remembering.

Learn more and join us here.

And perhaps ask yourself this:

What would it look like to let your altar hold you through whatever transition you’re facing right now?

P.S. You don’t need to consider yourself “spiritual” to make an altar.
You just need a quiet corner, something that matters to you, and the willingness to say:
This moment is sacred, too.