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.

Welcome and welcome back to The Wild Journey Home podcast! Isn’t lioness medicine perfect for August? On the banks of the Lower Zambezi River, I watched a pride of lionesses and their cubs feast on a hard-won Cape Buffalo kill. Once the males arrived, the females backed away — and one exhausted lioness, belly full and blood on her muzzle, sauntered over to our game vehicle and lay down in the shade like a house cat.

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.

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.

Puffins are funny little seabirds that look a bit like contemplative clowns — and they carry some of the most radical wisdom I know. In this episode of The Wild Journey Home, I’m reading my essay Loving Life As It Is — on innocence, saying yes, and letting your heart break open.

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.

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.

The evening we arrived at KaingU Lodge in Zambia, we took a sunset boat tour of the Kafue River — and inadvertently steered directly into a pod of submerged hippos.

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.

We are always being guided.

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.

The Wild Journey Home is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

What do you do when the proverbial crocodile slides into the water?

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 of essays written with honesty and love, for the tender places in you. Learn more at nonajordan.com.

The Wild Journey Home is becoming a podcast — stories, animal wisdom, and embodied medicine for women in the middle of change. The first episode will arrive soon, and I think it will feel like exactly what it is: a voice in your ear for the journey home.Stay tuned.