We are...
...Ren and Desiree -- a queer couple choosing to catalyze their spiritual and personal growth through a partnership devoted to supporting one another’s most wild becoming.
Through writing, teaching, and conversation, we share the ever-deepening process of healing the many layers of domestication woven deeply into our lives and relationships. Our combined and complementary skill sets provide a powerful model for how individuals can be informed by a shared universal intelligence, surrendering to the body as conduit for soul-guided wisdom.
We are feral love. We are wild, human animals.
Desiree Coutinho
Desiree is a poet, mother, therapist, and community organizer sustained by the wisdom of the earth and led by her connection to the mystery. She has worked in community agriculture, education, mutual aid, and the culinary arts for over a decade, teaching and organizing around issues of social, environmental, and racial justice, natural medicine, local food systems, and art as activism. Desiree has a Master's of Social Work and has worked the last few years in mental health in a youth milieu treatment setting. Desiree is passionate about community grief ritual as a means of processing socio-ecological collapse and collective trauma, and individual grief tending for personal healing. Her work is rooted in deep grief/love for life, and relationship with land, ancestors, and all beings.
Ren Hurst
Ren is an author, mentor, and guide exploring the individual and collective impact of domestication as trauma – for our own species as much as the non-human animals we share our lives with. Formerly a professional horse trainer, she is now an author, mentor, and guide helping others restore connection to and mature their relationship to emotion to become the embodied, intuitive animals we were designed to be. Her books, Riding On the Power of Others: A Horsewoman’s Path to Unconditional Love and The Wisdom of Wildness: Healing the Trauma of Domestication, are helpful resources for understanding how our relationship to captive dependents affects our ability to heal trauma at the deepest levels. Ren is passionate about undomesticating young adults as early as possible, relating to wild creatures and places, and trusting embodied soul guidance above all outside influence.
Re-imagining Sanctuary
We are re-imagining sanctuary through an undomesticated lens, as a move away from domestication rather than treating the symptoms of it. In a world that primarily sees animals for their usefulness, there is no end to the number of beings in desperate need of care. Here, we approach our relationship to non-human animals as a means to heal the root cause of exploitation, not perpetuate it. Interspecies relationships are the foundation of our work.
At Phoenix Landing, we care for a herd of undomesticated horses that inspire and inform us daily to fully consider the influence and impact of captivity on the dependents in our care – especially the power dynamic between guardian and dependent and how very easy it is to interrupt emotional development through both overt dominance and subtle, positive manipulation.
The horses and other animals we provide sanctuary for do not offer healing to anyone nor are they used to regulate the nervous systems of those in a position to control them. We relate to and care for them in a way that reveals patterns of our own domestication, and often uncovers core wounding.
Our practice creates opportunities for radical accountability and a powerfully reflective model for becoming the kind of mature, human animals that would never build a society rooted in systems of oppression in the first place. Our goal is to heal the trauma that motivates abuses of power among our species and in relationship to all living beings.
You can learn the work we practice here and support the sanctuary by becoming a patron of Phoenix Landing. Each week, we offer an online class on our guiding principles, Sanctuary13. These teachings provide the context and conditions to undomesticate yourself and those in your care, to access your own feral becoming.
All proceeds from this patronage are used to support the animals and develop the sanctuary as a space for grief-tending and experiential education around the trauma of domestication.
