Instagram story viewer> @ryn.fink> Posts

ryn fink

@ryn.fink

3K

followers

737

following

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

Birthday month memories // Savoring the last of the blooms in the garden, the last Sunday afternoons making love with a breeze and sun on bare skin.

Singing to the snake who’s taken up residence alongside our chickens. Black tongue languidly flicking the air to smell me in response. Tasting each other’s presence.

Beholding my niece for the first time. I don’t believe in perfection—striving for it, praising it—and yet, she is perfect. The only thing more perfect is watching my friend of so many years become a mother.

My brother and I trading LPs for our birthdays. Throughout childhood we were best friends, just thirteen months apart. Catholic twins. And then we weren’t. But this year, he gifts me Grouper—one of my favorites, without realizing it. I cry the whole time it plays.

Turning a lifelong love of horror into my current hyperfixation. Transmuting a summer full of grief and anxiety and vulnerability through flesh and fluids. Dilated pupils. Blood quickening once more.

And doing all this next to you, my love. Atop the ferris wheel, heart beating like when I was a teen, first learning how to kiss—except now, we both know exactly what to do, when, how. Except now, we never have to come back down. by @ryn.fink

82

7

a month ago

As I age, I understand more and more why the old tales and old ways and old gods couple life and death so closely.

Now, at the peak of summer, our garden paths are crossed with branches of elder—bowed over from flowers and perfume and the first berries—but also with rotted trees that keep collapsing after recent heavy rains.

Inside the house, a blockage in the chimney backdrafts the scent of old smoke into the living room, making me think of charnel grounds where yogis once meditated among burning bodies in order to find bliss.

At the start of this year, Greg and I lost our youngest dog, our sweet boy Townes.

But also my closest friends are marrying and having babies and nestling into homes together.

So much joy. And I know the only way to let this in is to let in the hurt as well.

Finally, yesterday, the latest heartache. The loss of our dog of fourteen years—our honeymoon baby, the dog we welcomed at the very start of our life together, as soon as Greg and I had settled into our Brooklyn apartment so long ago.

On Tuesday, I began a vigil with Toots, the window above us open to help her breathe easier. The night air carried in a repeated cry from the fox who’d killed my beloved chicken the week before.

Greg and I both slept by Toots’ side on her final night. And then, the morning of her death, Greg fed her venison he’d hunted—food her oldest ancestors will recognize.

There was a tingling in my palm the moment she passed, when my hand on her fur felt her life leave. And in the empty place where her spirit had so recently been, I felt the exact shape and weight of gratitude.

I anointed my dog’s paws with mandrake, like I did her brother’s feet earlier this year, and asked Our Lady to receive her into the Wild Hunt. I cried without ceasing, but through my heartache, as I caressed her rough skin, I said my own version of one of the old prayers, and felt the words enfold me as well as her.

Am I not here, I who am your Mother? Are you not under the veil of my care? I love you. Am I not the source of life and death? I love you. Abide with me. I love you.

In the sun soaked garden, a wren sang, a thunderstorm gathered. by @ryn.fink

113

31

3 months ago

Land, my love. I tell people this is my annual solo retreat, but I am so far from alone. I think of this time with you all year. Our solstice sacrament.

First, a fire on your highest point, on the longest day. Heat lingering in stone well after I’ve savored every last ember.

Then a slow stroll back in dusk, then twilight, then darkness. You undress along the way, teasing me with fireflies among your ferns, spiderwebs licking my face, a moon reclined just-so above a cleft in the hedge.

In the morning, I lay myself on an altar of mossy boulder, and open to you in return. Breeze on bare skin and trembling tulip leaves. Sun slipping through canopy to kiss my lips and set wet rocks to gleaming. Losing the edge of where I end and you begin.

After, I walk through your waters, your creek caressing my ankles, inviting my eyes into your bright pools of dancing minnows, your dark corners dotted with crayfish. Everything singing.

Land, my love. Never stop singing to me—your night bird calls and your coywolf howls and your brooks that whisper on and on and on.

Never stop loving me, the way I’ll never stop loving you. by @ryn.fink

261

16

3 months ago

February 28, 2025. I held the first glass eel of the season in my palm. Tiny and totally transparent, except for the suggestion of a spine, a brain, and two eyes that I knew without a doubt looked back at me.

My first thought was how much sturdier they felt than expected. I had worried I would harm them, but the body of this glass eel was not only completely solid but determined, seeking even in this moment to continue the journey onward. I had to create a miniature valley with the edges of my hands to hold them.
But before that first thought was simply awe.

Myself and the other volunteers were completely silent for a heartbeat, each of us reflecting in our own way on the miracle of the moment—how much had to occur, how many miles traversed, how many perils evaded, how many people caring—for us to briefly touch one of the most mysterious and magical creatures on earth.

Read more about the magic of eels, watersheds as grails, and the quest each of us is called to. “Well Maidens Among Us” now on the Substack. taken in Croton-on-Hudson, New York by @ryn.fink

63

5

4 months ago

I heard the skunk cabbage days before I saw them, a collective chatter pricking against my awareness like icy slush sliding down the back of my neck.

“We wake. We wake. Wake with us.”

Every year, I mark the start of spring with the emergence of these plants who look more like creatures than wildflowers. It’s not just their appearance—Cretaceous era tentacles curling up from the earth—but their strange abilities that we associate more with animals, like generating their own heat to melt the snow and ice around them.

So I listen closely for skunk cabbage every year, and when they call, I go to the bog, a favorite home of theirs. But when I arrived last week, everyone was still blanketed in winter, and I could only trust that there was movement beyond what I could see. A colony of skunk cabbage dissolving whatever stood between them and spring.

Then yesterday came with air so warm that the whole valley exhaled, mist settling between dripping trees and pooling in trails that had transformed into small rivulets.

Sure enough, when I arrived once more at the hilltop, countless curling fingers and gaping mouths the color of coagulated blood had clawed and chewed their way up through the mud.

My ritual to welcome spring could begin.

I prostrated myself, just as I would before buddhas and beloved teachers. Then I laid myself bare like the freshly exposed earth, so I could take the last of the slush and scrub my skin until it was pink and prickling, until I could literally feel winter melting off of me.

Next, naked at the threshold between the retreating line of snow and the blackness of the awakening bog, I sang a hymn by Hildegard. Meant for mass inside a church, I now repeated it over and over as a call and a response to the wild: “O greening finger of God.” #skunkcabbage #hildegard #veriditas by @ryn.fink

102

3

7 months ago

“It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.” - Heraclitus

back in a bit, tending the fire by @ryn.fink

30

1

7 months ago

Once upon a billion years ago, a single celled creature swallowed up a bacteria, but instead of the story ending as a simple fable of consuming and being consumed, the two co-existed—not just co-existed, but cooperated.

The host fed the bacteria, the bacteria processed oxygen for the both of them. And this queer, symbiotic multi-being eventually evolved into specialized animal and plant cells, aka much of life as we know it.

So many big messages from this tiny messenger…

… even in the midst of feeling slowly swallowed, destruction is not inevitable.

… we will stick in the craw of the consuming horrors and transform our shared reality no matter how long it takes.

… but I like to focus on what “science’s unruly earth mother” Dr. Lynn Margulis dedicated herself to, back when survival of the fittest was the only acceptable view of evolution.

Much of life on earth was born from mutual aid.

Her thesis was ridiculed, though future evidence—our very mitochondrial center, the echo of our strange cell-bacterial ancestor—affirmed: “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.”

This does not mean that evolution has been free of violence or competition. But when so much of the present day narrative is trying to make us small enough to subsume, and separate enough to subjugate, we need to be reminded that survival through community care is literally infused into every cell of our being.

Keep reaching for each other. It’s what we were made to do.

[For more revolution through symbiosis, see the Substack post for recommended reading and listening.] by @ryn.fink

74

1

8 months ago

“And the soul creeps out of the tree.”

I used to celebrate the equinox and Samhain and All Souls and Hekate’s Night… Now I let the land guide my rhythms, more than the calendar.

I still harvest the haws from the hawthorn, so I can restring the sixth decade of my rosary. Red beads on red thread to thumb throughout the year.

I still lay the table to dine with the ancestors and cook them goose and cabbage with apples and serve wine made near the river valley where my great-grandparents were born.

I still invite the dark goddess to abide with us through the winter. Still ask her to wrap our home in rest and slowness and the wonder of night.

But I wait for the first snow to tell me it’s time. I wait for the haws to fall with the gentlest of shakes, so they drop unto my forehead and into my bowl like tiny blessings. I wait for the leaves to have fully fallen, so that the wind’s voice sounds vast and undeniable, as it calls, “Come here. Come here, little one.”

[Quotations from “All Hallows” by Louise Gluck.] by @ryn.fink

100

6

a year ago

Here’s to -f̶̶o̶̶u̶̶r̶̶t̶̶e̶̶e̶̶n̶ ̶y̶̶e̶̶a̶̶r̶̶s̶- forever, love.

“Everything that was broken
has forgotten its brokenness.

I live now in a sky-house,
through every window the sun.
Also your presence.

Our touching, our stories.
Earthy and holy both.

How can this be, but it is.

Every day has something in it
whose name is Forever.”

- Mary Oliver by @ryn.fink

248

26

a year ago

What is your doorway into the dark half of the year?

Will you let the quiet become a comfort?

Will you lick at grief like a lover?

Will you wander between two trees to find there’s no way to return unchanged?

Will you wonder to find solace alongside sorrow?

We may not cross the threshold with resolve or bravery, but intention can be a light in the palm. A guiding stitch in the sole of our shoe. One step, and then another. The doorway to a stone chamber looms dark within an autumnal hillside. taken in Clarence Fahnestock State Park by @ryn.fink

54

2

a year ago

> Esperance, NY. Camp out dance party to fun-raise for World’s End Farm. Fog on the dance floor so thick, my body disappears in a dense oblivion. Only the brushing of my fingertips against other fingertips reaching up up up reminds me that I am never alone. My bestie’s grin emerges from the haze, and the whole world shakes and shimmers.

> My own Witch Garden. Panicking at bees swarming the woodbine around the chimney—doesn’t that harbinger death?—but realize later that the buzzing was because they were drunk on the ephemeral bloom of flowers. A harbinger of joy. That evening, I dream of my father, and he is happy for the first time ever.

> Lake Eerie, Ohio. The local news dedicates a segment on how to avoid flesh eating bacteria at the beach. My mother and I take in the view of the shore from a distance. She’s deep enough in the waves of dementia that she calls me mother now sometimes.

> Montana. I bury my face in jasmine flowers for the first time and realize it’s the same scent as the perfume I’d made from a kit my grandfather gave me when I was 12. I still have the tiny vial of sweet summer scent, anointed myself with it years and years ago in the deep woods, when I’d declared myself a witch to the trees. Now I will link the scent with the tattoo I came here to get. Another kind of anointing, with inked symbols of water and earth and renewal.

> Karaoke bar, NYC. I love him.

> My bathroom, with mermaid hair just-because. I love me. taken in Saipua - the Farm at World’s End by @ryn.fink

75

10

a year ago

𝘉𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘭𝘢𝘮𝘣, 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘥𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘩.⁣
⁣
I’ve always had a thing for correspondences to, and from, the land. ⁣
⁣
In the old days of my podcast, I used to write erotic love letters to each season, and in Through This Vale, every season’s chapter opens with a missive of sorts from the mycelium. ⁣
⁣
In this tale (as in our world), the fungal network is not just an isolated organism, but the interdependence between all local beings. The web across the land and the land themself. Magic.⁣
⁣
Hear what the mycelium has to say on the Stack in “Nothing, if not everything.” Excerpt below.⁣
⁣
𝘒𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘭𝘦𝘥𝘨𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵. 𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘭, 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴, 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺.⁣
⁣
𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘞𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘥—𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘶𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘵, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘢𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘶𝘴, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮. 𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥, 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵.⁣
⁣
𝘞𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳. 𝘞𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘨. A sunset atop a hilly vista in early spring. Ryn raises their hands into the air, to welcome the turning of the season. Across their heart are the words “nothing, if not everything.” by @ryn.fink

53

1

2 years ago