How to start the very first blog entry on a brand new website? A brief introduction coupled with a short story about a bunya nut might work - so here I go!

My name is Claudia (soft pronunciation - the 'au' sounds like the 'ow' in 'flower')... I am part-time ocean saltwater-sprite and part-time cloud-forest fairy. In the photo, I’m holding a gorgeous Bunya nut that was gifted to me by a dear friend, environmentalist and philosopher John Seed (founder of Rainforest Information Centre).

My experience with my gifted Bunya nut was an incredible journey through ancient time to the present - you see, the Bunya pine (Araucaria bidwilliia) is a living fossil; a remnant species that ran rampant in ancient forests across the former landmass Gondwana. I live in a rainforested extinct volcano in far Northern New South Wales - incidentally, the national park I live in, Nightcap National Park, is one of the last remaining vestiges of Gondwana’s ancient forests, and a World Heritage-listed area.

So, quite literally, my Bunya nut is a link to a very old past. The Bunya pine has survived mass extinctions, plagues, floods, fires, Ice Ages, world wars. As I stroke my fingers across its rough bark, peer up its trunk into the sky above, I wonder which other creatures also glimpsed the sky through a Bunya pine canopy over the eons, ran across its bark, ate these nuts.

I feel so deeply interconnected, so very inherently part of this Earth, when I am with the Bunya pine.

I discovered at a very young age that the natural world was my solace and sanctuary, haven and heaven. I was fortunate to grow up in an urban bushland, with many holidays to grandparents with homes in the mountains and on the beach - nature was everywhere.

I was the child who was outside for hours - whispering to ladybugs, playing with gumnut babies and singing to whales. Licking lichen, eating grass stalks, sucking Jasmine flowers. That child-like wonder has never left me, either. It’s led me to the best adventure in nature- through magical portals, and beyond.

This bunya nut gift was such a joy- to observe, to smell, to photograph, to pull apart, to eat with my family. Look at that perfect geometry... each fractal contained one single nut within a hard shell. I ended up roasting them in the oven, similar to how winter chestnuts are prepared.

When I received my bunya nut gift from John, I was living on the Central Coast surrounded by lake, ocean and littoral rainforest; collaborating with John on campaigns and community engagement for Rainforest Information Centre, learning from him in realms of deep ecology and ecophilosophy, and studying psychology at university.

Since my bunya feast, my family and I have become custodian and caretaker to unimaginably beautiful rainforest acreage sandwiched between Nightcap National Park and the Border Rangers, where the Byron Hinterland meets the Tweed Valley; I have said goodbye to the urban life and moved with my family to our off-grid home in these beautiful rainforested mountains by the sea, I have completed my psych studies and moved across to environmental science studies (more on the meeting of these two disciplines in another post); I have traveled across the world and trained in forest bathing therapy, ecotherapy, and permaculture.

So now I’m here, on the edge of 2020 (incidentally my 37th year of sun revolutions begins at midnight tonight), and am ready to launch this platform - and my offerings - to the world.

Wildforest Folk is the place where my years of research, training, study, passion and creativity will intersect, and burst forth like ripe seed pods!

This blog will be an informal way to communicate my learnings, new discoveries, thoughts, stories (particularly the nature-based folkloric stories of my ancestry), workshops and events, and the like. I’ll also be sharing my off-grid journey, creative pursuits, adventures in plant consciousness and folk herbalism, permaculture happenings on our property, and whatever else evolves along the way.

If any of the above resonates with you on any level, you can also find me on Instagram or Twitter, or of course come back and visit my website (which is quite obviously still under construction) every so often!

Claudia x