Hi,

I'm Ravenari, the host of Wildspeak.com (which has been going strong in some incarnation or another since 1998, when it started as a tiny Geocities website). I was born in 1981 (saves me from going back and editing my age every year, heh), and I live in Western Australia.

I have felt compelled to work with animal energies and teachers from a very young age. I guess you could call me an animist, or an animist healer who specialists in working with land, animal and plant teachers. I use trance, journeying to the otherworlds and mediating between here anda the spiritworld to do a lot of my work. I believe in the sacredness in everything, and then seek to bring that forth in my spiritual artwork. The process involves a light trance state, and has been tuned or honed over quite a few years now. Through that, I am able to bring you the animal information and artwork that I do. I hope you get something out of it, but I'm okay if you don't. I'd really like it if you didn't share the information without crediting me, or linking back (and letting me know is wonderful!), and please don't take my artwork without asking or crediting me. This is also my livelihood, you see.

I have been everything from a green tea taster, to a supervisor/trainer at Toys 'R' Us, to a radio broadcaster, and a librarian in an architecture firm. Right now, I am a professional writer and maintain this website and do my spiritual artwork as a way of furthering my spiritual vocation. I have an incurable genetic neuroendocrine cancer, among many other things, but sometimes life is like that! Life has taken me everywhere, once or twice. I also enjoy bushwalking, researching everything and anything, media studies, being a reclusive, introverted nerd, healing and growing, never letting myself be stagnant.

Wildspeak.com was always intended to be an animal teacher / symbolism dictionary, one that generally focused on unusual animals more often than it did the common ones. I saw - especially in 1998 - a gap between really common animal guides like wolf being represented everywhere, and no literature at all on say, Australia's marsupial mole. I also felt that I might be able to do something about that. And in the process, help people to learn that actually, learning what an animal might mean for them symbolically is something they could do too. Books and websites help, but they aren't crucial to the process. If you disagree with what you find here, because you have a different relationship the animal, that's great!

You see, we can all speak the wild language. This website is intended as a small stepping stone on the path to learning it. And I hope it brings you as much spiritual nourishment as it has me.