2020 – Greetings!
Wildspeak has a new look! It’s now completely functional on mobile phones (it wasn’t before, which was a shame, since that’s how most of you are using the site!) It’s also SO much more searchable than it used to be, which is fantastic. 😀
I’m still working on animal teacher art, which you can find over at DeviantArt, as well as Facebook and Etsy! When referring to me, please use they/them or he/him pronouns, as I’m transmasculine nonbinary. Please respect me and my spirit by using the former.
Hey, I survived head/neck radiotherapy, and only with marginal brain damage! (It’s very marginal and mostly around how much I have to edit my writing now). I still have the neuroendocrine cancer and will always have it, but this is the path I walk, so what can you do? Also a heads up, do not contact me with your pseudoscience claims of how you can ‘heal’ my cancer.
At the time of writing this, the global pandemic has affected everyone on earth in a way nothing else has. It has also sadly enabled far more conspiracy-theory thinking and toxic individuals-over-community-spirit ideologies, which has been so devastating to see and will have a human life cost we will never be able to properly quantify.
I do what I can, and continue to work with animal spirits and energies even more than before. I am working on Animal Oracle Decks, something I have been asked about for maybe twenty years now. What can I say, when I embraced Snail as a teacher, that meant something for how slow I can be on my personal projects.
In the meantime, a few people have asked about sending donations to help with the hosting of the site, or other costs, since I pay for this entirely on my own and have done so since the site’s inception post-Geocities (honestly I dread to think how much I’ve paid in hosting fees over the years, Wildspeak is cheap, but it adds up overall). I have thought about possibly starting something like an animal teacher Patreon, but I also have a Ko-Fi account, and for the cost of a coffee, you can really help things along! Don’t feel like you have to though, the whole point of this animal teacher dictionary is that it is and will remain freely available.
Along with now having practiced as a practical animist healer and spiritual otherworld mediator between this and the otherworlds for two decades, I am also in the Ovate Grade of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD) after spending 6 years in the Bardic Grade. This has very much brought me back into paganism and spirituality in a way that is important to me, and I hope this means more animal teacher essays and other articles soon. I can’t believe it’s been five years since I last updated! (And yet I also can, I had a lot of life to go off and live in that period of time).
Want to get in touch with me? Feel free to shoot me an email at ophelias.diary at gmail.com. I attempt to get back to people as soon as possible, but I am often ill, or working on other projects (my main job is now as a fiction writer); so please be patient.