great, wonderful, do it. But it wasn’t the training that created an experience that was there prior to me deciding to be a monk, “prior” meaning it’s so fundamental, our very being. So it was an important insight to actually question, what are we doing here? What is going on with how we’re going about practice? Now, that didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable. It just meant that it was important for me to have an experience where I got to question the nature of what we were doing. TS: That’s so interesting. In a sense, you could say you went from, this is my language, “practice to performance” in deciding to leave mona... posted on Jan 17 2023 (3,002 reads)

the still water. Maybe that was part of the problem: he spent too much time rolling thoughts around his head, not enough time listening to his gut. Or simply experiencing the present moment without analyzing it. Simply being. While his rational side argued that what happened was nothing more than a pretty amazing coincidence, some deeper, intuitive part of him wasn’t convinced of that. He sensed that he stood at a gateway into some different realm, a deeper way of connecting with wild nature, the more-than-human world that he loved so much. It wasn’t the first time he’d felt this way. Sometimes he wished he could be more open to the possibilities . . . There you go a... posted on Apr 6 2023 (5,270 reads)

Dr. Porges also tells us that when we no longer feel safe, we will adaptively fight or flee or dissociate. No wonder it is so challenging for people to stay with awareness of the existential threat to our earthly home. The Polyvagal Theory made us curious: could beauty provide enough safety for people to see the pain and not look away? We discussed Iain McGilchrist’s (2009) ideas about our left hemisphere dominant society, leaving people cut off their feelings, viewing nature as disconnected from who we are. In this left shifted world view, without the balance of the right hemisphere that sees the wholeness and interconnectedness of things, the planet and human bein... posted on Sep 26 2023 (3,242 reads)

goodness. In such a world, we come to believe, it’s compete or die. The popular British writer Philip Pullman says, “we evolved to suit a way of life which is acquisitive, territorial, and combative” and that “we have to overcome millions of years of evolution” to make the changes we need to avoid global catastrophe. If I believed that, I’d feel utterly hopeless. How can we align with the needs of the natural world if we first have to change basic human nature? An eco-mind thinks ... Less about quantities and more about qualities. Less about fixed things and more about the ever-changing relationships that form them. Less about limi... posted on Apr 10 2012 (28,264 reads)

with nature confers a gift of presence. I try to open up to it rather than pursue distracting thoughts or emotions. As an urban dweller, walking in a park fills me with a sense of my roots in the natural world. Seashore, mountains, meadows, woods and desert all invite us to discover our own nature in theirs, to meet their presence with our own. So whenever I feel too far from my deepest wish, off-balance, shaken by the blows of life or mired in the inertia of not caring, I seek contact with nature--a primary source of re-centering. Each of us responds more deeply to one or another great natural scene, depending perhaps on where we received our earliest impressions. At this tim... posted on May 5 2013 (22,992 reads)

Veh told me about Jane Wodening. She told me Jane was an astonishing writer, that she wrote about animals, creatures, about the intimate life of nature around her. That her writing was like no one else she knew of. And then she thought of Barry Lopez. Well, it was okay to bring in Barry Lopez in the same conversation. In fact, Anne was putting together an exhibit at the Di Rosa in Napa, California. It would be called “Entering the Wild” and would feature a hand-illustrated book by Barry Lopez along with works by five other artists. It would also feature several of Jane’s books of stories. Anne hoped to find a way to bring Jane out from Colorado for the opening. I remem... posted on Jun 3 2013 (16,336 reads)

Survival of the Fittest: It Is Kindness That Counts A psychologist probes how altruism, Darwinism and neurobiology mean that we can succeed by not being cutthroat. Why do people do good things? Is kindness hard-wired into the brain, or does this tendency arise via experience? Or is goodness some combination of nature and nurture? Dacher Keltner, director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, investigates these questions from multiple angles, and often generates results that are both surprising and challenging. In his new book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, Keltner weaves together scientific findings with personal narrative to uncover th... posted on Oct 19 2013 (26,973 reads)

of the big ports for the whaling community. Shinnecock is on the south fork of the island, if you look at it like a lobster claw. So we grew up fishing. I didn’t hunt. My uncles and my grandfather would always shoot something; a squirrel, a raccoon. That was how we fed ourselves. We didn’t go to the store very often for stuff like that. We had our own chickens. We had geese. We had a huge garden. So we really grew up kind of playing with earth. RW:  Really in contact with nature. CS:  Well, it was interesting, because where we lived in Huntington was on a hill. Even when my grandfather was growing up there, they called it Crow Hill. It was this isolated little ... posted on Dec 1 2013 (22,010 reads)

by the premise that there's not enough of anything: not enough goods, not enough goodness — meaning that there are not enough material things, nor enough good qualities of human character. I love to quote the dear, now deceased, Hermann Scheer, the great German environmental leader, who reminded people that the sun provides us 15,000 times the daily dose of energy compared to what we're currently using in fossil fuel. Hit the limits of the Earth? No. Of human violation of nature’s rules? Yes! FC: That really relates to your early work about food. You said then that it's not the quantity of food that's not enough, but it's the distribution and unbal... posted on Jan 13 2014 (26,586 reads)

Brown: I could ask you as a parent and any other parent that's listening with a young child, you know, say a child over 3 but under 12. And if you just observe them and don't try and direct them and watch what it is they like to do in play, you often will see a key to their innate talents. And if those talents are given fairly free reign, then you see that there is a union between self and talent. And that this is nature's way of sort of saying this is who you are and what you are. And I'm sure if you go back and think about both of your children or yourself and go back to your earliest emotion-laden, visual, and visceral memories of what really gave you joy, you'l... posted on Jul 18 2014 (32,034 reads)

now for Descartes there was the experiential taste of certainty. Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787 RW: In your new book An Unknown World you bring up how Descartes has fallen into disfavor. And yet there is something, you write, that’s admirable about his search. JN: I think there is. He’s been demonized as being the chief culprit in practically every problem we face, especially the environmental crisis, alienating humanity from nature and divorcing the mind from matter. But , as a young person reading about his experiment of doubting everything, I remember this action of concentrating and withdrawing my attention (he calls i... posted on Jun 11 2016 (17,424 reads)

and you will sense two things: a wisdom that makes you curious and a casualness that makes you comfortable. One example of this kind of relaxed intelligence was when I was having lunch with him and we were discussing some of the ins and outs of doctoral research. In an off-handed way he said, “Don’t worry about finding the answers; find the questions. When you find the right questions the answers will follow.”       Dr. Nakasone’s inquisitive nature is evident in the variety of activities he has pursued and keeps pursuing. He is an accomplished scholar in Buddhist studies (he is a member of the Core Doctoral Faculty in Buddhist Art and Cul... posted on Feb 22 2017 (7,931 reads)

I've been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé, which are the skills you bring to the marketplace.The eulogy virtues are the ones that get mentioned in the eulogy, which are deeper: who are you, in your depth, what is the nature of your relationships, are you bold, loving, dependable, consistency? And most of us, including me, would say that the eulogy virtues are the more important of the virtues. But at least in my case, are they the ones that I think about the most? And the answer is no.... posted on Mar 12 2017 (50,002 reads)

with even very horrendous events. But particularly traumas that occur at the hands of people who are supposed to take care of you, if you’re not allowed to feel what you feel, know what you know, your mind cannot integrate what goes on, and you can get stuck on the situation. So the social context in which it occurs is fantastically important. MS. TIPPETT: Something that’s very interesting to me in how you talk about trauma, the experience of trauma, what it is, is how the nature of memory is distorted, that memories are never precise recollections, but that in general, as we move through the world, memories become integrated and transformed into stories that help us ma... posted on Oct 20 2017 (66,878 reads)

with even very horrendous events. But particularly traumas that occur at the hands of people who are supposed to take care of you, if you’re not allowed to feel what you feel, know what you know, your mind cannot integrate what goes on, and you can get stuck on the situation. So the social context in which it occurs is fantastically important. MS. TIPPETT: Something that’s very interesting to me in how you talk about trauma, the experience of trauma, what it is, is how the nature of memory is distorted, that memories are never precise recollections, but that in general, as we move through the world, memories become integrated and transformed into stories that help us ma... posted on Oct 20 2017 (1,410 reads)

Harrod Buhner is an award-winning author of 22 books on nature, indigenous cultures, the environment, and herbal medicine. He comes from a long line of healers that include Leroy Burney, Surgeon General of the United States under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and Elizabeth Lusterheide, a midwife and herbalist who worked in rural Indiana in the early nineteenth century. He says that the greatest influence on his work, however, has been his great-grandfather, C.G. Harrod, who primarily used botanical medicines, also in rural Indiana, when he began his work as a physician in 1911. Buhner, who says his DNA prevents him from working for others, has been a fulltime therapist in pri... posted on Mar 9 2018 (24,695 reads)

top solutions to climate change. These are proverbs, not solutions, and it doesn’t mean they’re not good things to do. Proverbs generally are. But they don’t give anybody a sense that their action is going to accumulate into a sufficient difference that will counter what is being predicted. So given this moral weight is, as you put it, often “invisible”—when did it become visible to you? I grew up outside and felt very safe there. I felt protected by nature. When I saw things like a new development, trees being cut down, a road scarring the landscape, the first RV camper in Yosemite, it was shocking. I would go, “Whoa, what’s that and ... posted on Apr 13 2018 (13,640 reads)

become problematic when we think they represent the truth. Whenever we believe that our storylines are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, we are no longer in the present moment because we are so completely enmeshed in our preferred version of reality. This happens to all of us. It’s easy to get emotionally attached to whatever we believe is right or wrong, good or bad, fair or unfair. But no one’s storylines can ever represent the whole truth. By their very nature, storylines are subjective and partial because we each perceive life from our own perspective. My version of reality will always be different from yours because we are different people. When we... posted on May 3 2021 (59,095 reads)

going to know who we are.” For Berry, it all came down to cosmology—the basic worldview of a culture: its foundational story of how the world came to be and how it got to be as it is now, and how we, as humans, fit into it. To address the deep underlying causes of the industrial-capitalist-corporate destruction of the biosphere, we had to examine our worldview. In Berry’s view, a central cause of the West’s ecological hostility was its separation from nature—a separation that was at once spiritual, religious, psychological, emotional, intellectual, and philosophical. The root of the eco-destruction was an anthropocentric (human-centered) West... posted on Sep 19 2018 (11,823 reads)

and billions of bacterial cells in just one teaspoon of soil. So, think about that: one teaspoon of soil in your hand contains as many bacterial cells as there are humans over the entire globe. Of course, the human brain is a very centralized structure. In the forest, the intelligence, thought processes, memories, and decision-making are a lot more diffuse throughout the entire network, though they do include animal brains.  Pavi: You talk about the contradictory creative duality in nature. Are we atoms or networks? We are neither and both, and it's not just a question of metaphor but the fundamental nature of life. One of the most provocative realities that the book surfaces... posted on Mar 22 2019 (4,986 reads)