book. It's called Sacred Medicine, and it's pretty fresh off the presses. And it is a deeply, deeply personal book. I mean, we can call it you as a doctor going on a search for these answers – you're exploring these questions about healing – but you are traveling the world, you are doing deep inner travel as well. And during this 10-year period you sustain a horrible dog bite that could have taken your life; the COVID 19 pandemic hit and actually changed the nature and the content of your book; and your mother got really sick and she died during this period as well. And so, I just encourage anyone who's on a path of soul searching or healing, or just ... posted on Aug 28 2023 (3,534 reads)

that doesn't invite nor allow for individual, let alone communal, rest. With our Chilean Criollo herd roaming the wilds of Patagonia, Chile, we’re finding our way back to rituals that tend to our essential need for rest, and reclaiming our communal spaces for sharing reverence together.   The Stillness Within All Things For the last seven years of my life, I’ve lived in slow relationship with this herd of horses here in the south of Chile. By sheer necessity, the seasonal nature of Earth guides the rhythm of our lives together – such a remote place requires daily surrender to the force and flow of Mother Earth. It has been within this state of surrender that I&rs... posted on Jun 28 2024 (1,447 reads)

very essence of life, and it’s connected with the network pattern. When you look at the network of an ecosystem, at all these feedback loops, another way of seeing it, of course, is as recycling. Energy and matter are passed along in cyclical flows. The cyclical flows of energy and matter — that’s another principle of ecology. In fact, you can define an ecosystem as a community where there is no waste. Of course, this is an extremely important lesson we must learn from nature. This is what I focus on when I talk to business people about introducing ecoliteracy into business. Our businesses are now designed in a linear way — to consume resources, produce goods,... posted on Feb 26 2014 (27,029 reads)

with soil erosion or toxic pollution. For me—and most people are like me in this respect—“climate change” is an issue of faith; I must either trust or distrust the scientific experts who predict the future of the climate. I know from my experience, from the memories of my elders, from certain features of my home landscape, from reading history, that over the last 150 years or so the weather has changed and is changing. I know without doubt that to change is the nature of weather. Just so, I know from as many reasons that the alleged causes of climate change—waste and pollution—are wrong. The right thing to do today, as always, is to stop, or s... posted on May 5 2015 (10,905 reads)

Yes, exactly. Right, yes. MS. TIPPETT: And I have to say — and I’m sure you know this, because I’m sure you get this reaction a lot, especially in scientific circles — it’s unfamiliar and slightly uncomfortable in Western ears to hear someone refer to plants as persons. It’s unfamiliar. Does that happen a lot? Is that kind of a common reaction? DR. KIMMERER: Sure, sure. Scientists are very eager to say that we oughtn’t to personify elements in nature for fear of anthropomorphizing. And what I mean when I talk about the personhood of all beings, plants included, is not that I am attributing human characteristics to them, not at all. I’... posted on Apr 22 2016 (14,747 reads)

big hurricane there, when I talked, and then eventually I did a whole book, on this mysterious emotion. People would light up, and everything we’ve been told about disaster by trashy Hollywood disaster movies with Charlton Heston and Tom Cruise, everything about the news is that human beings are fragile, disasters are terrible, and we’re either terrified, because we’re fragile, or our morality is also fragile and we revert to our best-deal savage, social, Darwinist, Hobbesian nature, and go out raping and looting. Those myths became a secondary disaster, worse than the hurricane that hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, because that’s why it was — the city was s... posted on Jun 25 2016 (10,835 reads)

the zither and everything was just magical. Even though it was a public school, and there wasn't much greenery around, she found the beauty in everything. She would take us out into the weeds and teach us about wheat and the importance of making bread, and how to make bread. She just found beauty in everything. As I reflect back on my childhood I feel so grateful that she planted those seeds in me because when I look back "I think, wow, my refuge has really been in the garden and in nature." And in 5th grade I had a very difficult year. Many things happened, and they kind of happened all at once. My mother was diagnosed with cancer. And at that point the doctors diagnosed he... posted on Aug 18 2016 (14,066 reads)

a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions and it becomes narcissistic; reduce it to the spiritual and it loses its anchor to the world. Intellect, emotion, and spirit depend on each other for wholeness. They are interwoven in the human self and in education at its best, and we need to interweave them in our pedagogical discourse as well. By intellectual I mean the way we think about teaching and learning the form and content of our concepts of how people know and learn, of the nature of our students and our subjects. By emotional I mean the way we and our students feel as we teach and learn feelings that can either enlarge or diminish the exchange between us. By&n... posted on Oct 3 2016 (32,988 reads)

person yearns for community is directly related to the dimming of memory of his or her last experience of it. I came up with my own definition of community after a year at Pendle Hill: Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives. At the end of my second year, I came up with a corollary. When that person moves away, someone else arises immediately to take his or her place. But the question I want to address is this: How should we be thinking about the nature of community in the modern college and university? I think that question puts the issue where it belongs. We need a way of thinking about community in higher education that relates it to the ce... posted on Nov 13 2016 (12,945 reads)

most regretful people on earth,” Mary Oliver wrote in her exquisite meditation on the central commitment of the creative life, “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” The past century has sprouted a great many theories of how creativity works and what it takes to master it, and yet its innermost nature remains so nebulous and elusive that the call of creative work may be as difficult to hear as it is to answer. What to listen for and how to tune the listening ear is what the trailblazing physicist David Bohm (Decem... posted on Jan 7 2017 (21,025 reads)

me heal myself and will be useful and inspiring to the world. I can see that in your own example, right. Despite everything, you kept going in so many ways. I had another question, more around how technology is shaping our life. I feel like there are 2 flows right now – one is centered around technology (artificial intelligence, singularity, trying to figure out how man and machine can be one, SpaceX etc.) and the other around a simpler, older way of life (how the natives lived, nature worship, seeing the interconnectivity of all beings etc.). I wanted to get your thoughts on the role of technology -- what are the drawbacks and positives? David: Well, what I see is, ther... posted on Mar 23 2017 (28,751 reads)

is an old saying, ‘May you live in interesting times’. When someone said this to you it was viewed as both a blessing and a curse, because to live in interesting times means to face both danger and opportunity, to simultaneously embrace both breakdown and breakthrough, which is exactly what these transformative times demand of us. The UN Secretary General refers to these times as the Great Transition; Joanna Macy, Thomas Berry, Charles Eisenstein and others have referred to it as the Great Turning, due to a trilemma of social, environmental and economic factors. My own contribution to this Great Turning is to shed some light on our relationship with Nature, to ... posted on Apr 3 2017 (11,142 reads)

the only private wildlife sanctuary in India, came to host animals like Bengal Tiger, Sambhar and Asian Elephants.  Wouldn’t it be great to wake up to the sound of chirping birds, with fresh air and splendid scenery around? In the busy lives of our cities when even house sparrows are fast disappearing, this seems like a dream. But a couple has converted this dream into a reality by creating a wildlife sanctuary of their own. The couple, passionate about wildlife and nature conservation, bought 55 acres of land to plant native trees and protect the environment. Today, they are responsible for creating over 300 acres of wild life sanctuary that hosts animals like B... posted on Apr 6 2017 (23,149 reads)

challenged it on its terms in the quest for justice that which never has left the heart behind. I include Jesus in this model as well. Bringing a heartful engagement with the suffering that is happening under the current system—this is the system you’ve created and this is the suffering that is happening under that system. The system itself is part of that problem. Since I first presented my job talk at the University of San Francisco—it was on this topic and the Janus face nature of law when it comes to this quest for justice around social inequality, that it has been at the same time the source of injustice for many, many sub populations and sub communities, and the ho... posted on Jun 1 2017 (13,870 reads)

core self or the best self in everyone that is good, wise and powerful. This assumption is that, no matter what happens to you or what you do; goodness is still there, though it might be deeply buried. The second assumption is that the world is profoundly inter-connected. This is one of the most important things that I came to understand more clearly working with Indigenous people. This understanding of everything as inter-connected that you CANNOT disconnect. It's not possible in the nature of the universe. Once we understand that, it has huge implications for everything that we do, because then we understand that everything we put out also comes back to us through all of connecti... posted on May 17 2017 (21,677 reads)

say, “There’s a rhinoceros coming in 30 years,” people will ask, “What’s the problem?” Moderator: The reason I’m interested in this question of emotional responses is because behavioral scientists say that people are frozen by bad news and motivated by positive messaging. This creates a challenge for those working for environmental change. Matthieu: All my photographic work is about showing the beauty and the wonder we have in terms of nature—implying, of course, how incredibly sad it would be if it was all destroyed. We need to inspire. But we also need to be honest about what’s going to happen in the future if we don&r... posted on Jun 19 2017 (16,033 reads)

hymn to the numinous splendor of nature. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” wrote the French philosopher Simone Weil in contemplating gravity and grace. “Attention without feeling,” the poet Mary Oliver observed many decades later, “is only a report.” Indeed, what confers meaning upon our existence, what gives it an undertone of secular prayerfulness, is precisely this empathic beam of attention to all the world’s fullness, to all of its creatures. An incantation for honing that attention is what the poet, essayist, science writer, and naturalist Diane Ackerman&n... posted on Sep 5 2017 (14,871 reads)

makes you, you or I, I? That is the age-old question science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy tackles in his book, The Man Who Wasn’t There: Tales from the Edge of the Self (Dutton, Penguin Random House, USA, 2015). He examines the nature of selfhood from all angles, turning to philosophy, neuroscience and in-person interviews with people afflicted with neurological conditions that in some way rob them of some aspect of their selfhood.   In his book, Ananthaswamy, a former software engineer and current consultant for New Scientist Magazine, writes about eight diseases, starting with Cotard’s syndrome, in which deeply depressed individuals become convinced they are d... posted on Sep 13 2017 (8,910 reads)

diverse people come together with an openness to explore new possibilities. It was this melting pot that was partly responsible for the development of the college itself, created in 1991 to crystallize emerging ideas about ecology and sustainability even though they ran counter to the legacy of the Elmhirsts who had favoured more intensive farming. “I think what drew people here was the very fact that then, most higher education focussed on dominion, a separation of ourselves from nature,” says Jon. “That is alienating for many people." "The paradigm we are exploring and cultivating is an ecological world view which is not concerned with dominion over... posted on Dec 11 2017 (9,151 reads)

stress, when people are more susceptible to believing negativeinformation. Interesting research findings like these provide useful food for thought throughout the book. By learning this fascinating science, we can all become better influencers—and we can also guard against manipulation from others. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, by Florence Williams Florence Williams chronicles our intricate connection to the natural world and nature’s impact on our health, creativity, and happiness. She makes a strong case for incorporating more green spaces into our lives to improve personal and societal well-being. Williams has ... posted on Nov 27 2018 (14,926 reads)