of literary failure that is so interesting; the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either the regulatory atmosphere of reviews or the objective interrogation of seminars, and yet, despite all this, true. 3. What writers know First things first: writers do not have perfect or even superior knowledge about the quality or otherwise of their own work - God knows, most writers are quite deluded about the nature of their own talent. But writers do have a different kind of knowledge than either professors or critics. Occasionally it's worth listening to. The insight of the practitioner is, for bette... posted on Mar 14 2018 (11,957 reads)

issued a ruling declaring that both the Ganga and Yamuna rivers are also “legal persons/living persons.” But what does it mean for a river, or an ecosystem to hold rights? The answer may vary from place to place.  The growing global movement for Rights of Nature — or the Rights of Mother Earth as some cultures prefer — seeks to define legal rights for ecosystems to exist, flourish, and regenerate their natural capacities. These laws challenge the status of nature as mere property to be owned and dominated by humans, and provide a legal framework for an ethical and spiritual relationship to the Earth. While recognizing legal rights of nature doesn’... posted on Jun 2 2018 (6,873 reads)

Artists and Neighbors Turned a Bomb Site Into a Medicine Garden Amid a housing crisis, a London neighborhood found a way to protect a parcel of rewilded land—then transform it into something better. It was a fenced-off World War II bomb site that had rewilded, and a team of London artists decided it was the perfect place to grow a medicine garden. The site is in the middle of a social housing complex in the Bethnal Green neighborhood of Tower Hamlets, a London borough that has become the U.K.’s second most densely populated local authority, the basic unit of local government. For the artists, the hardest part of getting the project off the ground turned out... posted on Jun 13 2018 (6,969 reads)

because it is exactly that act of breaking that has been on my mind this last year, and which I feel has everything to do with how I want to make art, and how I want to live. It’s a strange thing about the human mind that, despite its capacity and its abundant freedom, its default is to function in a repeating pattern. It watches the moon and the planets, the days and seasons, the cycle of life and death all going around in an endless loop, and unconsciously, believing itself to be nature, the mind echoes these cycles. Its thoughts go in loops, repeating patterns established so long ago we often can’t remember their origin, or why they ever made sense to us. And even when ... posted on Nov 12 2018 (11,291 reads)

Spectrum… All of it and so much more! Few weeks ago we had the joy of spiraling up together in the wisdom of circles, in an amazing conversation with our inspired elder John Malloy. This was the first time we had a guest speaker in last month’s calls and it was truly delightful, deep and natural! Here you have some of the main insights and reflections from John and others. John dives into the wisdom of circles, the role of anchors and facilitators, the nature of human groups, different types of leadership… Almost everything John says gives for a ton of reflection. He is someone who says a lot even when he is silent; understanding, compas... posted on Jan 24 2019 (10,458 reads)

weave of myths, meanings, narratives, words, symbols, rituals, and agreements that together define the world. That story tells us who we are, how to be a man or a woman, what is important and valuable, what is real, what is sacred, what humanity’s role and purpose is on earth. The world’s dominant culture, the one called modern, has a story of the world too. I call it the story of separation. It is the story that holds us as separate individuals and holds humanity separate from nature. Here, giving does not come naturally. In fact, that story says our default nature is selfishness, down to the genetic level. If I’m separate from you, then more for me is less for you. ... posted on Feb 6 2019 (9,268 reads)

inward,” Dot answered. “I kind of keep the thoughts to myself and keep going until it settles out. Basically I internalize it.”[1] DENIAL AND THE DOUBLE REALITY Joanna Macy has proposed several reasons why people avoid admitting to sadness and despair about the state of their world. Some are afraid that their feelings will be interpreted as negativity by their friends, who will then themselves fall prey to it. Others worry that getting emotional about the decline of nature shows lack of faith in God, who they believe has a plan for all things, or even that it is unpatriotic, since it counters the treasured American archetype of the optimistic, can-do individual w... posted on Apr 1 2019 (6,357 reads)

a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books. I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imagin... posted on May 25 2019 (6,022 reads)

sense of environmental balance. Ms. Tippett:I’d like for you to tell me something about where you were born, about your family upbringing, including the spiritual aspect of that. Ms. Maathai:I was born in rural areas of Kenya, in the central highlands. My community is the Kikuyu. And one of the things that I may have inherited without being conscious about it, because my people were already Christians by the time I was growing up, is the fact that my people were very close to nature. I like to give a story, for example, that reflects that: that when I was a young child, I used to collect the firewood for my mother. I remember my mother telling me not to collect any fire... posted on May 28 2019 (5,000 reads)

here at Sounds True—they like to have plans. They're like, "We want to know what's next," and then "What's beyond that?" and "This will help us." And then I imagine those people who are out there going out and raising money for their business. They certainly want to be able to tell their investors, "Here's our five-year plan where you're going to get your money out with this." It seems like it goes against some parts of human nature who want to see the plan. FL: It's true, and I think part of it is simply the conditioning, right, we've been so conditioned that we want this form of certainty that plans give ... posted on May 13 2019 (7,646 reads)

Robin Wall Kimmerer observed in her poetic meditation on moss, “finding the words is another step in learning to see.” Losing the words, then, is ceasing to see — a peculiar and pervasive form of blindness that dulls the shimmer of the world, a disability particularly dangerous to the young imagination just learning to apprehend the world through language. In early 2015, when the 10,000-entry Oxford children’s dictionary dropped around fifty words related to nature — words like fern, willow, and starling — in favor of terms like broadband and cut and paste, some of the world’s most prominent authors com... posted on Jul 23 2019 (12,473 reads)

might be called a homecoming speech of the truest kind - a return to the heart. Weaving her family's personal moonshot of arriving into middle America concurrently with America's (and humanity's) own literal moonshot through the Apollo 11 mission, she sets the stage for the gravity of heavy realizations from her own rocket-like career trajectory into the highest echelons of conventional power, and back to "a place that operates at a human and community scale bound to land and nature." Preeta Bansal has spent more than 30 years in senior roles in government, global business, and corporate law practice – as General Counsel and Senior Policy Advisor in the Execu... posted on Oct 25 2019 (8,113 reads)

met Mark Tredinnick’s work through The Little Red Writing Book—recommended by a teacher I loved. Within the opening pages, I was hooked. I read the text avidly, for the author’s voice came to me with clarity, and elegance. Exercises adeptly invited me to ‘Try this’.  I was drawn to the way Tredinnick connected rhythm and sentence-forming to breath and walking in the natural world. Little did I know he was already a revered and award-winning poet and nature writer. In the years that followed I gave Mark’s book on writing craft to friends and family, using it to coach and encourage other writers. Through a Melbourne winter I met up with my... posted on Dec 2 2019 (5,571 reads)

methods of transportation that carry them. Our gaze is more often directed into a computer monitor, television screen, or cell phone than directed at the ground or at the sky. As we surrender more and more to technological advances, our individual lives can become cut off from the thread of connection that helps us to know our true and necessary place in the exquisitely resilient, fragile, reciprocal web of life. In many ways it can require more effort than ever to connect with the gifts that nature holds for us, and in so many ways it has never been more important. Gratefulness supports the cultivation of intentional remembering and honoring of our relationship with “Mother Natur... posted on Nov 25 2019 (6,580 reads)

natural selection throughout the animal kingdom… “…across the animal kingdom, different animals pick up on different parts of reality. So in the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and butyric acid; in the world of the black ghost knifefish, its sensory world is lavishly colored by electrical fields; and for the echolocating bat, its reality is constructed out of air compression waves.” The variety of sense perceptions used in nature determine our reality… but they present just a slice of the totality….which makes up our surrounding world… “That’s the slice of their ecosystem that they ca... posted on Dec 28 2021 (5,274 reads)

and consciousness; it is both solidity and radiant transparency. It is both the most ordinary, sober experience of ourselves and our environment, and the most extraordinary, at the same time. we also cannot know before this letting go that our imagination is not extinguished with spiritual awakening; it matures. The Reality of the Body The reality of actual contact with oneself is, at the same time, actual contact with our environment. It is a very interesting aspect of our nature that to heal the split between body and mind is, at the same time, to heal the split between oneself and one's surroundings, or in between oneself and other people. Life is, to some extent,... posted on Oct 16 2020 (5,827 reads)

Yamil Rivera - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79424399 I had never been good at practicing mindfulness, or being mindful—period—until I got a dog. Observing your breath, extolled as the surefire way to become present, left me in such a deep state of hyperventilation I quickly wanted a break from taking a break. I was in constant, anxious movement, starting projects but never finishing them, leaving things halfway done, forgetting items, moving from one thing to the next, constantly apprehensive. But then I got George Lucas: a miniature schnauzer that was the doppelgänger of the Star Wars director, down to the salt-and-pep... posted on Jan 30 2021 (7,040 reads)

“That is why you are all sick! Because you see the Earth as a thing and not a being.”  She was right, of course. As African Americans, our 400-plus years of immersion in racial capitalism—the commodification of our people and the planet for economic gain—has attempted to crush our sacred connection to the Earth. Many of us have forgotten that our cultural heritage as Black people includes ecological humility, the idea that humans are kin to, not masters of, nature.  Despite the pressures to assimilate, there are those who persist in believing that the land and waters are family members, cling to our ancestral ways of knowing, and continue to prac... posted on Feb 23 2021 (5,131 reads)

heard the song, Ohio, by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, I wept, remembering the pain of losing my peers. I put my camera aside and joined the other four million students across the country, who staged a massive student strike and marched most of the night in protest against a government that would kill its own people. I simply could not integrate the events of Vietnam and Kent State. I experienced what I can describe only as the angst of an inner fire, obliterating my once good nature and middle-class complacency. The weight of depression made its unwelcome debut on my emotional stage. This inner fire raged, fueled by anger and outrage, and I knew I needed to find a way to u... posted on Aug 10 2021 (2,808 reads)

and learned about competition rather than co-operation. When the fires come, when the buildings burn, friends and neighbors are what we need, communities to support us, the kindness of strangers. We experienced it last Summer as the firefighters risked their lives holding the line. We were fortunate in our small town that this time no one lost their home, unlike so many inland. Hand-painted signs are still beside the road, thanking the firefighters. We cannot escape the imbalance of nature we have created, but we can learn how to walk together into an uncertain future. Years ago I had a series of visions of the future, of a civilization waiting to be born. I was shown how we... posted on Aug 19 2021 (6,867 reads)