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 (8,115 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 (5,572 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 (6,581 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 (5,275 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 (5,828 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 (5,132 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 (6,868 reads)

such as theism and idealism being associated with having had a self-transcendent experience.  However, one interesting discovery is that philosophers who have used psychedelics and cannabis are more likely to have a more subjectivist view of morality and aesthetics (the view that there is no objective truth about what makes something ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’). Another is that hard determinism (the belief that human actions are wholly determined by the laws of nature and so genuine free will does not exist) is associated with lower life satisfaction and higher depression/anxiety. The finding related to hard determinism and poorer mental health is particu... posted on Nov 13 2021 (5,694 reads)

More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts… love your heart. For this is the prize. VIKTOR FRANKL: HAVE MORE MUSIC AND NATURE IN YOUR LIFE PA century after Nietzsche proclaimed with his nihilistic grandiosity that “without music life would be a mistake” and a century after Walt Whitman observed with his life-affirming soulfulness that music is the profoundest expression of nature, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997), having narrowly escaped death in a concentration camp, delivered a set of extr... posted on Jan 2 2022 (7,419 reads)

well 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. 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 Feb 10 2022 (7,326 reads)

pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times. This optics of the self, the way in which the individual becomes “subjective center of the world,” is the defining feature of this most recent chapter of the history of our species. And yet everything around us reveals its illusory nature, for as the great naturalist John Muir observed, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Art by Arthur Rackh... posted on Dec 9 2022 (3,915 reads)

dazzling interleaving of life that prompted Ursula K. Le Guin to write that “the word for world is forest,” that cathedral of interdependence where trees and fungi whisper to each other in a language we are only just beginning to decipher. Art by Violeta Lopíz and Valerio Vidali from The Forest by Riccardo Bozzi In consonance with the emerging science of “soft fascination” — which is illuminating how time in nature jolts the brain out of its rut and unlatches our most creative thinking — May writes: The forest… is a deep terrain, a place of unending variance and subtle meaning. It is a c... posted on Apr 25 2023 (3,838 reads)

Tippett, host:It has ever and always been true, as David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This “conversational nature of reality” — indeed, this drama of vitality  — is something we have all been shown, willing or unwilling, in these years. Many have turned to David Whyte for his gorgeous, life-giving poetry and his wisdom at the interplay of theology, psychology, and leadership, his insistence on the power of a “beautiful question” and of everyday words amidst the drama of work, as well as the drama of life. The notion of “frontier” — inner frontiers, oute... posted on Jun 18 2023 (4,226 reads)

the non-profit Bioneers (“Revolution from the Heart of Nature”), producing an annual conference that attracts thousands to San Rafael, California in October. The event’s presentations, panels, keynote addresses and exhibits bring together internationally known  social activists, environmentalists, technological innovators, journalists and indigenous wisdom keepers with an engaged audience to seed and propagate collective change with solutions usually inspired by nature. Bioneers also produces an award-winning radio series, anthology book series, television programs and rich media website. Simons thinks of Bioneers as “a three-day ceremony.” Typic... posted on Oct 2 2011 (11,997 reads)

just ten corporations—with boards totaling only 138 people—had come to account for half of US food and beverage sales. Conditions for American farmworkers remain so horrific that seven Florida growers have been convicted of slavery involving more than 1,000 workers. Life expectancy of US farmworkers is forty-nine years. That’s one current. It’s antidemocratic and deadly. There is, however, another current, which is democratizing power and aligning farming with nature’s genius. Many call it simply “the global food movement.” In the United States it’s building on the courage of truth tellers from Upton Sinclair to Rachel Carson, and wo... posted on Nov 1 2011 (12,565 reads)

this kind of honeymoon. :-) For us, this walk was a pilgrimage -- and our goal was simply to be in a space larger than our egos, and to allow that compassion to guide us in unscripted acts of service along the way.  Stripped entirely of our comfort zone and accustomed identities, could we still “keep it real”?  That was our challenge. We ended up walking 1000 kilometers over three months. In that period, we encountered the very best and the very worst of human nature -- not just in others, but also within ourselves. Soon after we ended the pilgrimage, my uncle casually popped the million dollar question at the dinner table: "So, Nipun, what did you ... posted on May 14 2012 (394,864 reads)

Second Half of Life, emphasizing that we have an opportunity to develop our character. And I’m curious what you mean by it; it’s a word that people don’t use very often, but that I quite like. AA: Well, character is composed of integrity and patience and trust and flexibility and clarity. It’s the heart of our moral compass. But what fosters a spiritual growth and development is attending to coming into congruence with who we really are in our own authentic nature. And that’s always interested me: what keeps me in my integrity, and what pulls me out of my integrity or my patience or my trust or my flexibility, which are all qualities that foster wi... posted on Sep 17 2012 (30,151 reads)