definition of ‘sustainability’ and invites us to learn something from these powerful, wise and sensitive animals. Allegorical use of horses as a window into the management of our own social organizations may seem at best romantic, and at worst a cheap stretch. We are not animals, we tell ourselves, and our brains function differently, and besides, horses can’t balance a budget. But this thinking not only over estimates our superiority, it underestimates the intelligence of nature. And, in fact, as mammals, our brains are hardwired for the same need for safety and success as the horse. It is our nature-deficient culture that robs us of true insight, robbing us of wisdom ... posted on Sep 22 2018 (21,009 reads)

the Fukushima nuclear power plant of March 2011. The other notable difference is the addition of a substantial afterword, where I have discussed more directly my own journey and some ways we might apply what the people profiled in this book have to teach us to our lives in the West. *** Introduction I have always thought it was possible to live a great life. Beyond all the nightmares we hear about in the news, there is a larger world surrounding us: not just the resplendent world of nature, but also our own potential as people to live well, to connect with each other, to do meaningful work, to make powerful art, and to forge a different kind of future for ourselves and for the ne... posted on Nov 28 2018 (8,900 reads)

to pick a few zucchinis for supper, I was once again amazed at the Earth’s generosity, how one plant could give so many vegetables. I had to look carefully under the spreading leaves to discover a zucchini unexpectedly growing almost too large. This is the sacred life that sustains us, part of the creation we desperately need to “love and protect,” just as it loves and protects us. A central but rarely addressed aspect of this crisis is our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation, and how this affects our relationship to the environment. Pope Francis speaks of the pressing need to articulate a spiritual response to this ecological crisis and to “feel i... posted on Dec 16 2018 (7,939 reads)

you, in your body, feeling that interaction of the nervous system and subtlety in your body. What I found, as I started to recognise and feel some of the more subtle connections to my whole body, is that who and what you are—especially what you are—changes shape. You actually start to recognise things you never knew before. And so what I like to say is we’re all made up of some combination of tangible and intangible. In broad human history we’ve called our intangible nature by a whole bunch of names. You might have called it “soul,” you might call it “spirit,” you might call it “psyche,” you might call it “the unconscious,... posted on Jan 30 2019 (9,086 reads)

a fast and effective way to open your heart and embody what you really want to communicate. Despite what your mind would have you believe, your soul loves to sing. Your authentic singing voice is the muscle and mouthpiece of your soul. As unique as your fingerprint and DNA, your soul has a melody, a rhythm, and a resonance that is yours alone. You are the only one who can embody your voice. Your true or naked voice can access your soul song, and this resonant song reveals your authentic nature, who you really are. Expressing your soul song is easy if you are willing and committed to listening, to hearing, and to acknowledging it without judgment of any kind. Once heard, your soul ... posted on Mar 18 2019 (8,009 reads)

in philosophical questions, or great works of art and literature, or the astonishing discoveries of modern science. And it is so even when they come achingly hoping to help this world or even just to make sense of the heartbreaking storms of injustice, human suffering, and corruption raging throughout our civilization. Always, in almost all of these young men and women, their entrenched standards of thought and understanding, shaped by a toxic tangle of ideas about the universe, human nature, and Great Nature itself, have locked their minds in an airless reality devoid of intrinsic meaning and purpose. And here they are in front of me, notebooks or laptops at the ready. On the s... posted on Mar 25 2019 (9,264 reads)

credit Kim Morrow             A few years ago, I was invited to visit a bison ranch in eastern Wyoming. I was dating this new guy named Mark, and as we got to know each other he kept talking about this place that had been in his family for three generations. He talked often about how much he loved visiting the ranch: going for hikes; sitting out in front of his cabin and watching the symphony of nature; looking for wildlife, and even catching a mountain lion or a bear cub on his motion-sensor camera that was tied to a tree; setting out even in the dead of winter when his snowy hikes were sheathed in silence. He told me h... posted on Mar 7 2019 (8,328 reads)

a point. Perhaps we are meant to yield to this flamboyance, to understand that life is not always to be measured and meted as winter compels us to do but to be spent from time to time in a riot of color and growth. Late spring is potlatch time in the natural world, a great giveaway of blooming beyond all necessity and reason – done, it would appear, for no reason other than the sheer joy of it. The gift of life, which seemed to be withdrawn in winter, has been given once again, and nature, rather than hoarding it, gives it all away. There is another paradox here, known in all the wisdom traditions: if you receive a gift, you keep it alive not by clinging to it but by passing it ... posted on Mar 21 2021 (14,304 reads)

followed a path that led me into one of these woods, through a tunnel of green gloom and smoky blue dusk. It was very quiet, very remote, in there. My feet sank into the pile of the pine needles. The last bright tatters of sunlight vanished. Some bird went whirring and left behind a deeper silence. I breathed a different air, ancient and aromatic." A joyful observer of the quotidian, playwright, novelist and essayist J.B. Priestley shares his heart's delight in the quiet manifestations of beauty and magic in everyday life--a quiet pine wood at dusk, a spray of plum blossoms, the light and warmth of sunbeams. Celebrate the everyday wonders of the natural world with J.B. Pries... posted on May 2 2019 (6,399 reads)

cherry blossoms have arrived, and it feels like nature has handed us a beautiful gift. At the Japanese Tea Garden, here in San Francisco, I lean into a low hanging blossom and inhale the delicate sweet scent. The wet pink petals touch my nose, and once again, I am reminded of the generosity of nature, year after year. From the air we breathe, to the body we each inhabit, we are living a profound gift, and yet, we can struggle to see and relate to life as a gift.   In his seminal book, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, Brother David Steindl-Rast poses a question worth pondering: “Why is it so difficult to acknowledge a gift as a gift?” He believes that admitti... posted on Jun 23 2019 (6,683 reads)

migrants and decked in early wildflowers.  Oh, yes, we had our plans.  We planned for the weekend of Earth Day, a day of Love Your Mother, get back to the great womb of Mother Nature.  We didn’t plan on Mother crawling through an extended drought, and then breaking that with her own wet celebration for our region.  Now we had to amend our plans, grateful for the sumptuous accommodations of the Vandiver Inn Bed & Breakfast, but determined to still meet our goal of nature-connection for each woman as she continued her healing.             The first evening activity had us walking a few blocks for homemade... posted on Jul 22 2019 (5,027 reads)

actually have sustainable micro gift economies in most families. I don’t keep track of how much my dad does for me, or how much I do for my mom. We have a gift economy and we’re all very innately familiar with that. It just needs to be embedded in a larger culture, in this polyculture of relationships, so that it grows at its own pace, in different people at different times in different capacities, and we’re able to hold all of that. Q: So it’s in tune with nature as opposed to being imposed. NM: Yes, you’re trusting nature. You are counting on it, because it grows by nature’s order and not by your timeline. Q: So then you’re... posted on Jul 5 2019 (8,109 reads)

began with pronghorns. Growing up obsessed with creature , the main allure of the antelope was its cheetah-esque speed, evolved to evade the North American version of that predatory cat long extinct. I was tickled by the idea that the pronghorn outran its ghost and thus forever evaded its own doom. In these later years and slower-paced days, other commendable qualities came to the fore: Those long-lashed doe eyes; that sly, set hint of a smile; the pair of ebony horns sheathed in keratin which shed like antlers; the tinge of melancholy derived from knowing that it is the sole survivor of its family, the last remnant of kin. It was a fortuitous flip to the essay on pronghorns that ... posted on Aug 15 2019 (5,489 reads)

1987, while teaching a class at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] on nonviolence, philosophy lecturer Lee Perlman had a novel idea: Why not take the students to a prison, to talk with men who had committed extreme forms of violence?  Needless to say,” an MIT publication reported, “the experience was an eye-opener for students — a powerful way to help them understand, at a visceral level, the nature of violence. And it also sparked Perlman’s lifelong professional and personal interest in the prison system.” What follows is the edited transcript of an in-depth Awakin Calls interview with Dr. Perlman. You can listen to the recording ... posted on Dec 28 2019 (6,950 reads)

I wrote to my sister, which was inspired by a prompt in the packet: My Dearest Li’l Sister: I am currently participating in a course called “Grateful Anyhow,” which challenges me to think about the things I’m grateful for despite my difficult circumstances. You immediately came to mind, since I am most grateful for you allowing me to be a part of my nephew’s life. It’d be very easy for you to cut me out entirely — especially considering the nature of my offenses. I think about this whenever I look around and see so many guys who don’t even have contact with their own children, which makes me feel all the more lucky whenever I ta... posted on Aug 28 2019 (5,704 reads)

course progenitors but they live a very different kind of social life that involves competition between themselves. Most of the calls we found — although there were some calls associated with aggression, some calls associated with moving from one place to the next, very many of them were calls between calves and their mothers or their aunts or their cousins. Ms. Tippett:It is fascinating how paying attention to these sounds and the calls does help you understand the social collective nature of elephant life, isn’t it? Ms. Payne:Yes, it is, and other people are picking up from where we did our beginnings there, in the Savannah elephants. The Elephant Listening Project is a... posted on Oct 22 2019 (5,039 reads)

from diaries, from interviews, from accounts and so on.  So, that was part of the research and I love learning.  It was fascinating just piecing together one fragment after another and building a mosaic.  I really found myself researching this book in layers.  I would learn about the history of World War II and Poland.  I would learn about the culture, the music, the inventions of the era, what was happening with the Nazis and their paradoxical relationship with nature and then the personal life of Antonina.  All of these things required reading in different directions. But one door kept opening up to another one.  And in that sense, it was a boo... posted on Sep 29 2019 (4,429 reads)

in is that, no, these are all interconnected. They’re all woven together. You can’t separate them, actually. Can you – is that – Pete: That’s right. And that is a perspective that I have come to over the course of my building into these things. And I really believe that that is the perspective that we – as a world community quickly need to come to, is the understanding that we, as a species were not put here to control the natural world, to control nature. Instead we are an integral part of nature. It seems so simple when we say it. I think most, if not all, pre-industrial societies had this deep understanding. But we, somehow, have allowed o... posted on Oct 18 2019 (2,640 reads)

to be together; when we don’t talk about anything; when I feel disconnected from my body; when I am critical of my body,” et cetera, et cetera. It has nothing to do, specifically, with sex. It has to do with shutting down. And when you ask people, “I turn myself on…” all the answers are about aliveness. “I turn myself on when I listen to music; when I dance; when I play music; when I go out with friends; when I take care of myself; when I’m in nature; when I climb the mountain; when we play together; when we have time to just lounge.” It’s about a quality of aliveness. It’s about the permission to feel good. And that comes... posted on Dec 18 2019 (10,714 reads)

and fear were at a global high, by a German Jew who had narrowly escaped a dismal fate by taking refuge first in Switzerland and then in America when the Nazis seized power. Erich Fromm In a sentiment he would later develop in contemplating the superior alternative to the parallel lazinesses of optimism and pessimism, Fromm writes: Hope is a decisive element in any attempt to bring about social change in the direction of greater aliveness, awareness, and reason. But the nature of hope is often misunderstood and confused with attitudes that have nothing to do with hope and in fact are the very opposite. Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene made his po... posted on Mar 30 2020 (14,828 reads)