long hours to protect a place or species, sometimes turn their backs if they lose the fight, stifling a sense of failure by shifting their energy quickly to another worthy project. Yet, as with any shadowy aspect of our consciousness, what we avoid continues to plague us, whereas what we agree to face offers us the possibility of transformation and wholeness. And as Stephen Aizenstat, the founding president of Pacifica Graduate Institute, has written, “Avoiding our relationship with nature only hastens the inevitable: the death of the natural world.” One way to acknowledge our love for nature, grieve for its destruction, and kindle compassion is through ritual. Ritual ca... posted on Aug 26 2013 (16,955 reads)

them how to cook it and eat it, together, around the table? When you start to open up a child's senses — when you invite children to engage, physically, with gardening and food — there is a set of values that is instilled effortlessly, that just washes over them, as part of the process of offering good food to one another. Children become so rapt — so enraptured, even — by being engaged in learning in a sensual, kinesthetic way. And food seduces you by its very nature — the smell of baking, for example: It makes you hungry! Who could resist the aroma of fresh bread, or the smell of warm tortillas coming off the comal? There is nothing else as univer... posted on Sep 23 2013 (26,142 reads)

Pavi Mehta, Chris Johnnidis and I have been visiting a wildlife sanctuary in Half Moon Bay to listen to and record the remarkable animal stories and personal journey of founder, Steve Karlin. Sitting on his back porch one day last spring, Steve casually alerted us to the piercing cries of a young red-tailed hawk above and motioned us, mid-sentence, to look beyond the fence at a bobcat moving stealthily in the tall grass. To be in Steve’s company is to be reminded that the vast play of nature is all around us, and visible if only we cultivate our ears to hear and our eyes to see it. Together over many months we experienced an expanded space of listening and learning what it means to... posted on Jan 6 2014 (53,638 reads)

drawing. I was an only child, single mom, chubby red-haired kid that went to a different school every two years. So you know no self-esteem at all. I had a really good third grade teacher. She had a big roll of butcher paper. She was like, “Now who should I give this to?” I was just kind of like “…ehh.” You know?  She’s like, “Yes, you.” It was just one of those things. I felt like I could do this. I could paint. I could draw. It was mostly nature. When I was very young I worked in acrylics, mostly nature. And when I was a teenager, it was cars for a while, pen and ink. All kinds of exotic cars, and I just kind of went back into oil pain... posted on Feb 16 2014 (22,517 reads)

until after I'm gone." This is what Terry Tempest Williams's mother told her the week before she died of cancer at the age of 54, bequeathing three shelves of colorful, clothbound volumes. Williams waited a full month after the death to open them, only to discover that each one was blank, containing page upon page of emptiness. The way she speaks mirrors her writing—fragmented, aligning pieces of ideas like a mosaic. Williams uses this enigmatic gift to explore the nature of voice and silence in her most recent work, When Women Were Birds. "What was my mother trying to say to me?" she asks in the interview that follows. "Why did my mother cho... posted on Mar 22 2014 (12,658 reads)

a slave laborer during the day for the Nazis. And then stay up all night doing their underground work. I mean, it was just a struggle, a struggle to, you know, to overcome the — what was there, and to change really bad things. Ms. Tippett: You know, it's very striking. You, again referring to Feynman, but I think this comes through in all your writing, you know, you talk about, you know, you said this about him near the end of his days, that you found answers you sought about the nature of science and a scientist, but also you discovered a new approach to life. And I just wondered if you'd say a little bit more about the contours of that, the substance of that, that approa... posted on Jul 15 2014 (26,548 reads)

and consumption are clearly me-oriented. Consumption subtly becomes stronger, and all of a sudden, "Sharing Economy' feels a lot more like Economy and a lot less like Sharing. It's a pattern we've seen before. Sometime last year, I ran into a woman who had just quit her job, after ten years of leading a pioneering sustainability organization. Just plain burned out. When I probed further, she said: "I started with the hope that we could elevate economic forces to value nature. Instead, what we've done is commoditized and devalued nature." Same thing happened with social entrepreneurship. Bill Drayton's vision behind it was to leverage entrepreneurship t... posted on Jan 22 2015 (21,908 reads)

in the way. Do not allow semantics to become one more block for you. When the word God is used in these pages, you may substitute the thought good orderly direction or flow. What we are talking about is a creative energy. . . . There seems to be no need to name it unless that name is a useful shorthand for what you experience. Art by Vladimir Radunsky from Mark Twain's 'Advice to Little Girls.' That creative energy, Cameron argues, is part of our core nature. Rather than learning it, we simply need to unlearn all the techniques we’ve acquired for blocking it in the course of living our Serious Adult Lives. She writes: No matter... posted on Sep 3 2014 (25,435 reads)

we divide our world up into pieces because we are afraid to explore its web-like nature? Margaret Wheatley, author of Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, examines our ways of viewing the world and how to thrive in a world of interconnectedness. The dense and tangled web of life—the interconnected nature of reality—reveals itself daily. Since September 11, think of how much you’ve learned of people, cultures and nations that previously you knew little about. We’ve been learning how the lives of those far away affect our own. We’re beginning to realize that in order to live peacefully together on this planet, we ne... posted on Aug 31 2014 (22,143 reads)

in silence for a year? Even if it were possible to live in silence, why would anyone want to do it? Being silent was not difficult for me. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that once I went into the silence, I was not interested, most of the time, in speaking. Also, when no one is speaking, it is much easier to be quiet than if some people are speaking and others are not. In our monastery, everyone lived under the rule of silence. As for why we wanted to be silent, that relates to the nature of monastic life itself, which is to be apart from the world and to have an opportunity for reflection and meditation, activities that are “inner” and require quiet. It would be abs... posted on Nov 18 2014 (38,619 reads)

looked at the medicine man, and he said, "You didn't go to medical school, did you?" The shaman said, "No, I did not." He said, "Well, then what can you know about healing?" The shaman looked at him and he said, "You know what? If you have an infection, go to a doctor. But many human afflictions are diseases of the heart, the mind and the spirit. Western medicine can't touch those. I cure them." (Applause) But all is not rosy in learning from nature about new medicines. This is a viper from Brazil, the venom of which was studied at the Universidade de São Paulo here. It was later developed into ACE inhibitors. This is a frontline tr... posted on Jan 24 2015 (34,988 reads)

seed will naturally begin to develop. The seed of Buddha Nature is the same. It will lie dormant until the right conditions come together. But once we discover this potential within us, we can water our seed with loving kindness and prepare its bed with mindfulness. When we do so, the growth of the seed of awakening will be effortless and natural." —Acharya Judy Lief from "A Little Seed of Awakening" Photo by: Ana Castilho "Because of the nature of our constitution, we have been gifted with a diversity of seeds and nutrients to ensure our survival. These gifts are not about reinforcing our human propensity to dominate; rather they are ... posted on Jan 29 2015 (40,786 reads)

at all,” said Kasl. Since her family is still in the process of moving out of their old home, she and her kids often stop by to finish up the cleaning and prepare it for sale. She says her kids don’t even want to go back into their old house. “They want to get back home to the tiny house as quick as they can.” There’s been no mention of the toys that were lost in the tiny transition or the bedrooms that no longer exist. And, perhaps because of the adventurous nature of their new home, her kids are more eager than ever to help with chores like cleaning, cooking, and gathering firewood. The Kasl kids rearranged their room to make space for a p... posted on Feb 12 2015 (26,008 reads)

The simple idea that all streets should offer safe, convenient, and comfortable travel for everyone—those on foot, on bike, on transit, in wheelchairs, young, old or disabled. Twenty-seven states and 625 local communities across the U.S. have adopted Complete Streets policies in some form. The Healing Properties of Nature and the Outdoors: Not all exercise offers the same health benefits, according to a growing body of research showing that outdoor physical activity, especially in nature, boosts our health, improves our concentration, and may speed up our natural healing process. A walk in the park is not only more interesting than a workout at the gym, but it may also be healt... posted on Feb 10 2015 (26,184 reads)

century. The good news is that rescuing silence can come much more easily than tackling these other problems. A single law would signal a huge and immediate improvement. That law would prohibit all aircraft from flying over our most pristine national parks. Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything. It lives here, profoundly, at One Square Inch in the Hoh Rain Forest. It is the presence of time, undisturbed. It can be felt within the chest. Silence nurtures our nature, our human nature, and lets us know who we are. Left with a more receptive mind and a more attuned ear, we become better listeners not only to nature but to each other. Silence can be carried l... posted on Feb 16 2015 (22,138 reads)

that can slash prices by paying rock-bottom wages. Production workers find themselves unwilling participants in a race to the bottom for the lowest wage. Employers pick up and relocate if wages and safety standards are lower somewhere else or if workers begin organizing a union. The nonhuman life of the planet suffers, too, from the colossal ecological burden of producing all our stuff. Human activity is causing species to go extinct at 1,000 times the rate that would otherwise occur in nature, according to a recent study published in Science. Industrial chemicals turn up in the bodies of sea mammals in the Arctic—and in our own bodies. A giant patch of plastic garbage circulat... posted on Mar 13 2015 (34,573 reads)

inspire how we might live. We can learn a new solar economy from plants, medicines from mycelia, and architecture from the ants. By learning from other species, we might even learn humility. Colonization, we know, attempts to replace indigenous cultures with the culture of the settler. One of its tools is linguistic imperialism, or the overwriting of language and names. Among the many examples of linguistic imperialism, perhaps none is more pernicious than the replacement of the language of nature as subject with the language of nature as object. We can see the consequences all around us as we enter an age of extinction precipitated by how we think and how we live. Let me make here a ... posted on Jun 6 2015 (18,133 reads)

and a perspective and a passion. When my son dies, it’s my son who dies. I don’t frame my son’s death in your narrative; I frame my son’s death in my narrative. You frame my son’s death in your narrative. YES: You talk about the South African Truth and Reconciliation process both revealing “an extraordinary capacity for evil” and “a marvelous magnanimity” on the part of victims. What has that insight led you to believe about human nature? Desmond Tutu: That we are extraordinary beings! All of us have the capacity for the greatest possible evil. All of us! None of us can predict that under certain circumstances we would not b... posted on Jun 21 2015 (13,545 reads)

like sustainable development and wellbeing. Gross Domestic “Problem”: why GDP doesn’t add up GDP is not a measure of “all” economic activities. Because of its design, it only counts what is formally transacted in the market, which means that other economic activities occurring in the “informal” economy or within households as well as a variety of services made available free of charge, from volunteering to the ecosystem services provided by nature that allow our economies to function, are not counted as part of economic growth (Fioramonti 2013, p. 6f.). This generates evident paradoxes. Take the case of a country in which natural resourc... posted on Aug 22 2015 (13,495 reads)

We wanted those cows; we didn't want the bison. That's what the Indians ate. RW: It’s one example of what some people could call our hubris—that we can make it work the way we want it to. What you've just described suggests how sadly mistaken we can be. Peter: I call that the myth of progress. We pride ourselves on not being superstitious anymore, right? Because we've got science and technology; we've come out of the Dark Ages and we're mastering nature; we're making a better life for ourselves. It's what we tell ourselves. But we’ve replaced what we thought of as superstition with a new superstition, which is the myth of progres... posted on Oct 11 2020 (18,256 reads)