and billions of bacterial cells in just one teaspoon of soil. So, think about that: one teaspoon of soil in your hand contains as many bacterial cells as there are humans over the entire globe. Of course, the human brain is a very centralized structure. In the forest, the intelligence, thought processes, memories, and decision-making are a lot more diffuse throughout the entire network, though they do include animal brains.  Pavi: You talk about the contradictory creative duality in nature. Are we atoms or networks? We are neither and both, and it's not just a question of metaphor but the fundamental nature of life. One of the most provocative realities that the book surfaces... posted on Mar 22 2019 (5,076 reads)

(often lurking in their dreams) of being scared stiff? To these stories we can add our contemporary myth of the “dis-ease” that psychiatry has named posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Indeed, when compared with historical mythologies, modern science has certain advantages and disadvantages in accurately comprehending the universal human experience of terror, horror, injury and loss. The indigenous peoples throughout South America and Mesoamerica have long understood both the nature of fear and the essence of trauma. What’s more, they seemed to know how to transform it through their shamanic healing rituals. After colonization by the Spanish and Portuguese, the indig... posted on Feb 20 2019 (10,721 reads)

Webb, an English writer of the early 20th century was an acute observer of nature and its multi-dimensional splendor. Diagnosed with Graves’ disease at the age of 20, Webb soon discovered that nature played a powerful role in her periods of recovery. The Spring of Joy compiles a series of essays on nature, penned by Webb with the aim of bringing comfort to ‘the weary and wounded in the battle of life.’ They are a testament to Webb's capacity to bear witness to the record of nature and to draw nourishment from it in a way that continues to benefit readers far beyond her lifetime. The following is an excerpt from The Spring of Joy: A Little Book of Hea... posted on Apr 10 2019 (6,126 reads)

the skill in its construction. The entire essay, about 1,600 words in length, can be read HERE. Orwell’s Praise of the Neglected Eyes akin to chrysoberyl. From wikimedia commons, by Joxerra aihartza. Orwell begins the essay by selecting the common toad as his personal herald of spring’s arrival. The prose in the introduction is exquisite, gains power when read aloud. I found myself mouthing each line as David Attenborough would narrate the script of a nature documentary: “At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful,... posted on May 29 2019 (5,810 reads)

of the Holy Dollar is the church of consumerism. That really swallows people's lives. Their souls are sicked up in this form of consumerism. But we are greater than the product of our whole. We also have our spirit, we have our soul and our mind. The Church of the Holy Dollar does not cater to the spirit and to the mind and to really the arenas of compassion that humankind is greatly endowed with. Going back to the idea of the seanchai with the spirit, the spiritual world and all of nature. All of nature has a form of spirit, which is something that was understood in the olden times. Today scientifically we understand it and the word is called DNA. The living world has got the do... posted on Sep 12 2019 (6,984 reads)

and biodiversity is not only driving animals to extinction but directly causing animal viruses to spread to humans. In response our leaders are using the images of conflict: “We are at war with Covid 19,” we keep hearing; it is an “invisible enemy” we need to “vanquish.” But although this virus is disrupting our lives, causing sickness, death, and economic breakdown, it is itself a completely natural phenomenon, a living thing reproducing itself in the way nature intended. Are these images of conflict and conquest appropriate or even helpful? Do they help us to understand and to respond, to bring our world back into balance?  One of Carl Jung&rs... posted on Aug 9 2020 (15,710 reads)

online in The Huffington Post, 2011 Prayer is the simplest and most natural way to communicate with the Divine. Prayer is the heart speaking. There are the prescribed prayers, the rituals of inner communion. But there are also our personal prayers, our way of being with the Divine, with the sacred that is our deepest nature and that of the world around us. In whatever way we are drawn to pray, there is a pressing need at this time to include the earth in our prayers. We are living in a time of ecological devastation, in which our materialistic culture has had a catastrophic effect on the ecosystem. Our rivers are toxic, the rainforests slashed and burned, vast tracts ... posted on Nov 20 2020 (8,222 reads)

leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” the young Walt Whitman sang in one of the finest poems from his Song of Myself — the aria of a self that seemed to him then, as it always seems to the young, infinite and invincible. But when a paralytic stroke felled him decades later, unpeeling his creaturely limits and his temporality, he leaned on the selfsame reverence of nature as he considered what makes life worth living: After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains;... posted on Nov 30 2020 (5,732 reads)

contemporary seekers to learn that the things we nowadays identify with the feeling life—passion, drama, intensity, compelling emotion—are qualities that in the ancient anatomical treatises were associated not with the heart but with the liver! They are signs of agitation and turbidity (an excess of bile!) rather than authentic feelingness. In fact, they are traditionally seen as the roadblocks to the authentic feeling life, the saboteurs that steal its energy and distort its true nature. And so before we can even begin to unlock the wisdom of these ancient texts, we need to gently set aside our contemporary fascination with emotivity as the royal road to spiritual authentic... posted on Apr 10 2021 (9,083 reads)

there an underlying spiritual dimension behind the myriad forms of Qigong that by its very nature, invites us to simply and directly access deeper levels of being, pure awareness and the experience of Presence in daily life? If this is the original intent of Qigong, in what way can this ancient art be practiced as a Portal to Presence? These questions and the perspective that informs them stem directly from many years of my personal and professional experience as a psychologist, student and teacher of Qigong and Tai Chi Chuan. My own journey through the complex and often confusing landscape of these disciplines and practices has led me to some of the insights and ideas I would like to ... posted on Nov 9 2021 (4,801 reads)

system that we’re looking at, any map that we might work with, we don’t want to promise the moon and suggest it answers every human question. Of course, it doesn’t, but it does answer certain questions very well. Again, I think that the Enneagram and this view of humanity has been around for a long time. It has legs. There are roots of this that go back to the roots of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some even before that.  So people have been looking at human nature a long time. I’ve almost never encountered a person that when they actually sat down and listened to these distinctions, didn’t recognize themselves or other people that they know. ... posted on Apr 7 2023 (6,573 reads)

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 (3,816 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 (2,350 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 (27,611 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 (11,134 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 (15,091 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 (11,116 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 (14,350 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 (37,125 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 (13,651 reads)