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 (6,885 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 (5,147 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 (8,343 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 (5,662 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 (7,086 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 (5,836 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 (5,280 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 (4,695 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 (2,710 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 (11,124 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 (15,075 reads)

we grow accustomed to life under lockdown, we are discovering the richness that can emerge from the quiet, contemplative nature of solitude. Hoping to tap into the inner wisdom of our collective attempt to find light amidst darkness, writer Emily Rose Barr asked one simple question of individuals across the globe: What are you doing that's bringing a little extra joy, light, or laughter to your days? As the answers poured in, she realized that perhaps the paradoxes of our time -- hope and fear, connection and isolation, anger and compassion -- are not meant to be reconciled, but simply to be lived. Read more to learn how the discomfort of uncertainty invites us to take care ... posted on Apr 29 2020 (8,083 reads)

emotion is a nonentity” and Tolstoy’s insistence that “emotional infectiousness” is what separates good art from the bad, Murdoch considers the central animating force of art: Literature could be called a disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. (Of course there are other such techniques.) I would include the arousing of emotion in the definition of art, although not every occasion of experiencing art is an emotional occasion. The sensuous nature of art is involved here, the fact that it is concerned with visual and auditory sensations and bodily sensations. If nothing sensuous is present no art is present. This fact alone makes it quit... posted on Jul 16 2020 (5,958 reads)

that remains: what exactly is time? To unpack this question, we have to look at the basic properties of space and time. In the dimension of space, you can move forwards and backwards; commuters experience this everyday. But time is different, it has a direction, you always move forward, never in reverse. So why is the dimension of time irreversible? This is one of the major unsolved problems in physics. To explain why time itself is irreversible, we need to find processes in nature that are also irreversible. One of the few such concepts in physics (and life!) is that things tend to become less “tidy” as time passes. We describe this using a physical prop... posted on Apr 7 2021 (7,602 reads)

about who is in charge here? Ridiculous! The universe is expanding? Ridiculous! We feel it necessary to keep secrets? Ridiculous. Art from Eating the Sun: Small Musings on a Vast Universe by Ella Frances Sanders In fifty-one miniature essays, each accompanied by one of her playful and poignant ink-and-watercolor drawings, Sanders goes on to explore a pleasingly wide array of scientific mysteries and facts — evolution, chaos theory, clouds, the color blue, the nature of light, the wondrousness of octopuses, the measurement of time, Richard Feynman’s famous cataclysm sentence, the clockwork mesmerism of planetary motion, our microbiome, ... posted on Nov 28 2020 (5,466 reads)

plants. In the Abrahamic version (based on earlier Sumerian tales), the Tower of Babel saga, the “something” that “happened” in the opening story is further elaborated. The first common tongue was abolished by a (slightly insecure?) god. He feared that people would use it to cooperate in building a tower that would eventually challenge his heavenly reign. Language has always been connected to the primal question of what it means to be human and our relationship with nature, the invisible and unknown, the “Great Mystery.” The word in its primordial force runs through us like a current: what we say still comes alive, as in Nalungiaq’s story, or... posted on Dec 5 2020 (7,723 reads)

me, and I really value this so much, that we’re spiritual beings having a human experience. We didn’t come here to talk about the problems, identify them and x them. What if we came here to shine a light on the things that are working? To shine a light on the wellbeing? Because if you go back to energy and how energy and matter works, we know that what you focus on expands. All of these Lores that we live by spiritually and culturally, they’re also the Lores that are just in nature. It’s that very beginning of our conversation. The grit is so important in making that pearl in the oyster. It sounds na and corny but it is the darkest before dawn every single day. So t... posted on Dec 19 2020 (4,408 reads)

arising from how our particular atmosphere, with its particular chemistry, absorbs and reflects light. Everything we behold — a ball, a bird, a planet — is the color we perceive it to be because of its insentient stubbornness toward the spectrum, because these are the wavelengths of light it refuses to absorb and instead reflects back. In the living world beneath our red-ravenous atmosphere, blue is the rarest color: There is no naturally occurring true blue pigment in nature. In consequence, only a slender portion of plants bloom in blue and an even more negligible number of animals are bedecked with it, all having to perform various tricks with chemistry and the p... posted on Jan 27 2021 (8,512 reads)

tidal changes, and their calendar follows a ’15 day cycle’ – a 𝘔𝘶𝘭𝘵𝘵𝘢𝘦 system – tide time – stretching between a neap tide (𝘫𝘰𝘨𝘦𝘶𝘮) and spring tide (𝘴𝘢𝘳𝘪). They live and plan in spans and shoreline-rhythms of 6 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours and 50 minutes. Their thought, language and temporality are profoundly littoral. The pre-eminent British nature-writer Robert Macfarlane calls language a ‘geological force’. And in corollary to this, land and its influence can be said to birth language in its image. It continually parturates ... posted on Mar 7 2021 (5,980 reads)

1929 meditation on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.” Half a century before her, Leo Tolstoy — who befriended a Buddhist monk late in life and became deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy — echoed these ancient truths as he contemplated the paradoxical nature of love: “Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only.” That in love and in life, freedom from fear — like all species of freedom — is only possible w... posted on Apr 4 2021 (7,675 reads)