Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

We have everything within us to make good decisions and follow a good path, and we can do this even when we’re young. It’s not what I learned among my own people, but it’s what Abraham Maslow learned among the Blackfoot early in his career. Today we listen to Indigenous voices, who talk about knowing from within, or “sovereignty of mind.” And we look at the long habit in Western history of definin...

Putting the pieces together with a very late in life diagnosis, including growing out of self-doubt; masking reframed as empathy; living with the challenges and gifts of an autistic mind; and how being autistic can enhance a person’s life. All this and more from an interview that autistic art therapist Jackie Schuld did with me for her series on late-identified autistic people. Get full access to...

Florida’s authoritarian laws are leading schools to empty their library shelves of possibly offending books. We dip into Karen Stenner’s definition of authoritarianism—being uncomfortable with differences—and find a tendency toward it stretching all the way back, in Western history, to the Roman Empire. But authoritarianism is fundamentally at odds with democracy, and with nature. For, as Darwin s...

A  mother doe once tried to attack my dog to save her fawns. She was single-minded about protecting her young. Not a hair of separation between mind and body. Are human beings this committed? Today we look at our response to COVID, and how kids are getting so sick right now. We’ve left the children unprotected, and we've done it through minimizing and denying some of the serious risks of the...

With climate change scientist Kimberly Nicholas, and her book, Under the Sky We Make , as our guide, we talk today about how to cut carbon emissions at home. Ordinary Americans have more power than we think! Most Americans belong to the top 10 percent of income earners in the world—the ones burning most of the carbon so the ones who can stop most of it too. How do we stop burning fossil fuels? By,...

We take a cue from the Aymara people of the Andes, who experience the past as in front of us, not behind us. So today we face the past: first the recent past, in June, of devastating Supreme Court decisions and horrifying Congressional testimonies about the former president’s attempted coup. The events are related, and we dip into the deep past to understand their connections. We explore the first...

So last year, in my mid-sixties, I discovered that I’m autistic. But what took me by surprise wasn’t the diagnosis, it was the overwhelming feeling of relief. Why so much relief? We talk about that today—how I, like many people, held an extremely narrow view of autism; how autism consists not of one spectrum but of eight or ten different ones; and how each autistic person is their own colorful con...

Did I really get kissed by a fox? Yes, I really did—many times!—by Rudy the red fox, who lived at the wildlife rehab center where I was volunteering. Rudy's story opens chapter 4 of my first book, Kissed by a Fox: And Other Stories of Friendship in Nature , and this recording is taken from the audiobook version now in production. I can't wait to make the audiobook available to listeners...

The everyday miracle of the sun rising into our sky and powering our Earth can become energy for our hearts and minds too, in the meditative practice of looking toward the dawn. What does it mean to look toward the dawn? It means lifting our eyes, metaphorically, from what’s right at our feet and looking toward new developments coming on the horizon, then aligning our efforts with their life-givin...

How does a person start practicing nature spirituality? Today we look at what nature spirituality is and how to begin on this path—with two simple (but maybe not easy!) practices: opening the heart and widening the perception. We outline differences between the mind and the heart and talk about why opening the heart may feel vulnerable or strange at first—because modern Western public life places...

How did Western culture get so disconnected from nature? Some people point to the scientific revolution of early modern Europe, with its quest to control nature. But where did those early scientists get the idea to conquer nature? Today we look at the famous theory of historian Lynn White in 1967—that the creation stories of Genesis taught medieval Christianity to “subdue nature.” It’s a theory th...

Insights from a Yurok man, shared with an anthropologist, guide us in learning from the spirit of a tree. The Yurok man’s three-sentence teaching leads us through some wide-ranging reflections: on how spirits are different from ghosts; on how Yurok ways of knowing are similar to and different from Western ways of knowing; and what it takes to live responsibly in loving relations with our more-than...

“The world is an entwined place.” Dr. Teresa Ryan, of the Gitlan tribe of the Tsimshian Nation of the Pacific Northwest coast, offers a sentence both evocative and profound. It is the worldview of her people, and it also describes the fungal web of mycelium hidden under the forest floor. Dr. Ryan studies this mycorrhizal network alongside forest ecologist Dr. Suzanne Simard, who showed that the fu...

When a reporter shows up to interview me about the small land trust I just founded to preserve an urban creek, and he asks the tough “why” question, I hear myself say something I’ve never even thought of before: “Because what’s good for creeks is good for people too!” Twenty years later, the truth of it only grows more clear, with climate change causing mega-storms, and rivers and creeks around th...

Bright fish and corals dazzle the eye at our local reef—gifts of millions of years of diversity. Ecologists tell us that the most resilient ecocommunities are the most diverse, and diversity offers the same benefits to human society. Then why are so many white people afraid of diversity? Political psychologist Karen Stenner shows how this fear is central to  authoritarianism. Today we look at a pa...

Diana Beresford-Kroeger learned “a duty of care” for the natural world from her Celtic aunties and uncles, as she writes in To Speak for the Trees . Today we listen to three more Indigenous voices on how their communities build care for land and people into the fabric of life. These three are Dr. Mary Graham on how Aboriginal relationships begin in the land; Claire Hiwahiwa Steele on caring for la...

 Going on a spirit journey is a spiritual practice, like prayer or meditation, that can help a person navigate the challenges of life and find their place in the family of Earth. Today we ask, How is a spirit journey like other kinds of meditation? Or like other kinds of prayer? We give special attention to the process of preparing the mind and heart for a spirit journey by committing oneself to s...

An ancient story from the Roman Empire about inheritance sheds light on a problem we have inherited today—a system of law that protects property and shores up severe inequality. In the ancient story, a teacher sharply criticizes property and its role in maintaining inequality. Years ago, when I first read Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), I found a parallel critique of Western inequity and s...

How does an animal find food? By committing to their hunger—unlike humans, who often second-guess ourselves about our hungers. There’s an old idea in Western culture that animals are innately violent and possessed by their appetites while humans operate by rationality instead. We look at the ancient source of this idea: a poem by Greek poet-farmer Hesiod around 700 BCE. But oops—Hesiod was confuse...

A Sufi teacher long ago told me, “In life, there is always sweetness and bitterness. Every sweetness holds a bitterness, and every bitterness holds a sweetness. Find the sweetness in the bitterness.” Amid bitter events of the past year—and the current week—we dig for pockets of sweetness. We find sweetness in people’s determination to keep working for equality and justice, even when they feel grou...

The Christmas story of the baby born in a manger follows, in Luke, the revolutionary song composed by his young mother, Mary, while she was pregnant. She sang about God upending the social order by filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty—a vision of social justice that modern people have all but forgotten. We delve into her song, “The Magnificat,” showing how relevant i...

As the pandemic rages through the country, we ask: How can so many people be so convinced that the coronavirus is not real, even when they are dying of it? We challenge Western culture’s idea of survival—that it belongs to the strong. What if humanity's best survival skill is humility? When a crocodile attacked philosopher Val Plumwood, it shattered her “desperate delusion” that human beings...

“The law is in the ground,” said Doug Campbell, an Aboriginal elder. What did he mean? Western law, by contrast, starts with the idea of protecting property, which means that owning things becomes central to Western values and status. To imagine what a law of the ground looks like, I talk about what it took to recover from a postviral syndrome many years ago—a complete reordering of priorities to...

Three Indigenous voices remind listeners that cultural values are a choice. Xiye Bastida, of the Otomi-Toltec nation of Mexico, a leader in the youth climate movement, talks about being invited to love the Earth from the moment she was born. Nemonte Nenquimo, of the Waorani people of the Amazon rainforest, in her letter in the Guardian this week addresses the respect for the Earth that every child...

So I keep coming back to the anti-maskers, how their refusal to do this one easy thing sounds so angry, so rebellious. But might they have something to rebel against after all? Today we look at the concept of community that dominant American society inherited from Europe, in which community exists to mold people into similarity, making individual freedom a prize to be won through struggle. The dic...