Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

“Everything is alive, and we are all relatives.” Native Hawaiian philosopher Manulani Aluli Meyer says this is what Indigenous peoples around the world all know, though each understands it in their own way. In today’s episode we explore “aloha ‘āina,” the Native Hawaiian tradition of “loving land”—where we both love and care for the land and the land loves us back. When everything is alive and we’...

When people are suffering and the world is burning, can we still enjoy nature? Are we allowed to appreciate beauty? A few lines from Rita Dove’s poem “Transit” send us into exploring the life and music of Alice Herz-Sommer, who played piano concerts in the concentration camp where she was imprisoned and who credited music with saving her life. Tough times are exactly when we need nature, and beaut...

A challenging time can wear on the soul, so now is a good time to slow down and seek out sources of inspiration. This week we dip into an essay by Barry Lopez that centers on the theme of loving more, and we explore how connecting with nature opens the flow of love in the heart. A few suggestions for connecting with nature even from home: meditating on the life force in a tree; making showertime a...

Join me for a trip across our favorite reef, connecting with bright corals and colorful fish. That so much dazzling life—invisible from shore—becomes visible as soon as we wade in and turn our faces into the water provides a helpful way of thinking about the world of spirit, or the parts of reality that we can’t measure with our senses. How slicing reality into visible and invisible parts, as the...

Watch how a seed pops into life—always a miracle! If we want to grow a healthy tree, we try to remove all obstacles to the life force. But if human beings lack resources for growing, people often take a different view—that people are to blame for their own poverty. It’s a jaundiced view of human nature that sees us as different from all other beings. Where did this negative view arise? We make a b...

In a time of cruelty and lies, when the heart can so easily turn toward outrage or despair, what can we learn from John Lewis and what he called “the graceful heart”? How did he and the other civil rights workers find the strength to “hold no malice” toward those who inflicted harm? This week we dig deeper into nonviolence, beyond its connotations of absence of violence. We follow the civil rights...

On a path of nature spirituality, one practice—one way of opening the heart—is to connect with a Spirit Helper through shamanic-style journeys. How I met my Helper in the predawn darkness of a winter morning and what the process of going on a journey is like for someone who is unfamiliar with it. Also some words about how walking with a Spirit Helper can change a person’s life, and what effects th...

Why is opening the heart so important? Because a heart that can flow freely is better aligned with reality—more in harmony with the unpredictability found in nature itself. In the poetry of an ancient text, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.” If the flows of life are inherently unpredictable, then living in harmony...

A long-ago hike in Pinnacles National Park and arriving at its panoramic view at the top offers clues about what it's like to open the heart. But in a society that teaches us to follow the mind—thinking and planning and goal setting—what does it look like to follow the heart? Unangan teacher Ilarion Merculieff's experience of discovering and practicing "awareness without thinking&qu...

Why are so many white people refusing to wear masks? It’s a kind of denial rooted in terror—of vulnerability and illness and all of nature’s uncertainties. How white people use race to insulate ourselves from the great democracy of dying—the bedrock equality of the natural world. How a pandemic is offering people many opportunities for reconciling with reality, beginning with telling a better, tru...

A birch tree from my childhood visits me in spirit many years later and reveals something so profound about the world that it changes my life forever. How nature speaks in the stillness of the heart, and how we can learn to be quiet enough to hear. Get full access to Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world at priscillastuckey.substack.com/subscribe

A simple question from Chickasaw writer and poet Linda Hogan stays with me for years: Why do I talk about Earth beings as friends rather than family members? And what difference would it make to claim the others of the world as kin? Her question inspires reflections on the story of hierarchy and control inherited from my European ancestors, and what it might take for Western society to move toward...

A walk on a June afternoon leads to meeting a dragonfly and making a friend. How dragonflies see, how they hunt—more efficiently than lions!—and how they can recognize humans.  Get full access to Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world at priscillastuckey.substack.com/subscribe

On this inaugural episode of the Nature-Spirit podcast, as Black Lives Matter protests grow throughout the world, some thoughts from philosopher bell hooks and her sharecropper grandfather, Daddy Jerry, on how nature has the power to reveal white claims to power and supremacy as lies. The reality is that we all die; this is “the great democratic gift the earth offers us,” says bell hooks. And in l...