Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

Looking up and opening the heart at the Solstice. We delve into the stories told by people through the ages about Venus and Orion and share some cool facts about red giants and blue giants. In a season for cultivating peace and goodwill, we turn to the stars to evoke wonder and awe and to cleanse the heart for a new year. 

In a recent university talk Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, reflected on how Indigenous understandings of what she called our “shared responsibility for Mother Earth” can help us heal our relationship with the land. “What does the Earth ask of us?” she asked. She suggested that Indigenous principles for relating with land might help guide Western science so that all can thrive. We reflect on three of these principles—responsibility, respect, and reciprocity—and we ask what might be possible if they informed Western knowing. And we end with Robin’s ideas about how to give back to the Earth.

After my first book came out I hit a wall, feeling churned up inside. What was going on? I turned inward to find out, crossing right over the sharp line that the Western world draws between matter and spirit. I began to talk in spirit with an animal helper: a bear. Some thoughts on the limits that the matter-spirit split imposes on Western thinking, and how most Indigenous traditions regard reality as one unified whole, matter and spirit flowing together through every being and part of Earth. How talking with a bear in spirit nudged me toward larger definitions of myself and of the world. With assists today from Rumi and Vine Deloria Jr.

Here on Maui we’re in crisis since the fire that destroyed Lahaina two weeks ago. But some of the same patterns of using and abusing water that contributed to this crisis are all too familiar from a history of colonizing people and land—including the land where I grew up in Ohio—that extends all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. Today we look at a few of those historical connections and ask: When is diverting water harmful? What does it look like to care for land, or as we say here, mālama ʻāina?

Getting tripped up in the early stages of writing my next book leads to some reflections on the process of writing the first two. More about how life led me to listening from the heart instead of following thoughtful plans and chapter outlines. On being open to the moment—in writing and life.

Opening the gift of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s question: Why is the world so beautiful? How awe and wonder make us better people, as shown by the findings of psychology researchers into the science of happiness. But how can we feel awe at a time like this, when the Earth is wounded and so much life is endangered? An example from Maui’s degraded dryland forests, and how people are coming together to help the forests flourish again.

How do we learn to trust the knowing that arises without words? Some thoughts on growing more sensitive to the messages we pick up through our many human senses. How to pay attention to our inner knowing, with ideas for simple ten-minute quiet times we can set aside each day to listen to the subtle whispers of the heart. But following the heart can be risky, so is it really worth it? Exploring the connection between how we treat the nature inside us—the heart-pulls—and how we treat the natural world. How respecting our inner knowing leads to cultivating more peaceful relations—with ourselves, with others, and with our more-than-human friends and kin on Earth.

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 defining knowledge instead as what is handed down from external authorities—an age-old habit that feeds the rise of authoritarianism today. What does it take to cultivate that quiet place inside, the place of discernment in the heart? How do we find sovereignty of mind? A moment from my own life when I took a step toward reuniting with my own heart.

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.

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 said, evolution brings forth “endless forms most beautiful.” Just as in the rest of nature, human societies thrive not by suppressing differences but by welcoming them.