Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

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 virus. What is denial? It’s a gap between mind and body—believing reality is different than it is. And we may be the only animals capable of it. So becoming more truthful is akin to becoming more like animals. Carl Jung called it “living your animal.” To him it meant becoming humble so that we can treat others fairly. We compare Jung’s view of animal morality with those of some animal behavior scientists. We compare it also with spiritual traditions, such as yoga and Zen, that try to help people bring body and mind into unity. And we touch on the practice of spirit journeys (or shamanic journeys) and how similar the practice is to what Jung called active imagination. When it comes to COVID, we need a lot more of "living our animal"—more single-minded purpose, more dedication to protecting our young, and more acting from a mind and body joined as one.

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, as Kim suggests, living close to “what we truly burn for.” Can we learn to say yes to our genuine needs and our most deeply held values—and only to those? What might it look like to choose “what we truly burn for” when it comes to climate? From Kim we learn three choices that will reduce emissions the fastest: going plane free, car free, and meat free. So when I applied my deepest values and needs to these three climate actions, what did I discover? For one thing, that contemplating changes can be scary! But as Kim writes, we don’t have to be perfect, we just have to be brave. So here’s to being brave together and cutting our own household emissions as fast as we can. And maybe, just maybe, life gets easier when we do.

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 law code written down that survives today, the Code of Ur-Nammu in 2100 BCE, and how it protected status, wealth, and the power of men over women. Through routes both direct and indirect, it became the “cradle” of modern law. So those who are trying to keep white men at the apex of power are inspired by a vision of society going back, not just fifty years, but five thousand.

We explore how to make social inequality strange—how to challenge lingering ideas in our own minds that wealth should bring status, that owners get to decide, and that authority "naturally" looks white or male.

A different social order IS possible, and we look to the Aymara again for an example of a society that rejects hierarchies. To the Aymara, hierarchy is the opposite of affection. They choose affection because they say it's the only way that people can thrive and the Earth can regenerate.

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 configuration of things in life that may be harder for them and things that may be easier. I muse on how being autistic (without knowing it) led me early in life toward meditation and toward connecting with nature, and how it laid the foundation for working today in nature spirituality. We talk about some common misconceptions of autism, and I reflect on my work life as an autistic person. We also review what slime mold taught ecologists about loners and outliers. Finally, we celebrate the radiance of an Earth that, in Darwin’s elegant words, has brought forth “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” 

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 everywhere!

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-giving power. How do we tell which developments are truly life-giving? We use some examples cited in the recent IPCC 2022 report on climate change to discern things that are truly new from things that grow out of old or destructive mindsets. Black poet Audre Lorde provides inspiration with her sentence: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And because the image of looking toward the dawn arose during a spirit journey, we talk a little about how a spirit journey works and how to integrate the images that arise during a spirit journey into everyday life.

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 the mind first. We show how serving the mind leads to personal and cultural imbalance because the mind allows only a narrow view, while the heart sees a more spacious and compassionate picture. So it is crucial, especially at this moment in time, to place the mind in service to the heart. Is it possible for people, individually and collectively, to live from the heart? Yes! We listen to the words of Indigenous teachers from both Africa and Alaska who talk about how they learned to live from the heart and how following the heart leads to wiser perception and more ethical living.

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 that people still repeat today, even though most of White’s evidence has been refuted. We look especially at how centuries of Jewish teachers interpreted Genesis—as a cautionary tale about what happens when humans fail to take moral responsibility. If two religious traditions can read the same creation story in opposite ways, what does that say about how creation stories actually work? And where, again, does that urge to conquer nature come from? Notes and links following the transcript.

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-human kin. The Yurok man said it all starts with “seeing each leaf as a separate thing.”  So how do we do that? Let's find out!

“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 fungal threads link the trees and plants of a forest so they can communicate and share nutrients. Today we explore the worldview of reality as a connected place—how metaphorical threads of connection link all things; how these threads, like mycelium, are invisible to our physical eyes; and how this hidden network provides a good metaphor for Spirit. If the world is an entwined place, then all our current crises, from climate change to a pandemic, find their origins in forgetting connection, forgetting relationship. And the remedy for these ills is engaging in practices that soften the heart and remind us that we are connected so we can act with respect and care toward all beings.