Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

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 the world in distress with both flooding and drought. We revisit the words of legal scholar Kelsey Leonard of the Shinnecock Nation: We need to protect water “in the way you would protect your grandmother, your mother, your sister, your aunties.” Water is our earliest beloved, and water is life. Some meditations for increasing our love for water as well as close-to-home ideas for working for the well-being of rivers, creeks, and oceans.

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 pattern of authoritarianism going back in Western history to the Roman Empire. Rome's intolerance for religious differences led to the Christian doctrine of original sin, which taught people they needed help to be good. Then subservience was drilled in to people through a thousand years of feudalism. We also look at my Mennonite ancestors—on both the giving and receiving ends of social control. For most of these two thousand years in Europe, people believed—and treated others as if—social cohesion depended on similarity. The upshot? Tolerance is a recent achievement in Western history. So it’s no wonder that a third of white people across Western democracies remain uncomfortable with diversity. The good news—overcoming discomfort with differences is possible, and nature provides tremendous inspiration for it. Data, studies, links to further reading available with the transcript at priscillastuckey.com/nature-spirit/.

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 land and people in traditional Hawaiian society; and Oren Lyons on the Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, of North America. Among each people, caring for land and people is how to be a human being—how to live peaceably with others and how to survive in a sometimes challenging natural world. We also look, for contrast, at how caring for land and people, while handed down in Celtic tradition, got lost in European history and did not form the foundation of law in the young United States. So how to bring love and care back into public life? Lots of questions and lots of ideas on where to go from here!

 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 serve love, not serve the ego. We talk about the kinds of impressions that can arise during a journey—images, sounds, feelings, hunches—and how to learn from them after the journey ends. We also talk about how to discern which messages are coming authentically from Spirit. And of course we address the question everyone asks, especially when they're just beginning this practice: “How do I know I’m not just making stuff up?”

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 social hierarchy, and I glimpsed a world where “normal” looks more like equality. What can an ancient story tell us about choosing equality? About writing laws to promote life on Earth more than to protect property?

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 confused! He mashed up “how animals eat” with “how humans settle disputes,” setting up a mistaken idea of the predator-prey relationship that carries down to our day—we still talk of dogs and cats as “enemies.” In fact, we have a lot to learn from animals and their appetites: (1) by identifying what they’re truly hungry for, they contribute their niche to the ecocommunity; (2) when they are full they stop eating, unlike capitalism, which goads people into reaching past “enough” to “more than enough” (profit); and (3) they take delight in the hunt—a model for a world beyond capitalism, where humans do not work for others’ profit but instead engage in work that satisfies our souls as well as bodies. We need, in other words, to become more like hungry beasts.

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 ground down and weary. And we find sweetness in the natural world, where Life keeps regenerating and experimenting and oozing more life. Especially during environmental crisis, it is crucial not to give in to despair—it will sap our will for change—but to keep seeking and finding consolation in nature. Some ideas for connecting with the animal and plant relatives nearby, even in winter, and for keeping the soul fed with wonder, awe, and reverence.

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 it was to her time, when a few wealthy families controlled most of the riches of the Roman Empire—and how relevant it is today in similar times. The story of the baby in a manger is a story of poor people in desperate circumstances taking shelter among the lowliest—the animals. In light of Mary’s “Magnificat,” the Christmas story says that true peace is found in true justice—in following the way of sharing and equality. May the blessings of justice become real in our time.

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 are supreme. The truth is shocking and much more humble—that human beings participate in the universal feast, and we too can be prey. The “desperate delusion” of dying COVID patients includes yet another kind of supremacy: the idea of whiteness. We draw on psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl’s 2019 book DYING OF WHITENESS to understand how the fear of losing white status leads people to support policies that sabotage their own health. Metzl calls it “the false promise of supremacy,” because supremacy is maladaptive. Surviving requires being humble enough to see our shared vulnerability and to respond appropriately. So do only the strong survive? Maybe it's the humble who survive, because they are living with eyes wide open.

“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 place my health absolutely first. At this moment we need to reorganize our cultural priorities to place the health of the Earth absolutely first. It will mean transforming the law—and one way to do this is to place the rights of nature into law.