Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

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 in her culture learns but that is absent in Western cultures. Finally, Simon Pokagon of the Potawatomi, in an 1893 birch-bark booklet, wrote of the “love of power to kill alone” that led white people to decimate the birds and beings of North America during his lifetime. Love for the Earth; respect for the Earth; humility in the face of what we do not understand of the Earth’s intricate processes—these are not traditional values in white Western society, but they could be. We can choose different values.

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 dichotomy is visible in conservative communities, like the one I grew up in, but it runs throughout American society as well—for instance, in education (turning students out in identical batches) and mass marketing (same devices, same clothes). I’ll never forget when I glimpsed a different way—from Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé of West Africa, who said that “community exists to help individuals remember their purpose.” What a radical idea—that a group can enhance individuality and nourish the uniqueness of each member! We need this radical reimagining of community to pull together during a pandemic. And reimagining community will give us much more adequate tools for addressing the climate crisis and healing our broken relationship with the rest of nature.

“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’re all relatives, it’s not about what belongs to us but rather about where we belong. When we know we’re related to all who live nearby, the heart opens. We feel moved to care for this community so it can continue to nourish all who come after. Included: a thought experiment in opening your heart to the land-community where you live.

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 beauty in general, the most. Beauty, wherever you find it, is your lifeline—nourishment for the soul to strengthen you for the part that is yours to play in helping to create the world we will live in next.

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 ritual of appreciation for water; seeking out the billion-year-old company of rocks. Two-minute vacations of connecting with the more-than-human world throughout the day can refresh the soul and renew the mind and heart.

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 Western world does, is a choice not shared by some other cultures, especially Indigenous ones. How Indigenous ways of knowing, or traditional ecological knowledges, involve not just learning about other beings but learning from them by listening to them, as Robin Wall Kimmerer says.

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 brief sweep through the history of two ideas—original sin and the need for hard work—to show how they underlie current Republican refusals to provide pandemic relief for millions. I tell the story of the moment I glimpsed a different view of human nature from Sobonfu Somé of the Dagara people of West Africa. Now, during a pandemic, the way back to a healthy country is the same way we’d grow a healthy tree: just tender loving care. Providing all the food and support people need for life to flow through them freely again. Because people and trees are alike after all. 

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 pioneers as they practiced cultivating compassionate hearts, inspired by Gandhi and his idea of satyagraha, or “truth-force.” And we explore the power behind what John Lewis called “soul-force,” the power—of imagination, of persistence, of decisive action—that is unleashed by digging deep to find the wellsprings of love.

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 this practice has had in my own life. This episode could also be called "When Your Still Small Voice Has a Name." One of the few unscripted episodes of this podcast.

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 with life means practicing humility and love. It means moving with the freedom of the wind and working to align self and society with that freedom.