Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world

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" offers one example. How opening the heart is not about opening to feelings per se but rather about navigating in life by following a larger wisdom that arises when we listen from the heart.

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, truer story of nature—one that opens to illness and vulnerability and that helps us support and comfort one another through this time. 

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.

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 kinship with the rest of Earth instead.

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. 

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 light of nature's ultimate power, we are all utterly equal. In memory of Breonna Taylor, killed by police, who would have been 27 today.