Geography of the Heart: Prairie

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee,

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.”

― Emily Dickinson

"Keep your hands open, and all the sands of the desert can pass through them.

Close them, and all you can feel is a bit of grit."

~Taisen Deshimaru

"Freedom is the capacity to pause in the midst of stimuli from all directions, and in this pause to throw our weight toward this response rather than that one. … In the pause we wonder, reflect, sense awe, and conceive of eternity."

~Rollo May

Geography of the Heart: Wilderness

Like the wilderness of the Jesus story, traversing the topography of mirage, we learn humility. Living with the extremes, we learn gratitude for the simplest and smallest things. Our wilderness holds wisdom that counters smooth talking seducers inviting us to resisting the illusions tempt us and every generation … the wilderness removes our illusion that we can endlessly turn stones into bread … that everything can be mined, melted, made into something that serves our species. The wilderness teaches us a new respect for limits … that thriving and surviving depend on our commitment to honor limits.

It also invites us to resisting the delusion that some god, some saving force is out there, up there somewhere in charge of it all ready to pick us up if we so much as stub our toe on a rock (lest we dash our foot against a stone) absolving us of any and all responsibility for ourselves and our world. Our wilderness teaches us responsibility … collective responsibility … for each other … a responsibility we have learned well in this pandemic … that we each must do what we can to keep another safe and healthy.

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And the wilderness invites us to unmasking the greatest lie of all: “all this will be yours, if you will just …” “you can have it all, as far as the eye can see, if only …” … the great lie of privilege … the great lie of exceptionalism … the great lie that some of us are exempt from hardship, sacrifice, and loss.

Geography of the Heart: Rockbeds

Once you leave the sidewalk up on the embankment, you soon discover that this isn’t a hospitable walk down the beach. This is a landscape with sizeable rocks making up the terrain. On our trek to the cliffs and the caves, it is slow and deliberate journey. One wrong move and you’ve twisted an ankle. One careless step and your foot has slipped off the slick uneven surfaces.

We think of a rock bed and we often think of rivers and the smooth rocks we find there. If you’ve ever crossed a creek or a small river, you know the difficulty and the danger is just as real.

Geography of the Heart: Shore

The shore is the landscape made by the deep communion of two distinctly different elements, a sometimes quiet and gentle communion, a sometimes wild and forceful communion, but always it is the landscape where each element is changed by the other.

One of the deep spiritual needs of our time is our genuine human need to meet one another on a shoreline, like water and land, two unique elements forged in the same stars, to meet one another with respect and curiosity

Geography of the Heart: Borders

This episode Chris New and Nancy Steeves reflect on the borders that meet us in natural landscapes, and those we create between each other and within ourselves.

Geography of the Heart: Forests

Chris New and Nancy Steeves share poetry and reflect on the community of forests, and what it looks like in our internal landscape.

Geography of the Heart: Waters

Geography of the Heart: Desert

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Geographies of the Heart: Thresholds

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In this episode Nancy explores her relationship with the fog growing up on the east coast of Canada through the story of Moses and his 40 days and nights in the Cloud of Unknowing.

Music: Robert Farmer - If we knew all the laws of nature