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.

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.

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.

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.