A path of listening, learned first in the yoga class of a beloved teacher in Boulder. For five years I attended her class, five years of book writing and coming to terms with my older brother's death. Wendy taught us how to move by listening—listening first to the body and breath, which is listening to the Earth. Here is a story of listening in Wen…

Why is there a price on land? When land is the living source of all our food—and of us—why do we think we can own it? We take a look at how private landownership got put into law in England in the 1600s to justify the landlords’ seizing of common lands. And how we might imagine our way to a different system. With inspiration for our imaginations fr…

On rivers, the secret river, and what one very early project from 1400 BCE to drain a lake can tell us about both. Plus, what losing spiritual connection to the irrepressible flow of life looks like: reaching for power and control over ourselves and others. How can we stay open to the life-giving currents, even those we don't understand? Get full a…

Looking up and opening the heart at the Solstice. We delve into the stories told by people through the ages about Venus and Orion and share some cool facts about red giants and blue giants. In a season for cultivating peace and goodwill, we turn to the stars to evoke wonder and awe and to cleanse the heart for a new year. Get full access to Nature …

In a recent university talk Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, reflected on how Indigenous understandings of what she called our “shared responsibility for Mother Earth” can help us heal our relationship with the land. “What does the Earth ask of us?” she asked. She suggested that Indigenous principles for relating with land might …

After my first book came out I hit a wall, feeling churned up inside. What was going on? When I turned inward to find out, I discovered company. I marched right over the sharp line that the Western world draws between matter and spirit and began to talk in spirit with an animal helper: a bear. Some thoughts on the limits that the matter-spirit spli…

Here on Maui we’re in crisis since the fire that destroyed Lahaina two weeks ago. But some of the same patterns of using and abusing water that contributed to this crisis are all too familiar from a history of colonizing people and land—including the land where I grew up in Ohio—that extends all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. Today we look at…

Getting tripped up in the early stages of writing my next book leads to some reflections on the process of writing the first two. More about how life led me to listening from the heart instead of following thoughtful plans and chapter outlines. On being open to the moment—in writing and life. Get full access to Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a livin…

Opening the gift of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s question: Why is the world so beautiful? How awe and wonder make us better people, as shown by the findings of psychology researchers into the science of happiness. But how can we feel awe at a time like this, when the Earth is wounded and so much life is endangered? An example from Maui’s degraded dryland …

How do we learn to trust the knowing that arises without words? Some thoughts on growing more sensitive to the messages we pick up through our many human senses. How to pay attention to our inner knowing, with ideas for simple ten-minute quiet times we can set aside each day to listen to the subtle whispers of the heart. But following the heart can…

We have everything within us to make good decisions and follow a good path, and we can do this even when we’re young. It’s not what I learned among my own people, but it’s what Abraham Maslow learned among the Blackfoot early in his career. Today we listen to Indigenous voices, who talk about knowing from within, or “sovereignty of mind.” And we lo…

Putting the pieces together with a very late in life diagnosis, including growing out of self-doubt; masking reframed as empathy; living with the challenges and gifts of an autistic mind; and how being autistic can enhance a person’s life. All this and more from an interview that autistic art therapist Jackie Schuld did with me for her series on la…

Florida’s authoritarian laws are leading schools to empty their library shelves of possibly offending books. We dip into Karen Stenner’s definition of authoritarianism—being uncomfortable with differences—and find a tendency toward it stretching all the way back, in Western history, to the Roman Empire. But authoritarianism is fundamentally at odds…

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 a…

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…

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 …

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 …

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 mak…

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 horizo…

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 a…

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…

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 …

“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 ec…

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 ca…

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 c…

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 …

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 hear…

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 f…

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 shattere…

“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…

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 ad…

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 f…

“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 la…

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. Toug…

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: meditatin…

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…

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 being…

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 …

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 Help…

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 ar…

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 practi…

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 …

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. Get full access to Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world at priscillastuckey.substack.com/subs…

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 wha…

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. Get full access to Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world at priscillastuckey.substack.com/subscribeBy Priscilla Stuckey

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 gi…