We evolved on a planet filled with winged creatures. Soaring above us, buzzing around us, filling our air, inspiring us. They pull our eyes and minds upward. Their colors dazzle us. Our ears have been attuned and our souls elated by their songs. They are messengers of life, industry, mortality, mystery.
Taking wing: celebrating the Season of Creation Read More »
The way Earth tosses beauty about fascinates me. She doesn’t save splendor only for grand vistas and awe-inspiring mysteries. She spreads it at our feet the minute we leave the pavement we are so attached to. She invites us to pay deep attention, often to the smallest of treasures. She strews exquisite mariposa lilies in the unlikeliest of places.
A season of butterfly lilies Read More »
The ability to center ourselves among the beauties of this challenging, whirling world is one of the greatest gifts of Earth. This is not superficial beauty, as pleasant as that is, especially for flowers. This is the beauty lying deep in the heart of creation. Beauty as energy, generativity, as the endless cycle of life, death, rebirth. Beauty as the slow evolutionary dance of function and form. As healing, exaltation, and inspiration.
Be astonished. Tell about it. Read More »
It turns out that heaven is relatively easy to find, just into Canada north of the Montana border. At the end of a beautiful drive through the prairies of southwestern Alberta, you arrive at the gates. Not pearly, as one was led to expect. Instead, the rather odd Tudor/rustic combination favored by Parks Canada. This
I have located heaven Read More »
What we do with our land, however small an area, matters not just to us, but to the life of our planet. Landscaping isn’t a static, visual element but an active participant in the world we create. It can foster healthy soil and air or drench it with chemicals. Clean water as it filters through healthy soil or send it laden with toxic compounds to underground aquifers or nearby waters.
Most importantly, it can help save birds, butterflies, and other living beings from extinction.
Gardening as if life depends on it Read More »
North American history is beaver history. Before the European fur trade took hold in the 1600s, the entire continent was one mesh of wetlands after another thanks to at least 7.3 million years of landscape management by hundreds of millions of beavers.
Earth’s consummate water engineers, beavers had it all figured out. And we are now enlisting them to figure it out for us.
Leave it to beavers Read More »
The wildly abundant, even overwhelming rain that has been falling on California this season has turned my neighborhood into a world of emerald fluff. In the woods, I walk through a green so pervasive that it’s palpable, almost breathable, both delicious and disorienting.
The emerald kingdom: the realm of moss Read More »
In 2007 the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed the word acorn from its print edition. Also the words blackberry, otter, willow, bluebell, and newt. Fifty such ‘nature words’ were eliminated and replaced by words like broadband, MP3 player, and chatroom.
This constant bubbling of form and new realities is what cosmologist Brian Swimme calls seamlessness, one of his eleven powers of the universe that I have been exploring. Though I am doing it last, it was his first because everything arose out of seamlessness, “the ground of being, an empty fullness.” A realm of existence so seething with constant creativity that physicists call it spacetime foam, bubbling everywhere and forever. This, the foundation of the cosmos, is “pure generativity,” Brian says. “Not a thing, or place. It’s a power.” The act of becoming “is the nature of the universe.”
Boundless possibility: the power of seamlessness Read More »
I didn’t come up with the title of this post until I had finished writing it. 2022 was, after all, a year of lurching geopolitical crises and brutal regressions. A year that often seemed like lunacy was triumphing. One calculated to produce nothing but the stress levels we all too often felt. But, when I finished describing my path through these months, I was struck by how joyful it also was. Even when I was responding to the anguish of two young men about the state of the world they are inheriting.
Songlines 2022: surprised by joy Read More »