About ten years ago, Conservation International made a video series that I think about still.1 Well-known celebrities speak as and for “nature.” They each voice a character, such as Ocean, Redwood, or Soil. The sad thing is, there isn’t a speck of love here, and even the films’ stunning cinematography does nothing to draw you in or elicit any emotion besides despair and guilt.

At the end of each spot comes the tagline, “Nature doesn’t need people. People need nature.” It’s the meanest sort of message, casting Nature as the all-powerful, disapproving parent who indulged us for too long and is now cracking down. Taking back her power, or at least throwing it around to scare us straight.

Harrison Ford’s Ocean is a thuggish intimidator intoning vague threats in a gravelly voice. He and Ed Norton’s Soil convey the attitude, “we don’t give a shit about you,” and say things like, “I suppose you still want to eat, right?” and “I covered this entire planet once. I can always cover it again.”

To be fair, the Redwoods one is a bit gentler. But even there, humans are portrayed as the loser neighbor who inherited a nice house from his grandma and now hosts constant ragers complete with meth smoking and booze, loud music and seizure-inducing video games. The human race as Jesse in Season 4 of “Breaking Bad.”

I’ve thought a lot about this message, that humans are an aberration, even a blight on the planet. An experiment in consciousness and manual dexterity that went horribly wrong. As tempting as this is—and as true, in many ways— it’s not close to being the full story.

It’s misguided and counterproductive for conservationists to project their (understandable) rage and despair onto “Nature,” to presume to speak through a thoroughly human voice, and to package it in these beautiful and depressing film spots. This campaign cannot advance the shift to a new story, because it is made entirely from the perspective of the old stories of separation, power-over, good-versus-evil, control and hierarchy.

What a missed opportunity! It’s understandable that clever people in conference rooms thought this would be a kick-ass campaign. But had they spent unmediated time with Ocean or Soil or Redwood, had they set aside agendas and listened with ears of the heart, with curiosity and humility, they would have heard an entirely different message. Not a projection of their own shame, fear, guilt and anger about the way humans (all of us, including the creative team behind this project) are treating the planet. No. A message of love. Of welcome. Invitations to connect.

Such reminders of our kinship and reciprocity with the natural world are available to all of us, anytime. Such encounters help us to find our way back from separation to the belonging that is our birthright. This may sound like rainbows-and-unicorns wishful thinking, but these are messages I’ve heard when I get quiet, engage my senses, and pay attention. True, I’m a rank novice, but I can say this for sure:

Nature is trying all sorts of ways to get our attention, to beguile and engage us, to pull us out of our materialistic stupor. Even if alarmed by our ego-saturated ignorance and destructiveness, she’s not petty and vindictive. She would never say, “You need me, but I don’t need you.” What kind of power-over dysfunction is that? It’s an abusive parent, a marriage doomed to fail. Shame and guilt can only harm, not repair relationships.

Nature as an unreachable celebrity

It strikes me as oddly appropriate that Conservation International used major celebrities for this campaign, because they cast nature herself as a celebrity: unreachable, out there—just as Julia Roberts and Penelope Cruz and Liam Neeson are unattainable icons, larger than life. They’re better than us. They know it and we know it. They can take us or leave us. Whatever.

It’s this superiority and indifference that are so troubling. On one level, they have a point, but where’s the compassion? Yes, nature’s awe-inspiring power is far beyond our own, and can at times seem vengeful at mythic scales. But she’s also a mysterious, all-loving and infinitely creative force. As part of nature ourselves, we too have that potential and that capacity. Speaking to us as errant children in need of a Time Out only perpetuates the same dynamic that brought us factory farming, deep ocean oil wells, tar sands, mountaintop removal coal mining, and massive extinctions. The stories of domination that created those outcomes can only perpetuate them.

I choose to align with the story that we belong here, we have a purpose, and we are loved.2 We’re here to bear witness to the miracle of creation: to revel in joy, to sing, dance, paint, write, teach, tell stories. As Mary Oliver wrote:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.3

Yes, by losing sight of those truths, we’ve caused great damage. It’s equally true that we can’t be intimidated into doing the “right thing.” When was the last time that worked for you?

Maybe this campaign was meant to be the first step in a 12-step addiction recovery. It’s the Intervention. We’ve all been gathered in a living room, surrounded by concerned friends and affected family members. Nature speaks first, ideally with more compassion than these mean-spirited videos.

Now it’s our turn. Will we get defensive, or will we put ourselves in our victims’ shoes and acknowledge the damage we have done? Is there hope for us to move from abusive codependence to healthy interdependence? For me, writing is one way to step out of the center, explore the edges, and share my profound gratitude, awe, and wonder at being alive on this amazing planet.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

What are your impressions of Conservation International’s approach to voicing nature’s disappointment disgust with us? Is nature an unapproachable celebrity? Or more of a cool cousin?

I’d love to hear from you. Or share it with others by restacking on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks and keep dreaming.

Did our senses lead us astray?

The final two chapters of David Abram’s exquisite book, Becoming Animal, present simple observations and proposals for a way back into kinship. For example, he notes that when Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo discovered that the earth is not fixed after all, but rather orbits a fixed sun, the senses were increasingly derided as deceptive and untrustworthy. It was thought that our observations had led us astray into primitive and naïve beliefs about our place in the cosmos, and therefore about ourselves.

While it’s true that oral, place-based, indigenous cultures did (and still do) rely on the body’s perceptions of, say, the sun’s daily departure and travel through the depths of the earth to reemerge in the morning to begin another transit of the sky, that’s far from a primitive understanding. Such observations kindled and sustained a relational understanding of the visible fire in the sky being in league with the invisible fire within us. A direct experience of the gravitational pull of the earth on their bodies was felt as the same attraction between the sun and the earth as between two individuals—eros.

Abram makes the startling point that the modern western notion of God-out-there-hovering-above-it-all comes from the same disinterested position apart from nature adopted by science. Both are divorced from sensual, material, subjective reality. Science and religion purport to be at odds with each other, but they stem from the same distrust of the bodily, earthly realm of senses and felt experience.

“The hyper-rational objectivity behind a great deal of contemporary techno-science could only have arisen in a civilization steeped in a dogmatic and other-worldly monotheism, for it is largely a continuation of the very same detached and derogatory relation to sensuous nature. If in an earlier era, we spoke of the earthly world as fallen, sinful and demonic, we now speak of it as mostly inert, mechanical, and determinate. In both instances nature is stripped of its generosity and prodigious creativity.” (p.302)

The distancing effects of abstraction

Our movement away from trusting the body has engendered a world of abstraction, which reduces the living earth to objects to be studied with as pure an analytical mind as possible, and to be harvested and fashioned into useful things. This modern scientific orthodoxy is, thankfully, now being questioned. I wrote on Aug.3 about the biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, whose book, Science Set Free, challenges this materialist worldview, and demonstrates that it’s been taken to the extreme of dogma.1

Abram also shows that the modern preference for abstraction, for distance and dogma, is detrimental to all our relationships—with each other, with the living earth, and even with our own body and imagination. The more we insist on control—of events, of each other, of our environment—the greater the distance between us yawns.

“All of these dodges, all of these ways of disparaging material nature or of aiming ourselves elsewhere, enable us to avoid the vulnerability of real relationship with other persons and places in the depths of this unmasterable world. Despite the several pleasures we might draw from life in this world, there remains something about earthly reality that frightens us. . . . Not just the decay to which our earthborn bodies are prone, and the death that patiently awaits us, but also our steady subjection to what exceeds us, to the otherness of other persons and other beings, and to an anarchic array of elemental forces over which we have little control.” (p.302)

Becoming Animal raises rich, blissfully unanswerable questions. Abram does suggest towards the end of the book that one way out of this is to become native to place again. To feel it and sense it and strike up relationships with the Others who live here. To discover the stories that dwell in that place. This is a wonderful tonic for our modern rootlessness.

Exploring other ways of being

And it’s exactly what we played with when I first met Dave at a retreat in Wyoming. There, for the first time, I experienced a stream’s gentle encouragement, the play of tiny fish in sunlight, a mother bear disciplining her rambunctious cubs. I was encouraged in this strange business by everyone’s sincerity and lack of pretention. The stories gathered by the other participants emerged directly from our immersion into another way of being and relating to place.

Inspired by the mentorship of Dave and others, I have experimented with going off the well-worn path of “civilization” more and more often. Learning to read signs and trust intuition and imagination and senses. Although I don’t know where it’s leading, I have accepted this as my work in the world. Finding fellow travelers is critical, not only as confirmation that I’m not crazy, but to challenge myself to dig deeper and to keep speaking up.

In audre lorde’s phrase, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I sometimes wonder if I’m here not to dismantle old houses, but to shift in a different direction and to build new houses with different tools. Yet, the master’s tools are alluring and stubborn, unwilling to be ignored. I considered this dilemma in an essay on drawing first published in issue #8 of the Dark Mountain Journal.2

We have the great fortune and challenge to live in this liminal time between science and story, intellect and intuition. I have chosen to be more intentional with when to use the powerful modern tools that stem from and create more distance, and when to turn to other, ancient tools rooted in body wisdom, sensory connection, delight and wonder. This is critical work in my day job teaching young aspiring architects within such an old-tool institution as a university.

I appreciate the willingness of mentors to teach people like me, tentative and clumsy as I am. In this time of unraveling, they embody alternatives to the deathly analytical, fact-based, command-and-control methods that many of us feel trapped within. Even when the choice to speak up for love may be ridiculed as naïve and un-scientific by those who embrace abstraction, it helps to know I’m not alone in learning to trust the tools that shift me from distance to intimacy.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

In case of emergency call your best friend or, if unavailable, call 911.1

• Seek shelter at the lowest level of the hierarchy (e.g., as a barista, kindergarten teacher, health care worker, house cleaner, or migrant farmhand), in a job with no windows, no exit doors, and no glass ceiling.

• You should smile more. Turn that frown upside down.

• Immediately leave using the nearest exit — become a TikTok’er, podcaster, homesteader, or WWOOF around Central America.

• Do not use elevators, as they will lock down tighter than the Dobbs Decision.2

• If you are unable to evacuate, seek a location that provides refuge, like your imagination or a fugue state, and call your best friend to alert them to your location. To avoid surveillance, use telepathy.3

• Go directly to the designated assembly point on the newly gerrymandered map.

• Once the evacuation is over, you will have to return to the building. Sorry not sorry.

• Why are you wearing that? You’re just asking for trouble.4

Welcome to the Active Shooter Society (ASS), America’s least exclusive and most expensive club. Membership is random and involuntary and there’s nothing we can do about it, so quit whining.

• RUN: your mouth at every opportunity. Share your truth, even if doing so causes snowflakes to shut down and right-wingers to dox you. When you get to safety, call your best friend or 911, but remember what we said before about 911.

• HIDE: your rage. If it is not safe to run your mouth, hide your true feelings until the all-clear sign is given by bell hooks’ ghost. Lock/secure your grief and contempt, turn off the constant stream of bad news, silence electronic devices, and stay away from predators and their enablers. If you cannot find a room big enough to hide your rage, stuff as much of it as possible behind a large immovable object like your ex.

• FIGHT: As a last resort, be prepared to fight. Yes, we know you’ve been fighting since you first drew breath. Feel free to use any available item that could double as a weapon: your voice, the written word, interpretive dance, public policy, the law, or a fire extinguisher, until police arrive. JK, the police won’t believe you.

• You should feel empowered to share your need for assistance during an emergency to a colleague, peer, or staff member, and of course everyone on your social media feeds.

• Be specific about the type of assistance you may need during an emergency, e.g., a shoulder to cry on, a couch to crash on, bail money, legal aid, a betterhelp account.

• Scan the QR code or read any Rebecca Solnit essay for more information.5

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

What did you enjoy most about this essay? I’d love to hear from you. Or share it with others by restacking on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks!

One place we never missed was the long walk through Wing Island via the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History (founded by our friend C’s father, a well-known naturalist and writer of many beloved books).1 After hiking through a pitch pine woodland and walking weathered planks through mud flats and a salt marsh, you arrive at the sublime Brewster Flats. It’s North America’s most extensive tidal flats, about ten miles long and 12,000 acres. The low tide recedes up to two miles in some places, exposing sand grooved with lovely ripples, grasses, tidal pools, and clam beds.

I would sit on a towel with my watercolors and paint. Later, I understood these sessions to be a conversation with the place, a conversation on its terms—the breeze on my skin, the sun’s heat, the salty-earthy smells and cries of gulls. The beaches, coves, and trees called to me with their colors and light. I mixed paints and worked them on the paper, much as I would choose words to form sentences. It’s no small thing that painting outdoors feels good and gives me peace, that I love doing it. It’s a practice of reciprocity.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

Why give the river a voice

Nina Schuyler traces the book back to law school, where her favorite class was water law. “Northern California moves a big chunk of the water to Southern California,” she said. “Really, Los Angeles wouldn’t exist without Northern California water.” Following that thread led her to legal personhood: in 2008 Ecuador granted personhood not just to rivers but to all of nature, and in 2017 New Zealand became the first country to name a river a legal person, with rights and the ability to sue. That discovery that a river could be property one day and a rights-bearing entity the next became the seed of the novel.

A theory of personhood

Nina’s aim was to write about climate change without falling into despair. “I have not seen a climate literature book that’s — here, a river’s going to court to try to live,” she said. She wanted magical realism, playfulness, even humor, genre choices that are largely missing from climate fiction. Philosophically, she leaned on Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s essay “The Extended Mind,”1 using it to argue against a Cartesian, bound self: “You are not confined to your skull and skin... being in the world and your relationship to the natural world is defining the self.” In the novel, the river doesn’t fully understand personhood either. It’s “trying to wear this cloak and figure it out,” a legal fiction it has to inhabit just to survive.

Fluid movement

I counted a dozen or more nonhuman characters2, each distinct, and asked how she kept track of them, whether it was mapped out or more of a fluid process. Nina said the first draft was, by her own account, “a big mess.” She began narrowly with the river, then the judge, then the judge’s wife, but then pushed further. “Why am I staying confined to this little story? There’s all these other stories going on.”

She also consciously avoided the hero’s-journey structure, “the dominant model in Western literature,” with a single protagonist conquering and saving everyone. That shape felt wrong for a climate story. Later revisions were more deliberate: “I wanted to make it feel like water.” She noted that humans are “highly watery” and let that physical fact shape the book’s structure.

The perspective shifts never feel arbitrary. Consciousness passes from one character to another through a gesture, a conversation, an emotion like love, or a sound like the river’s song. Nina explained that the handoffs were intentional: one character passes near another, and at that “little juncture,” the narrative shifts into the new person’s point of view. “There was this kind of, like you said, passing the baton,” she said. The beautiful thing is that this technique goes beyond plot mechanics to embody, structurally, the entangled theory of personhood the story argues for. She invoked Robert Creeley’s idea that form is content: the passing itself is the interconnection the novel is trying to show, whether between two humans or between a human and an “other.”

We can all be Hazel

I asked about one of the novel’s sharpest human character, a 75-year-old named Hazel. Nina said, “I think every female after the age of 50, and hopefully earlie, becomes a Hazel.” Hazel has slipped out of what she called “the envelope of the good girl,” the one trained to avoid conflict at any cost, “including the cost of the self.” On the stand, Hazel gets the courtroom’s full attention and finally says what she’s been holding back about the treatment of animals, children, and nature, how objectification of one bleeds into objectification of all three. Hazel testifies, among other wonders, that mice can sing — inaudibly to us, but recorded by scientists — and uses it to indict how casually humans have killed what they assumed had no inner life.

When the judge asks Hazel, “Where are you going with this?” She answers, “Wherever I feel I need to go.”

Her testimony had me cheering, Go, Hazel!

The imaginative leap

Asked whether it’s presumptuous to write from the point of view of a river, a mouse, a mountain, Nina pushed back: “I view it as an obligation. . . That is the role of empathy: to take the imagination and make the imaginative leap. What does the river need? What does it want? How can it thrive?” She sees fiction as the one place built for exactly that kind of trespass: “In fiction, there are no walls and no barriers... if you shut that down and say, oh no, I can’t write from that point of view, then the imagination is censored.” Refusing the leap, she argued, is its own kind of objectification — the very thing the book is trying to undo.

Preorder Nina's book

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

We are the ancestors

What does it mean to be a good ancestor? Are we meant to project current chaotic reality into an uncertain future, or work towards a more hopeful vision? Many of us have heard of the Seventh Generation. Yes, the eco-household brand, and also the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) understanding that today’s decisions ripple far into our descendants’ lives.1 For perspective, seven generations ago takes us back to about 1850, over a decade before the American Civil War.

After much trial and error, attempts and failures, side quests and surrender, I’ve come to understand that my contribution to future generations is to cultivate soil. I used to believe I was planting seeds, but before seeds can grow and thrive, they need fertile soil. My brief time here is to help prepare the ground by composting toxic stories so better stories can flourish.

Telling better stories

What sort of stories about our relationship to nature do we tell ourselves now? One way to understand recent literature and film is in three broad themes. This is not meant as a criticism; the works on these lists are all brilliant in their ways.

These admittedly oversimplified themes have been, and continue to be, countered with stories of nature as provider, mentor and creative partner.2 Stories that dramatize a reciprocal relationship where humans learn to appreciate nature’s gifts. Stories that allow readers to experience such a world, to immerse in what it looks and feels like. And crucially, stories that hint at how we might get there.

The power of this summer’s blockbuster “The Odyssey” reminds us that stories create worlds. Anyone can step into a theater and be immersed in that world, not least because the ancient poem is embedded in our collective cultural psyche. The good news is that human culture’s millennia-long relationship with nature is also embedded in our psyche.

We are a storytelling species. Since our imaginations and collective beliefs create the world we inhabit, today and every day, this series will explore legacies and possible paths forward.

Earth dreaming

What will it take for a pathologically self-absorbed culture to recognize that there’s other life out there with which we’re meant to engage? What will inspire the first tentative, humble steps towards repairing our broken relationships with the living world?

The great theologian and ecological thinker Thomas Berry wrote that, far from being a cancer on the earth, humans are an intricate and beloved part of the complex, wondrous whole.3 My dear friend Lisa Bardack, who is a heart warrior for our renewed relationship with Earth and all her beings, knew Berry. She once emailed me her understanding of his teaching:

“The deep and extraordinary revelation for me when I read Thomas Berry’s The Dream of the Earth was his eloquent explanation of the human as intentionally born onto the Earth and into the universe to serve as a conscious mode of reflection. . . I felt it deeply as the Earth’s dream, that she would bring forth a being that could consciously take in and celebrate the beauty and wonder that is the living earth; a being that could feel moss below its feet, take in the smell of the lilac, the taste of a perfect strawberry, the loveliness of bird song, the magic of the forest, the awe of the stars. Then sing, dance, paint, write about it. Celebrate the splendor of the Earth!”4

What if the way beyond our lonely self-absorption is to embrace a purpose far beyond control and exploitation of nature as a limitless Big-Box store? What if our sacred purpose is a calling from the Earth herself to immerse and notice, to celebrate our entanglement, to participate in the wild community of life?

Centering humans has a downside

The myopic modern gaze sees, measures, and values only human beings and human-made systems. With such a narrow focus, we’re cornered into human-centric explanations for our problems and resentments. If I struggle to make ends meet, it’s either my own fault or someone must be stealing from me. If a fire blows toxic smoke over my city, someone else is failing in proper “forest management” and must be made to pay.

This means that any solutions to these human-sphere problems must come only from human systems, whether exceptional individuals who rise above long odds, or institutions or leaders bold enough to stand up and claim their heroic role. The absurd extreme of this is to follow anyone who promises, “I alone can fix it.”

A recent poll by Pew Research revealed that about 40% of American adults believe we’re living in the “end times.”5 Climate anxiety, pandemic, creeping fascism, war, and growing wealth disparity all contribute to a collective intuition that we’re all doomed and there’s no way out. This existential paralysis spawns dystopian narratives, even as it gives rise to more and more outlandish claims like the latest: AI can solve any problem.

The great scientist Albert Einstein understood that new thinking would be required for humankind to advance. What happens if we expand our understanding of the context of both our problems and their possible solutions? If we see ourselves not as the center of it all, but as one being in a vast web of life, what might be possible?

Immerse in unfamiliar worlds

I love stories that immerse me in an unfamiliar world and open my eyes. Novels like The Underground Railroad, Americanah, James, and The Trees challenged and stretched my consciousness around race and racism, white privilege and the presence of the past. To see American culture through the eyes of an immigrant is a gift. To immerse in the lives of people with loves and hopes and ancestors who endured unspeakable horrors reminds us of the power of storytelling.

More recent writers make the case for stories that widen our perspective to include our non-human kin and to experiment with form. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues persuasively that literature must move out of its cultural role as mirror and become more of a lamp. At a time when collective solutions are critical, he writes that the novel, with its emphasis on the individual, is not up to the task of imagining possible ways forward for humanity.

Regarding the consciousness of our non-human kin, Ghosh speculates that they communicate through image, as well as sound. He suggests that to think about the Anthropocene would be to think in images. To his mind, TV, film and visual arts are better at this than literary fiction, whose logocentricism falls short in serving the cultural moment. He cites literary forms that embrace these ancient truths, from both past and present, including illuminated manuscripts, frontispieces, graphic novels, and the ubiquity of images on the internet.

Writing into renewed relationship

In this era of climate collapse and environmental reckoning, storytelling can help us imagine more reciprocal, restorative relationships with the living world. Through narrative, image, and voice, we can recover forms of intimacy with the layered worlds we live within: brown bears and beetles, sidewalks and skylines, clouds and crabs, herons and high-rises, lemurs and larkspur, monarchs and murals, oaks and overpasses, storms and streets.

Here are some recommendations for you to explore new perspectives and renewed relationships:

Speaking of voice

Join us Live tomorrow, Friday, 7 August, at 3:00pm EST, for a chat about Nina Schuyler’s forthcoming novel, Open the Floodgates. It’s written in what she calls a river-of-consciousness that swishes around into different points of view. I’m so inspired by her daring—and especially her respectful imagining of the River’s voice and so many more: pigeons, dogs, a cat, ducks, horses. . . Preorders are available now.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

What did you enjoy most about this essay? I’d love to hear from you. Or share it with others by restacking on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks!

Swarnali opens with Susan Sontag, then adds her own wisdom that shook me from my sorrow and reminded me I’m not alone.

“Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.” ~ Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

“How many more mountains of self-delusion and separateness will humanity climb before realizing that we are an ecology of consciousness? You and I. We are not separate from one another. We work in networks, like mushrooms, enriching each other, growing together.” ~ Swarnali Mukherjee

Marya’s essay felt sourced from my own soul and carried this call to humility:

“I think nearly every writer believes their words can, or at least could, create change. We operate on the assumption - insane, naive, arrogant, delusional as it may be - that language and stories wielded with intention and care have the capacity to move people; it’s that belief that drives us to the page.”

I know that words can create change. Writing (and rewriting) this has changed me.

My Uncle Tom is a nuclear physicist who devoted his career to fusion (the sun’s magic), rather than fission (commercial nuclear power production). I once asked him how he could consider nuclear power to be “clean” energy, when it produces radioactive waste that we hardly know what to do with—other than bury it in sacred mountains and saddle future generations with the problem. In his view, President Carter, who was part of the Navy’s early foray into nuclear subs, ruined the purity of the science by signing a treaty never to reprocess spent fuel. Never mind that it was to prevent disfavored countries from producing nuclear weapons.

Look how well that turned out.

My uncle was genuinely offended that politicians meddled in something they didn’t understand. To physicists, spent fuel could be recycled virtually ad infinitum and fed back into reactors in an elegant closed loop. I thought but didn’t say, DUH! This is reality. People can make nuclear weapons from spent fuel (including us, by the way). All your idealized theories and calculations don’t change that. I was struck by how such a genius could have a willfully partial, even naïve, view of reality.

Reality is messy. Throw politics and nuclear fuel and treaties into a pot and all the perfect theories in the world won’t keep them from stewing. Won’t prevent people from stirring and stirring in the name of national security.

This is the same science that’s given us a mind-blowing body of knowledge about the ways of nature, our bodies and minds, disease, animals and plants, as well as our solar system and distant galaxies. And yet science alone doesn’t tell the whole story. The promise since the Enlightenment has been that science will perfect us, and by extension, our world.

Are we perfect yet?

In recent years, this promise of perfection has been challenged by scientists themselves. Rupert Sheldrake’s 2014 book, Science Set Free, shows that our culture is in the thrall of a scientistic bias toward objectivity.

“For Plato, the allegory of the cave implied a journey beyond the realm of the body and the senses to the realm of immaterial ideas. But its meaning has been hijacked. For materialists, objective reality is not the realm of ideas but mathematicized matter. In the modern version of this allegory, scientists alone can step out of the cave, observe reality as it is, and come back into the cave imparting some of this knowledge to the rest of humanity, confused by rival subjectivities. Only scientists can see reality and truth. The philosopher, and later the scientist, have to free themselves from the tyranny of the social dimension—public life, politics, subjective feelings, popular agitation, in short, from the dark cave—if they want to accede to truth. Back within the cave, the rest of humanity is locked into the realm of multiculturalism, conflict, and politics.” ~ Rupert Sheldrake, Science Set Free

It’s heartening that some scientists acknowledge that the climate crisis is a humanity problem, not solvable by pure objectivity. This crisis touches all spheres of life, from social to economic, political and artistic, individuals and communities. It’s seen as a moral issue by academics at the Climate and Sustainability Ethics Initiative at Penn State.2 Its spiritual dimensions are covered eloquently here on Substack by writers such as and , among others.

A wider view of reality

You might say we’re all journeying through territory for which there is no map. The maps we’ve been using—objectivity, domination over the natural world, idealized individualism, human supremacy—are no longer working. They only ever worked for a few privileged individuals, never at scale. Solutions sourced in such a limited worldview often create new problems.3

And yet the myopic mantra “technology will save us” persists.

The good news is, there are maps. Beautifully detailed, sophisticated maps developed by civilizations far older than ours. Karen Armstrong covers them in her pithy 2022 book, Sacred Nature. She also considers the climate crisis to be a spiritual opportunity. As a scholar of comparative religion, Armstrong draws from decades of study into the world’s great religions and philosophies. She provides itineraries for us to renew our relationships with the natural world and each other.4

Sacred Nature considers the ancient Greek understanding of mythos and logos, as well as texts from Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, Sufi, Judaism, and Kabbalah that exalt nature. World leaders like Gandhi, Mandela and Reverand King chime in, alongside poets, philosophers, and anthropologists. Nature is divine and humans are part of a vast web of life. Humility and gratitude can be developed. Devotion is our birthright.

Trust the maps, travel together

Armstrong demonstrates that the Golden Rule found in all religions extends to our non-human kin and binds us all together.5 She reminds us that awe in the face of nature’s marvels is a shared spiritual experience, an antidote for isolation and loneliness.6

“We urgently need to cultivate an empathy with our fellow human beings that transcends national, political, racial, and other ideological boundaries, as well as a sense of responsibility—and love—towards the ‘myriad things’ of nature. . . . What is required is unrestricted goodwill.” (Armstrong, ch.10)

Can we can trust these maps to guide us through the difficult terrain ahead? A resounding YES.

1. They’ve been useful to many generations of people. Anything that’s been around that long is worth exploring.

2. They teach us how to, in the face of great hardships, live harmoniously with ourselves, each other, and our world.

3. They’re methodical and rigorous, having been honed through repeated use over hundreds or thousands of years.

4. Each is a complete system that fully accounts for reality, starting with our bodies and moving outward in concentric circles to include other beings, the land, cycles, and the cosmos.

5. They include, even welcome, paradox and contradiction.

6. They’re poetic, leaving space for interpretation and intuition, rather than relying only on one-size-fits-all objectivity.

7. They don’t require faith, only a willingness to practice.

8. There is no one way to use them. While each system has a timeless, unchanging quality, it is also endlessly adaptable and relevant.7

These ancient teachings were not superseded or made irrelevant by our modern, abstracting maps. They can help us return to the body and senses, to trust intuition and imagination, and to renew our belonging. That’s the most reliable map we have for the territory ahead.

I will leave you with this prayer from ch.10 of Sacred Nature, p.189 of the eBook. It’s a poem from the Pali Canon. I’ve been saying this every morning as an experiment.

Let all beings be happy! Weak or strong, of high, middle, or low estate,
small or great, visible or invisible, near or far away,
alive or still to be born—may all be perfectly happy!
 
Let nobody lie to anybody or despise any single being anywhere.
May nobody wish harm to any single creature, out of anger or hatred!
 
Let us cherish all creatures, as a mother her only child!
May our loving thoughts fill the whole world, above, below, across—without limit, a boundless goodwill toward the whole world.
Unrestricted, free of hatred and enmity.
 
~ Sutta-Nipata, 118

A recent comment on an old post reminded me that I’ve written about maps before.8 I do love maps. I’d love to hear about your own experiences with “alternative” maps that might help us navigate the territory ahead.

A special event

Join us Live on Friday, 7 August, at 3:00pm EST, for a chat about ’s forthcoming novel. It’s written in what she calls a river-of-consciousness that swishes around into different points of view. I’m so inspired by her daring—and especially her respectful imagining of the River’s voice. And the pigeons, dogs, ducks, goats, horses, cats. . . Preorders are available!

Save the date!

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

I’ve been working on an essay that isn’t quite ready, so I’m sharing this short piece for fun. It’s from the write-in yesterday with . He gives the best prompts! And it’s always an inspiring group of writers. Try it sometime.

Try to be happy; that is, make happiness a goal.

Prioritize making other people happy, especially your partner, your children, your friends.

Beat yourself up when you forget to prioritize the happiness of others.

Be too busy for self-care. Self care is selfish, anyhow.

Read the news

Resolve to be a better person, one that counts to 10 or 20 before answering when someone pisses you off, then go off on a co-worker who doesn’t deserve your equanimity.

Read a book (podcasts and audiobooks count) about how simple it is, really, to be happy. Be inspired to stick Post-It-note aphorisms to your bathroom mirror, around your desk, on your car’s dashboard. When you no longer notice them, take them down. Too much clutter. Clutter derails happiness.

Go to an art museum alone to stroll and stop at paintings that call to you, feeling lucky not to be distracted by a friend’s pedantic taste. Forget to put your phone on Do Not Disturb; respond when your college friend group chat blows up about whether “The Odyssey” is misogynist. Wish you’d brought someone to join you in mocking an over-hyped installation in the corner, a pile of dirt and broken glass and feathers that is somehow about climate change. Be gutted by a Walker Evans photo of a scruffy child that reminds you of the article you read that morning about immigrant children, alone, unrepresented, being railroaded by fast English-speakers in a cold courtroom.

Start a Gratitude Journal, then stay up late to binge Season 5 of “House” and forget to write in it, then do the same thing the next night with Season 6. Repurpose the journal to make lists like this.

List all the ambitions that animated and then paralyzed you.

Like the piano you ignored for years when you could’ve played it and now it’s gone, given away for a downsizing move.

Or the watercolor paints languishing in a closet.

Keep making lists like this.

You’re invited!

This Friday, 7 August, at 3:00 PM EST, I’ll be chatting with , author of the forthcoming novel, Open the Floodgates. I can’t wait to dig into it with her! I have so many questions.

In her story, the River is granted personhood and now has the right—and urgent need—to go to court and argue for its existence. It’s alive and talking, and so are the pigeons, deer, the muddy bottom, a crow, and more. Once Nina decided that humans are not exceptional but part of the fabric of the universe, the door to subjectivity flew open, and she found the world wonderfully alive with a lot to say. Pub date: 9-15-26. Preorders available now.

Join us Live

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

Today’s post is mostly visual. Bit of a departure for me, but . . . not really? Enjoy!

New to Homecoming? Start here.

“The United States Constitution is ‘pre-ecological.’ That is, it contains no reference, either explicit or implicit, to environmental concerns. As a result, federal environmental law in the United States is entirely statutory.” ~ Kyle Burns J.D. Candidate, 2017, University of Virginia School of Law2

“I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” ~ Abigail Adams, letter to John Adams, March 31, 1776

This may have happened one night in June 1787 . . .

Here’s an animated version. Enjoy. . .

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

What did you enjoy most about this post? I’d love to hear from you. Or share it with others by restacking on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks and keep dreaming.

“[Nature-adoring U.S. Poet Laureate (1995-97) Robert Hass]. . .once gave koanlike expression to our plight along the lines of: we are the only protectors, and we are what needs to be protected, and we are what [the world] needs to be protected from.

“Yet the excruciating sharpness of the dilemma he sketched out has an exquisite roundness at its heart, for exactly equally, we cannot harm the Earth without harming ourselves; we cannot heal the Earth without healing ourselves; we cannot protect the Earth without protecting ourselves.”

New to Homecoming? Start here.

This series draws from essays I wrote eleven years ago. Today’s final installment presented a challenge, built as it was around a long-ago sparkling moment of grace—President Obama’s eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney. He and eight other congregation members of Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, were killed on June 17, 2015 by a lone gunman. After speaking about grace, Obama stops for a long pause.1

You can almost feel him hesitating, listening to an inner prompting. And then he says yes to it. He begins to sing “Amazing Grace,” his usually confident baritone wavering, slipping, lifting. The congregation joins in and on he rides, not always in perfect pitch but in full feeling. That moment of gathering his courage and daring to sing out was a beautiful example of the humility of leadership. He didn’t know what would happen, yet he trusted his inner voice. And that spark of grace lit up a mourning community.

Perhaps you see my dilemma. That moment was eleven long years ago. Today, it seems unreal, deeply buried beneath the layers of turmoil and chaos of our current reality. I’m going to trust the process here, trust that this shadow series is as relevant now as it was back then in what I’m tempted to call “simpler times.”

Let’s trust that that event, that grace, has something for us now. As I thought about how very long ago that was, an eloquent eulogy and a President singing in great vulnerability at a memorial, these lines floated up from one of my favorite poems, “Annunciation.”2 In the gorgeous words of the poet Marie Howe:

“I know it is — and that if once it hailed me / it ever does”

That’s the thing about grace. It’s always present. Always working. Always available. Let’s consider writer Anne Lamott’s reminder that grace lives in the shadows, in our own shadows.

“I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival. But no, it’s clog and slog and scootch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.” ~ Anne Lamott, from Grace, Eventually

Grace is a word you don’t hear much in secular discourse. When I was a teenager, I had a conversation with my dad about it. He was a traditional dad who worked and did dad things, and we didn’t have many one-on-one interactions. This conversation was rare and memorable. He was caught up by my question, What is grace? I think he spoke of God’s presence or friendship, and we both enjoyed wondering about it together, turning it over, feeling its slipperiness. That itself was a moment of grace, a precious heart connection to each other and to something bigger than us.

Projection, imperfection, and multiplicity

Human affairs are full of flaws, opposition and contradictions. There never seems to be that one right solution we can all agree on.3 Even Obama’s presidency was far from perfect. He compromised on health care reform by giving too much power to insurance companies. I never understood the appeal the Transpacific Partnership, which seemed like a nightmare for workers and the environment. And what about the drone strikes and the “Surge” in Afghanistan?

When we project our shadows outward, it’s easy to spot imperfections, missteps, and mistakes. In any setting or organization at any scale, if we watch from the sidelines, we’ll see flawed humans fall prey to ego and posturing and bad decisions. People dig in their heels and point fingers at each other. These outward-directed blame sessions blind us to the difficulties of taking constructive, incremental steps towards more life-affirming, inclusive, fair and just policies. Projection is a blunt instrument when what we need is subtle, careful craft.

Whatever grace means literally or metaphorically, we need it now more than ever. There will always be opposition to good ideas. We live in a world of multiplicity, which is equal parts beautiful and frustrating.

I’m experimenting with trusting my emotional responses to these events. I have my cynical side, but when I rewatched President Obama’s eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney and heard his all-too-human voice singing Amazing Grace a capella, it moved me. I wasn’t thinking about which speechwriter penned that eulogy. I wasn’t wondering if this was all staged, or if he was being genuine in his preacherly cadence and rhythms. It was real and beautiful and heartfelt. Let that carry you into the day, lit by the mystery that if grace hails us, it ever does.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

Thanks for reading this series. If you enjoyed it, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

New to Homecoming? Start here.

There have been no shortage of reflections on the 250^th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Parker Palmer offered his usual thoughtful nuance.1 He wrote about the adolescence of our country and made a plea to “grow up”. One hallmark of uninitiated adolescence is self-centered black and white thinking: us and them, good and bad, for or against. Nuance and compassion take a back seat to bickering and certainty. The struggle for independence dominates.

Independence is assumed to be coded into our country’s DNA. There’s the famous founding document penned by Thomas Jefferson.2 There’s the fantasy of the frontier forged by independent-minded adventurers.3 Opponents cry “socialism!” whenever progressives seek to give Americans a modicum of safety net for education, health care, housing, or childcare. American “independence” masquerades in the lies of Horatio Alger’s bootstraps, Reagan’s “welfare queen,” and the Marlboro Man, to name but a few.

For decades, I believed independence to be the pinnacle achievement of adult maturity. We’re born dependent, we struggle through childhood to gain our independence, and with it we leave home to forge our way in the world. I carried this belief into my own adult relationships: dependence bad; independence good, mature, vital.

During a difficult period in my marriage, I learned of a third way: interdependence. When the therapist delivered that lesson, it was one of those forehead-smacking, Homer Simpson DOH! moments that rearranged everything. Thich Nhat Hanh and Robin Wall Kimmerer, among other wise teachers, have since helped me to embrace the beauty and inevitability of interdependence. Not only among humans, but between myself and the marvelous beings who, according to many indigenous creation stories,4 were here long before us. Now, it’s difficult to imagine how I ever thought independence was the highest good.

The dark side of a patriotism that ignores interdependence

When I was a kid, my sense of patriotism toggled between daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and unthinking fondness for the country of my birth. I was young and clueless during the Vietnam War, the upheavals of the ‘60s, Civil Rights, assassinations, burning cities, and the brutalities of Kent State and the ’68 Chicago Democratic convention. In the ‘70s, I was devoted to my POW bracelet, though the war was still a distant abstraction to me.5 Nixon’s resignation on a Thursday night in August 1974 was rare family-together viewing on our small black and white TV. I gleaned its import only through my parents’ outrage and anxiety.

Independence is threaded through every aspect of Americanism. The social safety net begun with the 1930s New Deal and continued in the 1960s with LBJ’s Great Society programs has been frayed by decades of ambivalence, othering, and opposition. Our immigration policies teeter on a history of xenophobia, racism, and exclusion.

This is the dark side of American patriotism. Our independence enables claims of “not me” and encourages the isolationism of “that would never happen to me.” It allows ordinary, decent people to blame asylum seekers for their plight, to spare not a moment’s thought for the desperation that drives anyone to leave their home and take a dangerous journey into the unknown. Supposedly generous Christians other and finger-point and say, “You’re not welcome here” and “Go back to your s***hole country.”

Other shadows lurk in our founding documents. Besides the Declaration of Independence, we have what was meant to be a living one: the Constitution.6 Nowhere in the Constitution are women or nature or the environment mentioned. Not once. “Law” is mentioned 36 times and “he” is used 55 times. The 27 Amendments use “law” an additional 56 times and “he” 90 (0 for “she”). In the absence of mention of half the population, women’s rights have been won through clever if contorted interpretations of amendments and some legislation. So far, environmental rights are enshrined only in legislation.

We have witnessed the precarity of this in recent Supreme Court rulings, such as the Dobbs decision abolishing abortion rights and several decisions that have now gutted 1965’s landmark Voting Rights Act (among other assaults). And still there are those with the wisdom and boldness to act on behalf of our country’s founding promises, the ideals for which the Revolution was fought. In 2019, we saw the brilliant, moving theater piece, “What the Constitution Means to Me,” that was created and performed by Heidi Shreck.7 She created it in no small part because of her love for the document, and her certainty that we the people can do better.

A great cultural initiation into interdependence

The Constitution may be a living document, but it can’t do the work for us. Last winter, the people of Minneapolis showed us another way. They demonstrated the compassion, imagination, and love that is the toolkit for meeting our cultural shadow. Instead of “not me,” they said “yes, me.” In the darkest, coldest days of winter, they chose to resist. With grace and bravery, they taught us how to meet the frightening foundational cracks of our country. With humility and community solidarity, they engaged in a great cultural initiation into interdependence.

I’m tempted to delve into the deepest-buried cultural shadows of our country’s founding, work that remains undone, barely begun. These are the ongoing stains of genocide, slavery, and racism. In the interest of keeping this essay from sprawling into next week, I will instead share a few resources that are teaching me lately:

• Do the Work – W. Kamau Bell and Kate Schatz – interview here

• Dr. Keon West’s 2025 book, The Science of Racism is excellent, engaging, and full of fascinating scientific studies. I will never again hear an opinionated pundit claim that racism being over without thinking that person is ignorant of the facts.

• The On the Media episode, The Fantasy of America at 250 – interview with Princeton University Distinguished Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr., who teaches African American studies and religion.

Prof. Glaude read from a student’s essay for his class on the author James Baldwin. She wrote about Baldwin’s “notion of love across his life, given all that he saw.”

“What remains is not hope, but something just as lasting, the insistence on truth carried by love and lit by rage.”

Minneapolitans showed us that love is an essential part of our toolkit for meeting the shadow. All those shameful, disowned parts of ourselves, and of our collective culture, will defy integration unless they are met with curiosity and compassion.

In this moment, this song expresses how I feel about this country. Especially this verse:

You say love is a temple, love a higher law
Love is a temple, love the higher law
You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl
And I can't be holding on to what you got
When all you got is hurt

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

What did you enjoy most about this essay? I’d love to hear from you. Or share it with others by restacking on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks and keep dreaming.

New to Homecoming? Start here.

“When you think everything is someone else’s fault, you will suffer a lot. When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy.” ~ Dalai Lama

I’ve heard the term “spiritual growth” so much that at some point I stopped wondering what it means. Wise teachers tell us that spiritual growth stalls when we attack others as evil instead of facing our own failures. With honest self-appraisal ideally comes the humility to recognize our need to grow and expand our capacity to learn from those with whom we disagree. In a sense, spiritual growth is a process of making room for the opposites inside of us.

This requires a stretching of consciousness, a way of confronting our self-imposed boundaries, our cultural story of separateness, and the oversimplification of everything precious. The story is so deeply ingrained that it taxes the imagination to see good and evil as part of one whole, rather than an opposition that begs to be resolved through force and war.

“As we work together to restore hope to the future, we need to include a new and strange ally - our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think.” ~ Margaret Wheatley, Turning to One Another

The promise is that we will find peace only when we stop projecting our shadow onto others to blame them for our discomfort. Spiritual growth can occur when I recognize that my habit of thinking in opposites expresses as prejudice: this, not that. Right, not wrong. Good, not evil.

If prejudice divides, reconciliation makes us whole. Its root, conciliate, derives from Latin, meaning “to bring together,” from concilium, “meeting” or “council.” I think of a council circle, an ancient practice found in most human cultures, where important matters are discussed and resolved. Council is a ceremony, a specific protocol of sitting in a circle, speaking and listening from the heart. Being well heard is a powerful way to feel part of a whole. Indeed, a council circle is a way of enacting and embodying individuality within wholeness.

Wholeness will never be realized when pursued through forceful means as a triumph over evil. This is easier to say than to practice. Especially in a culture that tends to view spiritual pursuits as the public performance of superior virtue, or as a private matter, or as the inferior hocus-pocus of innocents and primitives, or an excuse to conquer. We are told that evil is evil and must be confronted, rooted out, hunted down in the night by shadow forces like Seal Team 6. We have elected proxies to keep up our wars against the opposites that we cannot tolerate, along with the story that we can triumph over them.

What would our world look like if instead we saw that this warring mode itself is the evil? That, instead of triumph over evil, wholeness seeks balance and integration and kindness. Not “this versus that,” but “this and that.”

It can be unsettling and destabilizing to think this way. How can a system that includes evil be considered safe? In reality, no safety is possible under the story that we can rid ourselves, and the world, of evil. That’s as absurd and unnatural as saying that we no longer want the element Mercury in the world and we’re going to root it out and eliminate it wherever we find it. The only thing we can do is to seek balance, starting inside ourselves.

Maybe it’s more than a frustrating habit that I tend to perceive opposites and see people as “others.” What if it’s a special faculty that we all have? A gift that facilitates healing the separations within and between us. So that, when confronted with the discomfort and disorientation of having my story challenged, I can remember that hidden inside is the invitation to grow, to make space in my worldview for another perspective.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

What did you enjoy most about this essay? I’d love to hear from you. Or share it with others by restacking on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks!

New to Homecoming? Start here.

I was surprised to learn that some of us also have a “light shadow.” Driven by the need to fit in, not to upstage anyone, I developed a pattern of stuffing my own unique talents underground. It came from a desire not to shine too brightly, not to spark jealousy or alienate people, to be liked above all.

At the same time, my own envy of other creative people pains my heart. But such hiding is a form of modesty that violates my soul’s contract, the very reason I’m here. False modesty is also an attempt to inoculate myself against criticism, disappointment, and rejection. If I don’t shine too brightly, I have a ready excuse for why my work doesn’t land with someone.

I’m still finding my way to self-permission, to shining anyway, damn the consequences. Al-Anon helped me to disconnect from other people’s expectations and disappointments. I learned that it’s not irresponsible to stay in my lane, to sort out what’s mine and what belongs to others. What a relief. I can let my freak flag fly.

When I do follow my heart and pay attention to what it guides me to do and how that feels, I notice salutary effects. When I’ve been creative early in the day, I have more resources in frustrating situations that arise later. A while back, inspired by Nina Katchadourian’s “Sorted Books Series,”1 I played with arranging random books with interesting titles to form poetic phrases. Later that day, I spent maybe twenty minutes doing a quick watercolor of clouds over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge while at the after party for the annual Bay Swim.

That evening, when faced with a cranky, most unpleasant teenager, I seemed to have endless patience with him. Instead of the usual reactionary “who do you think you are” inner voice goading me to say things I’d regret, I kept trying different ways to reach him and bring him back to his usual sunny self. I stayed calm and nimble, creative instead of triggered.

What’s behind this magic? My first thought is that creative play inoculates me. It puts me in a good mood, so I can face challenges with resilience. And, while that’s true to a degree, there’s something deeper at work here.

What was going on as I sorted through books and arranged them into piles to form haikus, koans, or just evocative, playful phrases? What about when I was sitting in the blazing hot sun, working color onto paper to capture a boiling thundercloud in a summer blue sky? In both cases, I was in a charmed space of possibility, of both/and, of no right or wrong. I asked questions like, what happens if I try this? I gave myself permission to seek, without having a specific direction or expectation of finding anything in particular. Whenever a theme or phrase or color emerged, it was a delightful surprise. A discovery. A gift.

Our culture tells us that, as adults, we must be serious. We must contribute to making the world better, or making money to support our families, all outer-directed goals. Nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel. Which is not an enjoyable way to go about anything. I was raised to seek, even expect, “correct” answers to my questions. And if I don’t get it right, I must be wrong. There’s a best way to do something, usually as directed by an authority figure. First mother, then teacher, then boss or client. Follow directions. Follow the rules. Stay in line.

It feels subversive to advocate a playful approach instead. I think of that phrase, “Play is the work of the child,” referring to how children learn by imitating the adults around them. What if play is also the work of the adult? Not that we should all start acting as if we have no responsibilities. There’s a faculty all humans possess called the imagination. Let’s use it more. Let’s give ourselves permission to approach our work with curiosity, expansiveness, and possibility. We just may find we’re living more from our hearts, enjoying our work, and meeting serious, “real life” challenges with creativity, wit, and resilience.

When I first heard, really heard, this song, I played it over and over again, weeping with the grief and relief of deep recognition and also a complete absence of rational understanding. It felt like a pleading message directly from my soul, wrapped in the achingly beautiful harmonies of Plant and Krauss. Because the lyrics can mean anything, they mean everything.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

What did you enjoy most about this essay? I’d love to hear from you. Or share it with others by restacking on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks!

Read part 6

New to Homecoming? Start here.

In my imagination, the shadow is a hidden cavern deep inside me, a cave at the bottom of a fathomless lake and when I swim down there, if my breath holds, I might discover a secret lacuna to the center of the earth where all the treasure is buried. On sunny days, though, shadows aren’t hidden. They’re visible to everyone, except our own:

“When you turn to the sun, all shadows fall behind you.” ~ African proverb

Just as Bachelard observes, in dreams you always go down the cellar stairs, the shadow is ever and always behind me. I can never seem to turn around and face it squarely.

The shadow follows us wherever we go. Sometimes it takes on a life of its own. In the second book of the Middle Grade series, Peter and the Starcatchers, the evil Lord Ombra steals people’s shadows to possess them, read their thoughts and enslave them. The shadow is imagined as a kind of repository for an individual’s essence.

In the Tantric tradition, the back body is aligned with the universal, the front with the individual. This is a wonderful way to imagine wholeness: it’s in our body that we integrate our uniqueness with the wider world. The front is our place of effort, of being who we are in the world. The back is the unknown, the unseen, and yet it is always there, ready to support and help us when needed. This fits well with the classic teaching that the shadow is part of our childhood survival toolkit.

From our earliest days, we receive feedback from those closest to us about acceptable and unacceptable behavior. The rejected stuff—selfishness, rage, narcissism—gets stuffed down a deep dark well. We’re so hard-wired to fit in that we’re unable to distinguish well-meaning guidance from prejudice, healthy role models from bad parenting. In my family, anger and sadness were suppressed with the ruthlessly effective tool of banishment. As a child, belonging was such a critical need that my shadow formation didn’t discriminate between truly anti-social, life-threatening qualities and useful but controversial traits necessary for a fulfilled life as an adult.

The shadow has layers. There’s the dark, evil stuff we all have; that’s ancient and universal. Then there’s the shadow created by familial and cultural narratives. I picture it as an accumulation of junk heaping on top of older junk, the cellar of a family home for generations. My mother’s shadow contained her parents’ shadows, and so on. Whatever doesn’t fit the cultural or familial or personal stories gets buried beneath norms, expectations and ideologies.

I’ve been coming to terms with my shadow stuff. Driven by perfectionism, I was unable to be satisfied by any job for longer than a few years. I was an outsider to my body and emotions, uncomfortable in my own skin, and rarely able to be authentic in my closest relationships. In short, I was ruled by fear and anxiety, exhausted by the effort to appear normal, to fit in and be accepted and liked.

From the outset, I’ve been intrigued by the promise that the shadow is a treasure house containing superpowers that we have only to excavate and claim. If that’s not motivation enough, there’s also the warning that if we don’t integrate our darkness, it will destroy us. Just look at what happened to Macbeth and Othello and Hamlet . . .

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. ~ Gospel of Thomas, verse 70

I went into shadow work with a sense of urgency to fix all of the above as quickly as possible so I could get on with the rest of my life. Twenty years in, I’ve settled into viewing it with curiosity, as a source of endless fascination and contradiction. This is a long-term project with no ending. The more I learn, the more there is to learn. It’s not so much about dredging up icky muck from the depths to expose to light and purify. It’s more about learning to tolerate imperfection and discomfort. To appreciate the mess and give myself some grace.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

Read part 5

New to Homecoming? Start here.

I feel resistance to delving further into this topic of the shadow. It demands honesty and strips off masks. With nothing to hide behind, I tell myself it’s too hard or it’s all been said before. What can I possibly add to the conversation? And yet this resistance itself is a perfect invitation, a dare to keep going. Shadow is not only a repository of shame and evil. It’s a treasure house of insight for those with the courage to look.

The shadow is a trickster, slippery and difficult to pin down. Avoidance is tempting but futile: daily encounters offer boundless opportunities. Whatever shows up to block my way, to challenge and frighten me—that’s my shadow. When a person or situation brings up strong emotion—especially aversion, fear, anger, or shame—that’s revealing something deeply buried, something teasing curiosity. Either I know about it and thought it was safely under lock and key, or it’s been so long ignored, denied, and/or unacknowledged, I’m taken by surprise. Being blindsided happens less often now, but it does happen.

I came into this thinking that the most destructive, ecocidal aspects of our ingrained cultural story are reflections of my own shadow, projections of a great cultural shadow. But here’s a radical idea: what if it’s just the opposite! My shadow, everyone’s shadow, contains tremendous magic and power. And this power is just what we need to fuel the shift to new stories. Rilke saw this. He advised his poet pen pal:

“We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. . . . How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment transform into princesses; perhaps the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything that frightens us is in its deepest essence something helpless that wants our love.”

Years ago, I read a series of essays in the collection, Meeting the Shadow.1 In it, there’s a fascinating passage about our relationship to the web of life. Far from being good news of belonging, one late 19^th century lecturer framed it as being caught in a trap. He despaired of ever throwing off “the bonds that subject us to nature.”

What an odd notion! And yet, so telling: our entire modern world reflects that intense aversion to the truth that we are but one among many, not the center of it all. And that nature is a kind of prison from which we yearn to escape. Whether it’s factory farming, deep ocean oil drilling, genetic engineering, fracking or terraforming Mars2, our entire world seems predicated on proving that we can break those bonds.

To create such a world requires us to bury and suppress whole swaths of reality. Sound familiar? To bury and suppress is the same process by which the shadow is formed. Anything that doesn’t belong is shoved underground. Our hyper materialistic, overly rational, achievement driven, nature fearing culture has driven into the shadows the wild, the feminine, the intuitive: all receptive, creative, nonlinear aspects of life on Earth.

It would be a mistake to say we have only to rebalance and reintegrate these aspects and everything will be a-okay. There’s a reason the shadow is the shadow: to meet it, let alone give it expression in the external world, feels dangerous, subversive, even life-threatening. Certainly, anyone who dares to embody such qualities overtly is mocked, ridiculed, or shunned by the dominant society. Or worse.

When I feel tremendous resistance to stepping out into the light with these thoughts, it’s from a deep, ancient, even primitive place of fear for my very survival. I am caught up in believing this resistance is my own, that I’m trying to spare my closest relationships the pain of seeing me withdraw from the world, the bafflement of witnessing my loss of faith in the system that raised me and made all those promises. I went along with the program to avoid rocking the boat, but I have been hearing the call to stop for so long.

The more I consider this, the more I believe this is not my own, single journey. (I almost said “battle” there, but language matters.) This is a larger calling, the stirring of a long-buried giant that can only be awakened by a quorum of us. Yes, it seems like a dragon from where we sit right now. But it’s really a princess and she’s been sleeping long enough. She wants our love. Let’s wake her up and see what happens next.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

Read part 4

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If the world is night
Shine my life like a light
…
I've seen the kingdoms blow
Like ashes in the winds of change
Yeah but the power of truth
Is the fuel for the flame
So the darker the ages get
There's a stronger beacon yet

Let it be me
…

I love these lines by the Indigo Girls.1 They say something important on my behalf, something I wasn’t even aware of until I heard this song for the first time. I do wonder whether my inclination to light candles rather than curse the darkness can be a crutch, an attempt to shortcut or avoid the unknown.

I tend to focus too much on the positive, which leaves out a whole rich aspect of reality: the shadow. What can this wild, mad, evil, naughty, unpredictable, untamed, uncontrollable part of me teach me about myself, and—more ambitiously—about our culture?

The approach to considering the shadow makes a difference. It’s shadowy for good reason, so best not to approach directly. The arts—poetry, music, literature, dream work, theater—speak the language of symbols. This allows us to peer at reflections, sneak in the side door, “tell it slant.”

The British actor, David Oyelowo, played Rev. Martin Luther King in the film, “Selma,” and a Black Panther member in “The Butler.” There’s a wonderfully awkward dinner scene in the latter, in which Oyelowo’s character disses his real-life hero: Sidney Poitier. He has said it’s the most difficult line he’s ever had to say as an actor.

In a 2015 interview with Terry Gross, Mr. Oyelowo said that he always turns down stereotypical afterthought roles like the “black best friend.” When she asked if there are other roles he declines, he said something very interesting:

“I hate horror. I won’t do horror films. I don’t really, personally, see the value in them. Anything that, basically, is overtly celebrating darkness, and, to be perfectly honest, sanctioning it, that’s something I can’t personally do. I feel you cannot see the light without darkness, but, for me, a prerequisite I have for myself is that light must, eventually, win out. And that’s just what I choose to put out into the world. I believe in it; I know that films affect and shape culture, and I want to put stuff in the world that I feel is edifying, as opposed to stuff that is detrimental.”2

As a classically trained actor, Oyelowo has been in a lot of Shakespeare plays, so he knows what’s possible in the storytelling art of theater. The world of the play includes both darkness and light. And isn’t that one of the great services of drama? To give us the vicarious experience of inhabiting every character, including the villains, so that, in the end, when good triumphs and evil is punished, the moral lessons are delivered directly into our subconscious.3

A key narrative of the dominant culture is that we have evolved past having to put up with evil and darkness, or even moral weakness. Whether it’s science, AI, psychoanalysis, pharmaceuticals, religion, incarceration, the Singularity, or space travel, we have the tools to perfect ourselves. We have only to project our dark, inferior, diseased, insane aspects onto others, then treat, cure, jettison, or lock them up.

This is the story that gave birth to the “War on_____” policies: War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terrorism. We saw the consequences too frequently in so-called “post-racial America,” and now daily in MAGA America: ICE raids, pointless wars, the attack on voting rights, on and on.

David Oyelowo didn’t say that he only plays light roles. He said he won’t play roles that wallow in darkness, because they do actual damage. He chooses roles that integrate the dark and the light.

There’s a classic plot form called the “Redemption Story,” where the hero or heroine starts off jaded, self-centered and pessimistic, then undergoes a series of trials that change her. By the end, his world has expanded: lessons learned and perspective shifted. She’s more honest with herself, perhaps more altruistic. He does something surprising and generous, seemingly out of character. Think Rick in “Casablanca.” Sure, he knows there’s evil and darkness in the world. He also knows that a light burns inside of him and it’s his choice whether to shine it or hide it behind cynicism and apathy.

Our culture is suspicious of the redemption plot. We’re taught to believe that optimism is futile. We’re doomed and we deserve our fate. Take the climate crisis or the Sixth Extinction. Even the most dedicated environmental activists sometimes fall into despair that Earth would be better without us.4

To believe otherwise is just Pollyanna, wishful thinking, so goes the messaging. In response to this cynicism, I come back to the power of story. We create worlds through the stories we tell. It’s that simple and that irrational. There is magic and mystery in storytelling, something Mr. Oyelowo understands well.

Why not tell stories of redemption? Maybe we must reclaim or at least meet our own individual shadows before we feel deserving of redemption. There’s been so much projection of shadows that the entire culture is blanketed by a great storm cloud. All we can see is darkness, wherever we look.

We just experienced the summer solstice here in North America—the shortest night of the year. Between the Autumnal and Vernal Equinoxes, night is either equal to day or greater in length. The good news is that darkness is not without its rewards. When we sleep, we are gifted an abundant, rich source of material for exploring the shadow: our dreams.

Just now, I’m wondering if Mystery isn’t having its way with me, nudging me to explore the shadow at the time of year when we have the most light. Could this be the safest time all year to delve into this difficult and dangerous topic? Only one way to find out.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

Read part 3

New to Homecoming? Start here.

Today begins a limited series looking at the role of the shadow in considering alternatives to our inherited cultural stories. Madness, darkness, the untamed and unpredictable—what do we do with these fearful things? Fairy tales and myths always made a place for the shadow: the evil stepmother, the witch, the monster in the forest. The wild forest herself. The bottomless well, the unexplored cave, the labyrinth beneath the king’s castle. Those unknown, uncharted places that house beasts, witches, demons, and all manner of nasties.

These stories mirror our own psyches—at least that was the understanding for quite a long time. We tend now to prefer our villains to live outside of us, so we can point to them and say, “Not I.” The problem with that is, we impoverish ourselves by offloading our inner darkness onto other people, real or fictional. As Carl Jung teaches us:

“Wholeness . . . is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.”

We’ll begin the series with a tale that came to me from wherever stories care born with the simple request that I share it.

In the time and the place before human beings came to live on Earth, they were beings of spiritlovelight without form. Because she could not do it herself, the Creator asked them to take form, to go and live on the earth, and feel and hear and see and feel and taste of her magnificent creations. The human beings recognized that this request was a great honor and were humbled by it. And a little confused.

“O, Creator,” they said, “when you can ask any of your creatures — the brilliant eagle of the skies or the noble elephant — why do you choose us?”

“I have designed you for a unique purpose. You are the voice of my creation. You will tell the stories, paint the pictures, sing the music, and dance the dances. You will celebrate the resonance and beauty of the world. You will convey her boundless mystery and intricacy to please and help each other.”

The human beings were awed by this assignment. “O, Creator, please guide us,” they implored. “What must we know in order to fulfill this role successfully?”

“That will be for you to discover. It’s all a grand experiment. Do consider this one thing: balance the opposites. You will experience — and, indeed, cause — great extremes: passionate love and searing heartbreak, freedom and slavery, connection and separation. You will story and paint and sing and dance the edges of balance.”

So the human beings came to Earth and for many years fulfilled their role admirably. They created rituals and ceremonies, enlisting the help of their brothers and sisters, the animals and plants. In return for this help, they made a great many promises to their relations, promises which bound them ever more firmly to Earth and her treasures.

Eventually, the human beings began to forget their role. Their great curiosity led them to make astonishing discoveries. Their new knowledge caused them to chafe at the opposites. They grew rigid. They cringed and ducked from some opposites and forcibly changed others to fit their ideas. They denied the ceremonies and declined to participate in the rituals. Eventually, the ceremonies and rituals were forgotten, along with the purpose behind them.

Instead, when human beings encountered opposites — which, being the way of the world, continued to occur — they aligned with one side or another. And when these groups encountered each other, each worked very hard to convince the other of its mistake. Some made eloquent arguments supported by philosophy; others drew data into elaborate formulas to theorize their truth. If they failed to convince the other side, they would try forcible conversion. Failing that, wars were fought.

To escape the brutalities of force and war, the human beings turned to their religions, especially soothed by the teachings that said opposites are only illusion, a trick of form on Earth. Very wise persons taught that there is only the Oneness, the Light of All Energy. They taught practices, such as meditation and prayer, to help people experience the bliss of escape from opposites, a state they called non-duality.

What the human beings forgot is that the Creator knows that part, the bliss of Oneness. It’s the experience of contradiction that she’s interested in. That was the point of this experiment, this world. That was the point of day and night, of winter and summer, good and evil, truth and lies, justice and tyranny, the creative, dynamic balance of opposites. The whole entire point.

Shadow part 2

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

Thanks for reading. I love and appreciate you all. If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

New to Homecoming? Start here.

I was finally able to get a few blurry photos of our ever-elusive Heron. She was gorging on the little fish (menhaden?) that live in our cove, so I jumped in the kayak and paddled over. Of course, that pissed her off so she flew into a tree. It’s wild to see a massive bird with a six-foot wingspan land on a delicate branch with such grace.

Besides the Heron, there’s more magic in the air. sums it up well with this Note:

I was delighted to jump into several conversations there with unabashed animists like myself (okay, I’ll admit to being somewhat abashed at times. . . ). It’s a treat to connect with fellow travelers, a phenomenon I wrote about a while back in “Finding Our Niche.”1

One of the commenters recommended this podcast, which is marvelous:

Also recently, the psychologist and mythologist reposted an interview where she goes deep into narrative psychology, magical thinking, and “all that restorying malarkey.” It’s an uncomfortable place to be, this awareness that our cultural narrative is, as the podcast relates, a radical departure from the experiences and cultures of 99% of human history. After all, stories created the world we live in today. They’re a powerful technology.

“The power of stories in wider social change is more complicated, but at the most basic level, it is clear that if you can change individuals, a few at a time, social shifts will occur. Once you’ve figured out what your own story is, then you can start to take it out into your own community.”2

I’m still figuring out my own story, with the help of wise mentors, inspired writers and storytellers, dear friends, and brilliant readers. Meanwhile, stories are a great source of nourishment, and there’s no better storyteller than Brian Doyle. I hope you enjoy these thoughts on one of my favorite books, Mink River. Heron even puts in an appearance.

A while back, my ancestors chose to deny their entanglement with the living world. Instead, they made an org chart with human beings at the top and the rest of nature below us. It’s a lonely legacy, this estrangement from brown bears and beetles, clouds, crabs, herons and honeybees, humpbacks, lemurs and larkspur, monarchs and maize, oaks and uncountable others. That story of separation and superiority still dominates while the Earth burns and civility unravels.

If only we could rediscover these relationships with non-humans, we might treasure them more and stop all this ecocide. We might begin to wonder how we could ever see a tree as mere timber, a river as a turbine driver, a mountain only as minerals. What if, instead, we meet them as sacred beings, as mysteries, lifeblood, kin?

Before reading Brian Doyle’s novel, Mink River, I didn’t have a good model for how my stories might restore those lost relationships. I didn’t quite believe it was possible to conjure that long-lost intimacy using the rational tool of language.

I’ll borrow the words of the great American architect, Louis I. Kahn, to express how writing feels to me: “A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and, in the end, must be unmeasurable.” I am in awe of the magic by which material things—words or bricks or dancing bodies—can be assembled to convey immaterial truths.

I read Mink River during my Fiction MFA program and was mesmerized by Doyle’s deftness with the craft of writing the unmeasurable. The narrator opens with a brilliant torrent of verbs: “so many stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves to one another and to the stories of the creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see. . .” The sentence goes on for a whole paragraph and ends with this: “But you sure can try to catch a few, yes?”

Many tellers and many listeners, and not all human? Sign me up. Sentences that go on for days with few or no commas? Yes, please! Doyle immersed me in a many-voiced, many-eared world. His omniscient narration flows from character to character as fluidly as the river at the heart of his fanciful town.

My quest to hear / imagine / write the voices of nature has been a long time coming. Remember the picture books we had as kids when animals could talk and implausible things happened as a matter of course? Why are those just for kids? I never shook the feeling that there’s more to this thing we call “reality” than we tend to notice. Salman Rushdie claims that magical realism is more real than ordinary reality, and I get what he means.

Still, I hadn’t dared to try it myself, until the mid-2010s after reading an essay by Paul Kingsnorth asking why can’t fiction writers do this? We use our imaginations to inhabit other human consciousnesses all the time. Why not a tree? Or a salmon, or a river, or a raven? Though I was excited by this charge, I also wondered if it was naive of me to even try to write. How could I evoke experiences that defy language, using language?

Save for human to human relationships, I wasn’t taught about reciprocity. I wasn’t taught by any tradition that understands animacy and kinship. But that doesn’t mean such strange consciousnesses aren’t possible, or real. It just means I was oblivious to them.

Doyle dares to hear and record for the reader the thoughts of a bear, a salmon, a raven. Mink River is so full of treasure, it’s difficult to find just the right quote to convey, in ecophilosopher David Abram’s words, “the magic of the real.” He begins with an omniscient, cinematic, aerial pan of the town, but within a page and a half, he attaches to an eagle swooping low to pick up a treasure, which turns out to be a piece of cardboard. He imagines the eagle as pompous and bombastic:

“I am one bad-ass flying machine, this weird flat brown bird didn’t get away from me, no sir, nothing can elude my lightning deftness in the air…” (p.12)

One of my favorite characters is this bear, who rescues a boy after a bike accident:

“She cradles the boy in her huge dark arms and rumbles uphill right through the bushes. This animal is broken, she thinks. It smells bloody. The blood makes her hungry. She remembers the ground squirrels. The word for ground squirrel in the language of bears is meat in holes.” (p.72)

Everyone in this town is open to the intimacy of animacy. During his recovery, the boy’s grandfather tells a story of walking for days to meet his guardian spirit:

“That was how I met Heron and we have been friends all these years since. I see herons all the time and whenever I meet a heron we have a good talk. A few herons just want to talk about fish and frogs but most of them have very interesting minds indeed. They have seen so many things and they forget nothing. That’s just how they are. They are very quiet. Their eyes are restless and burning. They don’t say much but when they do it is worth hearing. They say a lot of things that make you laugh if you listen carefully. That’s just how they are.” (p.112)

Fresh out of grad school as an intern architect, I discovered and embraced sustainability. It just made sense to me. Buildings and cities use a lot of materials and energy, and they disrupt local ecosystems. I was inspired by mentors who approached design holistically, seeking not only to do less harm, but to restore and repair the damage. In those days, most clients were skeptical or even apathetic. Everyone thought it would cost more to design efficient, interdependent buildings. I struggled with how to message this, how to motivate people, and wake them up.

At first, I tried gloom-n-doom warnings, flashing images of oil-slicked Alaskan seabirds and spoiled Gulf of Mexico coastlines, polar bears balancing on tiny bits of ice, New Orlineans trapped on their rooftops after Katrina. I didn’t know then that despair shuts off the creative, imaginative parts of our brain. We go into fight (denial) or flight (apathy)—neither of which are useful for paradigm-shifting, system-changing work. I would often say, We can do so much better, we know how, we have the tools—without realizing that I’d already lost 98% of my audience.

I grew restless and began to see architecture as too limiting, too beholden to the patronage of privilege and money. I felt complicit and trapped in a system, a culture that’s so disconnected from the natural world that people have stopped caring. Instead of preaching a message of efficiency and repair, I needed to get myself out there and actually connect. For a time, I left my drawing board and my computer and went to wild places in search of direct experiences with non-human beings.

A stream in the Tetons sought the vicarious experience of verticality and urged me to stand in the frigid water with arms raised high. I said yes. A triple tulip poplar in West Virginia requested I take selfies—of the tree, not of me. I said yes. An eastern box turtle near the Shenandoah invited me to gaze for an hour with my watercolors at her intricate patterned shell. I said yes.

I’d be so happy if one of my stories could motivate a reader to sit and marvel among moss in a shady patch of forest. Or maybe to befriend their local stream. After these and other encounters, I always feel calm and appreciative, in awe of the mystery of it all. I feel small and humble, modest and hopeful. All this life has been here long before me and will be here long after I’m gone. Why not enjoy and appreciate it while I’m here? Such pleasures are a powerful antidote to despair and anxiety.

In Mink River, Brian Doyle says yes to an animate, interconnected, untamable world. His craft is an endless source of lessons and inspiration to explore, engage, and conjure unmeasurable delights with words. His writing is my beloved teacher in the art of rewriting my relationship with the wild world.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

Thanks for reading. I love and appreciate you all. If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

New to Homecoming? Start here.

I’m recovering from acute Achilles tendonitis, my first sports-related injury. It’s been a slow, methodical process that has increased my admiration for the wonders of human anatomy and physiology. This is the story of how, at the depth of my frustration and discouragement, something amazing happened. It’s not as boring as a complete pain-free cure, no. This is far better.

For the first five decades of my life, I ran only in dreams.1 In waking life, I preferred cycling, which you can do sitting down. And weight training in an air-conditioned gym. And yoga for the savasana nap at the end (duh).

But in 2018, I set aside good judgment and joined a 10k training group. Between the camaraderie of running buddies, the euphoria of endorphins, and the ready excuse to buy new shoes every year, I was hooked. Events are the most fun: the festive vibe, crowds holding funny signs, crossing the finish line, getting a sweet medal hung around your neck, the party at the end. It’s all the best!

Last March, I struggled through DC’s Rock-n-roll Half Marathon with my worst time by far out of the ten that I’ve run. What did I expect? I was busy and for the first time lacked the discipline to stick with my training program. Injury was a natural consequence. Following my eventual abysmal finish, my right heel was so painful, I could barely walk.

My physical therapist is an angel. She gets me. Though she may be half my age, she doesn’t dumb it down. She’s challenging me to rebuild my stride, body position, and strength from the literal ground up. I now do crazy bodyweight exercises on my tiptoes—like split stance lunges, posterior slider lunges, and heel-raise wall sits.2 We’re working on my torso rotation for esoteric reasons I won’t bore you with here.

Now for the amazing part. I’ve been entirely focused on the physical aspects of my injury and slow recovery, which has led, I admit, to some discouragement. The French word for heart, coeur, beats within our word courage, and still I forget that dis-courage-ment is a literal disconnection from my heart. Fortunately, last weekend, I was reminded that there is so much more than the physical to my experience of life in a body.

The Earth loves us

This happened on the final day of our annual Heroine’s Journey retreat at a beautiful land trust of over 200 acres in the DC suburbs. It’s a special place—fields, ponds, forests, and streams surrounded by McMansions and strip malls. In this time of motherlessness and unravelling, many of us long to renew our lost groundedness. We gathered to reconnect with the earth and with each other, and to nourish our mythic imaginations.

My co-leaders and I offered stories, poetry, drumming, sacred circle dance, intimate conversations, and wandering the land to encounter marvels. Together with twenty-five women, we made spirals and origami butterflies, shared a powerful retelling of Ariadne’s story, and drummed around a fire circle to welcome the rising full moon.

She Told Me the Earth Loves Us

She said it softly, without a need 
for conviction or romance.
After everything? I asked, ashamed. 

That's not the kind of love she meant.
She walked through a field of gray 
beetle-pored pine, snags branching

like polished bone. I forget sometimes
how trees look at me with the generosity 
of water. I forget all the other 

breath I'm breathing in. 
Today I learned that trees can't sleep
with our lights on. That they knit 

a forest in their language, their feelings. 
This is not a metaphor. 
Like seeing a face across a crowd, 

we are learning all the old things, 
newly shined and numbered. 
I'm always looking 

for a place to lie down
and cry. Green, mossed, shaded. 
Or rock-quiet, empty. Somewhere

to hush and start over. 
I put on my antlers in the sun. 
I walk through the dark gates of the trees. 

Grief waters my footsteps, leaving 
a trail that glistens. 
 
Copyright © 2020 by Anne Haven McDonnell. 
From All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis (One World, 2020), edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson.
 

On the final day, we held a group walk through a lovely labyrinth of cobblestones and moss, serenaded by birds and witnessed by poplars, oaks, maples, and other kin. My friend Lisa drummed the beat of our hearts, our footfalls. My heel was tight and complaining about the miles of hiking I’d done the day before. As I walked, discouraged and fretting, to the rhythm of the drum, I heard the Earth’s voice.

Step on my body. Pour out your pain and grief through your feet.

I was suddenly aware of all that I’d bottled up for months. All that I’d been holding in, stewing and raging. My horror and fear had knotted into tight despair. The Earth said:

Release release let go. I will heal you with each step. Each step a prayer.

Move, swing, spiral. Each step a prayer.

As I walked, my pain dissolved. As we passed each other, the women in the labyrinth hugged, grasped hands, smiled, wept. Sacred tears of sisterhood. Of recognition. Of suffering shared and held.

We go into the labyrinth to be remade

Ariadne was known in ancient Crete as the Lady of the Labyrinth. Her story is an invitation to go into the labyrinth to be remade. My injury, my pain is physical, yes. And it’s also a spiritual wound of pent-up panic, grief, alarm, and outrage.

I left the labyrinth with a promise. Every step I take back to health will be a prayer. Running is how I love my body, and now, more consciously, how I love the Earth. Running is my offering. My gratitude to the Earth, my mother, who loves me. My physical body may be flawed or limited, but it’s also precious as the conduit to feel-hear-experience the Earth’s many voices. Always.

Since that time a week ago, my heel pain has been at most a 2 out of 10, where for months it has hovered between 3 and 8. Best of all, I have a new training mantra, as I prepare for the Chicago Half Marathon in late September.

Every step a prayer.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

Thanks for reading. I love and appreciate you all. If you enjoyed this, please share and comment. It’s always wonderful to hear from you. Stay safe and take good care.

“Sometimes it feels like nature is writing through me rather than me writing about nature. I love being a channel; when that happens, my best writing comes through.” ~ Annette Naber

Welcome to Season 3 of the Reciprocity interviews that celebrate authors of lovingly observed essays and photographs of special places, whose work tends relationships with humans and all beings.

Today’s guest, left a successful psychology career in Washington DC to become a homesteader and land steward in the Virginia Highlands. She tries to live lightly on the earth and helps others connect to nature through forest bathing, foraging classes, and retreats.

Annette’s newsletter provides appealing doses of inspiration, currently as part of the global art challenge, The 100 Day Project. On Day 1 back in February, she shared a list of ways that she calms her nervous system — including watching birds, tending houseplants, sowing seeds, and planning retreats (more about those at the end). And she has deeper dives into topics such as 'Plant Blindness,’ a condition linked to nature deficit disorder.2

Annette’s newsletter can be found at the link below. Her author website is here.

Seasons of a Wild Life

Nature re-connection through our senses, creative expression, imagination, mythology and archetypes.

By Annette Naber

Why are you drawn to nature writing?

Nature nourishes and sustains me, inspires me, gives me sensory experiences and symbolic messages. I draw many of my metaphors from the cycles of plants, the animals I see around me and the forces of nature I get to witness. Sometimes it feels like nature is writing through me rather than me writing about nature. I love being a channel; when that happens, my best writing comes through.

How does writing about nature affect you, in your work or personal life?

Nature writing flows out of my work and, in turn, informs my work in an organic way — I teach foraging classes, guide people through forest bathing experiences, and facilitate personal growth retreats richly infused with nature. While I have a background as a clinical psychologist and so learned to hold space for individuals and groups, my own experiences and understanding of nature expand my ability to show up for others and deepen their experience in nature.

Also, encouraged by reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings, I am deepening my exploration of reciprocity with nature in my personal life and in my work with others. How can we make our exchanges with nature bi-directional; how can we leave something of value behind instead of only taking from nature?

While outside, have you ever experienced feeling small, lost or in danger? 

Yes, I often feel small when I look over the endless mountain ranges here in the Highlands of Virginia which connect seamlessly with the wilds of West Virginia. I often feel small when I stand by the ocean and feel its powerful rhythm pulsing in my veins, take in its immensity, and sense its ancientness in my bones. I felt danger when I unexpectedly faced a mountain lion on my own property. I described that visceral experience and extracted its symbolic meaning for our own sense of wildness vs. domestication and disconnection from nature in my book, Seasons of a Wild Life.

What’s a favorite memory of nature from your childhood?

As a child, roaming freely through the fields and meadows on the outskirts of my little town in Germany where I grew up. Finding plums, cherries, and apples to eat, gathering wild blueberries and mushrooms with my family, or picking wildflowers by myself. As a teenager, I had a transcendent experience of coming across a beautiful scene on a bicycle path lined with wildflowers. Everything was still shiny and wet from a brief rain. I stopped my bicycle to marvel at the beauty and all of a sudden my entire life unfolded in front of me, I understood where I had been and where I was headed. It was all crystal clear in that moment — but afterwards, I could never describe it to anyone or even put it in writing. It was my first consciously spiritual experience of nature.

What do you hope for, for your writing? 

I hope that my writing inspires others to seek their own deeply meaningful experiences in nature. As I write in the Introduction to my book: “I hope Seasons of a Wild Life encourages you to apprentice yourself to whatever environment you find yourself in, and that you allow yourself to be nourished, enchanted, and more rooted by the place you inhabit. I offer [my writing] in the spirit of healing: may we recognize our deeper purpose of being and nudge our inner nature toward a more conscious reconnection with nature around us.” (p.4)

A writer or other creative artist who makes you hopeful for humanity and the earth.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry – for her creative integration of scientific knowledge, subjective experience, and ancestral wisdom. I also found Paul Hawken’s Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation very inspiring. He addresses the challenges faced by the major biozones on our planet, how they are affected by the climate crisis, and proven ways we can contribute to make things better.

Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Indigenous Climate Action. They envision a world with sovereign and thriving Indigenous Peoples and cultures leading climate justice for all. Track past and current recipients here.

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Notes and links

Two upcoming retreats led by today’s guest, Annette Naber:

These reatreats bring together her love for nature and her skills in helping people immerse themselves deeply in nature.

Nature Reconnection: Crafting A Deeper Bond with the Earth, June 12-14, 2026 at Yogaville in Virginia. More info here.

Between Tides: Nature, Creativity & Renewal, October 8-11, 2026 on Chincoteague Island, Virginia. More info here.

Participate in the Reciprocity series. . .

If you’d like to participate in this interview series, please DM me on chat, or reach out via email: gabrielli-dot-julie-at-gmail. Find previous interviews and an anthology of the first two years here.

Until Substack offers a ‘Nature’ category. . .

curates this lovely directory of nature-focused writers:

HOME | Nature Directory

This must be the place! It's a beautiful world and these writers and artists will inspire you with their love of our only home.

By Wildheart