Nature Spirit

A crocodile, a virus, and the false promise of supremacy

November 20, 2020 Leave a Comment

Transcript As the pandemic rages now through the heartland, I’m trying hard to understand how so many people in this country can be so convinced that this coronavirus is not real—even some people who are dying of it. Maybe you heard the interview this week with a nurse in South Dakota who says the some… Read More…

The law is in the ground

October 30, 2020 Leave a Comment

Transcript This week, with our attention on the Supreme Court, I was thinking a lot about one sentence on law that was spoken many years ago by an Aboriginal man of Australia. Doug Campbell was sitting one day with the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, looking at a large hill across the way. “You see that… Read More…

Loving the Earth: A new traditional value

October 16, 2020 Leave a Comment

Transcript I’m listening hard these days to voices that have a lot to say about the Earth crises we’re in. Voices that are sharing a wealth of ideas about where to go from here. Many of those voices belong to Indigenous people and young people. And what I hear from all of them sounds something… Read More…

Reimagining community

October 2, 2020 5 Comments

Transcript So this coronavirus is a great demystifier. It’s pulling aside the curtain on fractures in our society, the weak places that keep us from pulling together as a community during a pandemic. Fractures like racism and inequality. And today I’d like to talk about something that underlies all the weak points, and that is… Read More…

Everything is alive and we are all relatives

September 18, 2020 Leave a Comment

Transcript “Everything is alive, and we are all relatives.” The sentence showed up in an essay I read this week by a Native Hawaiian philosopher named Manulani Aluli Meyer. Manulani was quoting a teacher of hers who said that this one sentence, with its two simple ideas, is what Indigenous peoples from around the world… Read More…

Finding beauty in tough times

September 4, 2020 6 Comments

Transcript I think back to the early months after the 2016 election. Sleepless nights. Shock. We had a feeling about what was coming, and we were not wrong. In the middle of those early weeks, I started posting a nature photo every day on Facebook. Out of my decades of sunsets and birds and mountains… Read More…