Priscilla Stuckey

Reconnecting people with nature through writing and spirituality

Nature :: Spirit

the blog of Priscilla Stuckey

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attitudes toward animals

21. Committing to your hunger

Transcript If you’ve ever watched a nature documentary, you’ve seen a clip of it—a lion with muscles rippling sweeping across the savanna toward a zebra or gazelle. The lion is fully committed to the chase, bursting into top speed at a moment’s notice to satisfy their hunger. When it comes to getting their food, animals…  Read More…

19. Filling the hungry with good things: A Christmas meditation

Transcript I can still say the words from memory—Luke 2:1–20, King James Version, the verses I recited for the Christmas program at church when I was in grade school. It’s the story of the baby in the manger and the shepherds and the angels. Recently I took another look at the Christmas story in Luke,…  Read More…

Snuggle for survival

The phrase leaped out at me—from the pages of Scientific American, no less. Martin Nowak, a mathematician, biologist, and director of a program in evolutionary theory at Harvard, was arguing that cooperation, not just competition, advances evolution. In Nowak’s words: Life is therefore not just a struggle for survival—it is also, one might say, a…  Read More…

The terror of letting go

A reader, Gwen, commented about the terror that arises when a person gives up old certainties. Here’s how I felt that fear in a new way. A few months ago I received an email from a friend I’ve known for decades. I’ll fuzz the details here to blur her identity. Recently, after raising a family,…  Read More…

What Is natural? What Is supernatural?

“Natural” and “supernatural” used to be easy to tell apart. The natural world followed laws of nature—in short, anything we can see and touch. The supernatural did not. Mind-body split The division makes sense if you accept the idea of Descartes (borrowed from Plato and the Greeks) that mind and body are separate. After Descartes,…  Read More…