Midnight blue water rested at the horizon under a brightening sky, framing shafts of pine and fir at shore’s edge. It was a July dawn in 1995, and I was visiting Lopez Island, off the coast of Seattle, birdwatching. Bald … Read More…
Tag Archives: animism
I grew up in a small white house at the very edge of a tiny town in northwest Ohio. Beside the house my parents had planted just a few years before my birth a cut-leaf weeping birch tree, Betula pendula … Read More…
Over the weekend I attended a conference on religion, ethics, and nature at Ohio Northern University, where one of the keynote speakers was David Abram. A dozen years ago Abram wrote a book that for me worked magic. It became … Read More…
Following Karen Armstrong’s remarks on idols, I’ve been thinking about idolatry in relation to our view of nature. We are wedded to the view that nature lacks mind–to the extent that alternatives to this view, from pantheism to animism, are … Read More…
Last week while I was at Prescott College, where I teach in the grad programs, I had a wonderful conversation with Mary Sweeney, who also teaches there. Mary is a cofounder of Her Feet on the Earth, a nonprofit that … Read More…
My sweetie and I met two recent Buddhist acquaintances at a “fast world-food” place last night for dinner, just before the start of their meditation meeting. By way of getting to know one another better, one of our new friends … Read More…