Today I'm thinking about magical creatures, those beings that "live" at the edge of reality and Nature, as it is commonly understood. Fairies, dragons, mermaids, unicorns, and the phoenix are all examples that come to my Celtic-American mind and play a powerful role in human consciousness; across other cultures there are countless more. Some people wholeheartedly still believe in their existence, others want to believe but seem to perceive them more as benevolent sources of f

Until fairly recently, I never thought much about this question. Most of my life I just passively assumed that whatever Nature forms--plants, trees, birds, animals, rocks--existed within the bounds of a person's property line were also owned by the person whose name was on the property deed. This meant then that "Old Man Jackson's apple tree" and all the apples it produced were in fact the property of that wizened, gritty farmer, regardless of the fact that the apple tree had

Do you ever wonder what has spirit and what doesn't? Surprisingly as a spiritual person, I never consciously thought about it until some years ago. I've always recognized the aliveness of the natural world around me--it's easy to perceive that animals, plants, birds, insects, and trees have life. If they didn't, they'd die! And I've helped many a mosquito and house plant on their way into the hereafter, albeit the latter unintentionally. But what about stones, rivers, oc

It's Mother's Day! Happy, happy to the great nurturers in the world. <3 Whether you are taking tender care of your child/ren or other family, your fur babies or avians, your plants, neighbors, community, students, projects, or even your own tired/stressed/lonely self, you are doing important work in the world. Imagine if everyone was consciously focused on caring for Other; I venture to say the world would look pretty different. Who's the greatest "mother" you know? They may

Continuing on from my last post, I'm thinking about what makes our life our own, and one worth living. In my own experience and from what I've learned from companioning clients the last three decades, often we end up living a life we didn't actively choose and aren't particularly enjoying. How many of us went into careers our parents wanted for us, chose partners for the wrong reasons, hung out with people whose company we didn't really enjoy (and vice versa), wore high heels

I don't spend a lot of time on social media, but when I do dabble in online exploration, one of the things I find most striking is what an extraordinary diversity of input there is available to me, or to anyone. Depending how curious I am, inside of five minutes I can check out who wore what to the Met Gala, find recommendations for a kibble-free diet for my beloved senior pooch (Happy 12th birthday, Whitley!), read about an ecovillage near Cairo, Egypt, watch a high school t

In the way, way back, thousands of years before even Common Era (CE), humans lived in communities that were deeply connected to the natural world around them, recognizing everything as animate and living in reciprocal harmony to support and sustain a healthy balance that worked for all. Over time, in Western cultures things changed dramatically. Our world views became focused on the individual, the masculine, the mechanical, the scientific, and the religious (not so much the

Welcome to my new site and my first blog! As part of a project on sustainability for a class I'm taking, I've set my intention to write about the effect of psychological well-being on pro-environmental behavior (PEB). PEB, it’s a thing! I have a theory, an informal hypothesis born of a long career as a mental health clinician, which is this: Simply put, when we feel good inside ourselves and about our life—peaceful, happy, centered, and grateful—we are more likely to care abo