I didn't grow up in a church community, though I had a brief love affair with the ritual I found in an Episcopal church in Oregon in my twenties. My legitimate quest to create a spiritual practice was birthed in middle age by borrowing from the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, and the strong connection I felt for the worship of the Earth as taught us by our first nations. In Native American cultures The Great Spirit is a deity intertwined with the fabric of the Universe and the web of the life on Earth. It wasn't until recent years I discovered my Wiccan roots and the pre-Christian possibility that my ancestors were Earth worshippers. When I started this journey I worried because I didn’t know how to pray. Turns out we all know how to pray through our love of and gratitude for the gifts of life. This vault is for those who, like me, hunger for a spiritual practice and are learning to braid their own.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

What Pachamama knew all along


Suzanne Simard is professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia where she has studied the forests for the past 30 years. Her work reveals complex, symbiotic networks under our forests that mimic our own neural and social networks. Dispelling the idea that nature competes for survival, she discovered that trees use underground fungi networks to communicate and share resources. Not to be missed is her TED Talk urging a revolution in forest practices.