nature

Tree.fm: Listen to Forests Around the World and Plant Some Trees

The past week working at our desk, we listened to soundscapes of forests in Malaysia, Estonia, Portugal, China and France… Through a remarkable website, we found ourselves transported into tranquil environments AND quickly able to gift trees to friends…

Cosmo Sheldrake’s Remarkable Musical Collaboration with Endangered Birds

Over 9 years at dawn, Cosmo Sheldrake carried recording gear, laptop, and sometimes a keybord into fields and woods to make music in collaboration endangered birds. The result is his new album Wake Up Calls; it is both charming and illuminating…

Life Lessons from the Forest

Ferris Jabr’s deeply-pleasurable “The Social Life of Forests” tells the story of scientist Susan Simard whose pioneering research changed the way we think about the fundamental nature of forests: as complex deeply-connected networks that allow trees to communicate and cooperate. It offers a powerful lesson for this time of pandemic.

Marina Abramovic’s Public Service Announcement

In this video, performance artist Marina Abramovic describes the tree therapy she developed many years ago in the Amazon rainforest. It has become part of her “Abramović Method,

Tiny Whale Videos Spark Dreamy Reverie

A therapist friend once described the idea of reverie as a tool for healing; dreamy meditation and daydreaming, free of anxious thinking, has a powerfully restful effect. That state is what I found myself in after I stumbled on these tiny videos…

Why Walk in Hard Times (Rilke)

We take a walk daily because it never fails to refresh our thinking, change our view of things, calm us. Especially, in these most stressful times. It is perhaps our most powerful medicine. Walking, we find our mind shifting, ideas sparking, problems beginning to yield in ways we never expect. Rilke nailed it in A Walk:…

The “o my god at the heart” of Trees

Some remarkable writings and images describing intimate encounters with trees got us thinking about what really happens when we sit inside one, climb one, sit in its embrace…

S.B. Dworski on Escape, Noodles, Ecstasy

Fueled by a quarantine fantasy of hiking the Appalachian Trail, S.B. Dworski’s path took her into unexpected territory…

The Subversive Mind-Altering Power of Random Poetry

I came to loving poetry late in life when I realized what was happening when I read a great one. It was just as Emily Dickinson described… subversive words with the power of a drug…

Life Lessons from 100 Days of Seeing Color in the Garden (Lorene Edwards Forkner)

After a particularly rough period of her life, artist and gardener Lorene Edwards Forkner embarked on an unusual daily practice, that quietly taught her some very big lessons.

Emerging Seeds’ Wild Dances of Joy (Hope Jahrens, Mary Oliver)

Boxlapse Films’ timelapses of seeds bursting through the soil are so wildly expressive, we found ourselves watching with a big grin on our face at the life force in action. It called to mind botanist Hope Jahren’s description of what seeds really do, and Mary Oliver on the very thing to dispel anxiety…

Carl Jung and Mary Oliver on Touching Nature from the Inside and Outside

This morning we came across extraordinary words from Carl Jung. They describe a wholeness of experience that antidotes the very modern idea that we are each self-contained. Soon after, a Mary Oliver poem echoed it…

Van Gogh and Gary Snyder Teach “Tree Intensity of Mind”

Recently, the actual living trees that were the subject of van Gogh’s last painting in 1890 were discovered near the small French town where he lived. A photograph of the trees superimposed with the painting brings to life Gary Snyder’s idea of “tree intensity of mind”, and amplifies our own experience mightily.