“If you look at the field beside the road and you see merely the generic ‘meadow,’ you’re less likely to care if it’s bulldozed for a strip mall than you are if you know that those tall, flat-leaved spires are milkweed, upon which the monarchs have flown two thousand miles to feed, or if you can name sailer's breaches and purslane, lamb’s-quarter, or the big umbrels of wild carrot feeding the small multitudes. Isn't the world larger and more valuable, if you know what an umbel is?” –Mark Doty Do you know what an umbel is? A cluster of blooms, sprouting from a common center. A collection of...

share your spiritual biography in 10 words, or less: I'm a Healer and Practitioner on the Emotional Karmic Body. where are you turning for soul nourishment / joy / aliveness? I've been turning to my inner-work for soul nourishment. Through my self-nurturing rituals and my somatic therapeutic techniques for deep grief, I consecrate my body as my own altar - a portal of love, dignity, & miracles. what is a text you hold sacred? My childhood journal that has held and kept me for the past 27 years of wisdom. Her words are my guidance, my reflection, and my degree for the work I do now. what...

A week or so ago, a dear neighbor and I found ourselves sitting together in the sun-drenched afternoon heat, sweating, raising a toast to memorialize the trees that another neighbor had cut down. The trees were old, and cedar, and the aromatic scent of their vibrant aliveness lingered in the air. I have loved these trees dearly, and cried when the chainsaws came for them–these very trees offered shelter and shade to my ancestors, great-grandparents who died before my birth, whose presence and absence I feel deeply, and daily. This neighbor’s 4 year old and I scooped handfuls of the fragrant...

share your spiritual biography in 10 words, or less: turn towards that which nourishes you again and again where are you turning for soul nourishment / joy / aliveness? listening to the seemingly hundreds of birds that live on my busy city street provides instant grounding and transport to nature despite the context. a special delight comes if i can spot a specific little bird who is chirping near me and I can see their beak opening and their chest puffing up to send out their song. and the music of beautiful chorus, toni jones, and chris-n-teeb almost every day! what is a text you hold...

I spent an hour or so yesterday afternoon in the woods I frequent most often, pulling garlic mustard from the rain-softened earth. Garlic mustard can be medicine, but it is also invasive, and destroys biodiversity. The roots release chemicals that alter mycelial networks connecting native plants, and passing nourishment between trees. Garlic mustard emerges early in the spring and grows fast; the heart shaped leaves take up too much space, too quickly, at the cost of other forms of aliveness. And yet, garlic mustard has its own offerings, and I tucked a handful of leaves into my pocket to...

“Dead Stars” – by Ada Limón Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing. Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us. Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels so mute it’s almost in another year. I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying. We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder. It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn some new constellations. And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus, Draco,...