Transcending Mere Efficiency
In the noise of an efficiency and technology driven world, we find it difficult to hear and respond to what nature is saying. You can learn to listen and live in accord with a wisdom deep within reality.
Mending Broken Ties
Socio-economic practices push our interactions with the natural world toward bodily comfort and acquisitiveness, alienating us from our place in nature. By reconnecting with the natural world you can re-forge broken ties in your life.
Finding Our Place
We feel we’re missing something of being human in this world. If you find your place in stewarding nature, both giving and receiving, you fulfill both human nature and the order of the world around us.
What can I do?
STEP 1: Read Stewardship: A Plan for Everyone and pick a few action items to start restoring the natural order in your home.
STEP 2: Become a free LifeCraft Member and watch the Concepts Made Clear videos exploring nature.
STEP 3: What you eat reflects basic truths about human nature and the human difference. Evaluate you relationship with food by asking yourself the three questions in Start With How You Eat.
STEP 4: Reset your mind and body’s relationship with music by taking the Two Week Music Challenge.
STEP 5: See the library of Wednesday reflections below, in which I lay out more principles for stewardship, especially in every household, since the household is where caring for people and caring for the natural world come together, naturally.
Featured Posts:
Why are the Birds Singing This Morning?
“Whenever the sun shines warmly over the earth, the old males tune their pipe, and enliven the neighborhood with their song. By early April, the snows are all melting away, and nature again, in all the beauty of spring, promises happiness and abundance to the whole...
Our Lawn, Our Eden
Last spring I posted a piece on dandelions, after I had been struck by the preponderance of death-dealing chemicals in the ‘lawn and garden' section at the local big box store. Moved today by the appearance of tractors...
Recent Posts:
Mulch: Using Nature’s Plan for Life
“Art imitates nature.” Aristotle This growing season was dry. A number of trees, not to mention my garden, suffered. Upon seeing them losing leaves in early September, I asked my local state forester to look at my trees, both ornamental and native. His suggestion?...
Seeing is Seeing
For not only that we might act, but even when we intend to do nothing, we prefer sight, as we may say, to all the other senses. Aristotle, Metaphysics This year the fireflies have been stunning. Last night my wife and I were mesmerized; we just sat and looked. And we...
Delight Among the Oak Leaves
“When the cuckoo’s song is first heard among the oak leaves to the delight of mortals throughout the wide earth.” Hesiod, Works and Days What brings delight to people, or not, can show much about those people. Here Hesiod writes of what in his experience brings...
Planting Radishes: A Place to Begin
“Agriculture isn’t like other skills, where the pupil has to spend an exhausting amount of time at his lessons before his work is of a high enough quality to earn him a living. No, agriculture isn’t awkward to learn like that: all you need is to watch people working...
Remembering Spring
“Remember the time has come to plow again.” Hesiod, Works and Days Spring. It’s power never wanes. Once again we experience ourselves, especially in our bodies, as part of some great whole. Things are moving; and we are moved—though we might not know by what or to...
Of Dogs and Men
“But when he knew he heard Odysseus’s voice nearby, he did his best to wag his tail, nose down, with flattened ears, having no strength to move nearer his master. And the man looked away, wiping a salt tear from his cheek… If this old hound could show the form he had...
Some Matter Can See!
“By nature animals are born with the faculty of sensation..." Aristotle, Metaphysics Perhaps of all the wonders of the natural world none is as magnificent as this: some creatures can see. One almost shudders to ask: what does it mean to see something? Here perhaps we...
That Tree is Alive!
“Of natural bodies some have life in them, others do not.” Aristotle, On the Soul It seldom catches our attention. So easy is it for us to pass it by without noticing. That tree is alive. Choose the tree—it matters not which one: the specimen maple in...
Rediscovering Wonder
“For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.” Aristotle, Metaphysics When it comes to certain wonder-full things in the world around us, life experience can have a stultifying effect in our souls. We become...
Learning to See by Drawing
“The excellence of an artist, as such, depends wholly on the refinement of perception… I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing, and I would rather teach drawing that my students may learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature...
Dealing with Visual Noise
“There does exist something like visual noise, which just like the acoustical counterpart, makes clear perception impossible. One might perhaps presume the TV watchers, tabloid readers, and movie goers exercise and sharpen their eyes. But the opposite is true. The...
The Ability to See with Our Own Eyes
“Man’s ability to see is in decline. Those who nowadays concern themselves with culture and education will experience this fact again and again. We do not mean here, of course, the physiological sensitivity of the human eye. We mean here the spiritual capacity to...