Practicing Terraphilia with Susan J Tweit

This week opens our Terraphilia Book Club discussion of Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience & Creative Power. I’m looking forward to hearing what you think about the book, what Macy and Johnstone’s examples and thought-exercises have prompted for you, and any ways they’ve changed your perspective or practices.

Mid-autumn in my Northern Hemisphere valley smells of leaf-mold and fermenting apples, of soil breathing and big sagebrush talking in its signature scent. It’s the season of life turning inward, of humans honoring those who have passed on to the spirit world. Hence this month’s contemplative practice: creating personal, everyday altars to remind us to stop, reflect and listen within. First though, some housekeeping and a follow-up to last week’s Good Terra News.

Hello, Friends, The news these days is grim, but there are good things happening for this earth and we who share the planet. To remind us that all is not lost, I’m starting a monthly “Good Terra News” post featuring something positive happening in the more-than-human world, the world that our lives and our spirits depend on.

terraphilia n. An intrinsic affection for and connection to the earth and its community of lives. Without this bond we are lonely, lacking, no longer whole. Hello Friends, Because so many of you are new to this newsletter, I want to re-introduce myself and my mission: I am a botanist and writer, author of 13 books of creative non-fiction and more essays, articles and columns than I can count (or frankly, remember!).

This is where we begin: by acknowledging that our times confront us with realities that are painful to face, difficult to take in, and confusing to live with. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself feeling anxious, defeated, or in despair. … [Yet] our very act of facing the mess we’re in can help us discover a more enlivening sense of what our lives are about, what we’re here to do, and what we’re truly capable of.

[In the forest at Gombé], I felt this spiritual power in every living thing. We call it our soul. Well if we have a soul, then that spark of energy is in chimpanzees, they have souls. And the trees, they have a soul, too. They’ve got a spark of that divine energy.

Hello, Friends, Welcome to the first month of my Year of Contemplative Practice project. Once a month, I’ll reflect on a different contemplative practice, something any of us can embrace to bring spiritual awareness to our daily lives. I write not as an expert, simply as someone interested in deepening my relationship to the sacred and to this living earth in a time of wrenching change.

Hello, Friends, Sometimes the world breaks our hearts. I woke this morning with that sentence in my head, as if it came out of my dreams, which have been more than usually urgent lately. In them, I am searching fruitlessly for something that must be found now, or I am attempting to herd unaware loved ones away from imminent danger, or bashing and thrashing my way through impenetrable obstacles…. You know those “can’t get there from here” sorts of dreams, I am sure.

Hello Friends! Today is my birthday and I’m throwing myself a yard party, which means I have cooking and organizing and preparing to do. So this will be a short post to reintroduce myself to all who are new here, and share some videos from my work. I am trained as a botanist studying the relationships that co-create this world, the interdependencies between plants and animals, including humans; plants and other plants; and plants and their environment.