The bougainvillea around my kitchen window many years ago showed me something so precious that it changed me for good. It helped me work my slow way beyond the dualistic world of Descartes and toward a world of kinship. Today, some reflections on the decades it can take to step into a relational worldview, a world where every being and element in nature is alive, everyone is speaking, and everyone has wisdom to share.

A morning filled with hope and joy on Maui as volunteers gather at a greenhouse to care for the plants who will help to restore the native dryland forest at the top of Haleakalã. Reflecting on what it means to live in a sacred way.

Wading into the troubled waters of election integrity. There's a new field of study called election forensics that applies statistical analysis to public election data. Careful analysis of the 2024 election raises some serious questions.

To stand up to fascism, the most important thing we can do, every day, is to plant ourselves firmly in the truth. We talk today about how we recognize what is true—by finding the place of the heart. Guided by Ilarion Merculieff of the Unangan people of the Pribilof Islands and by my own teacher, we reflect on the differences between linear thinking and the awareness arising in the heart. We talk about how finding the heart means taking a vacation from the thinking mind and entering a place of greater ease and spaciousness, where we can lead with empathy and letting-be. Centering oneself in the heart, every day, leads to clear perception and wiser, humbler ways of living.

Third in a series on living in authoritarian times. Today: staying seated in the firmness of our own knowing, our own heart. We look at three daily practices for support: Touching silence, touching joy, and touching Earth. Each of them helps us declare daily independence from those who would try to control us, building a foundation of resistance from the inside out. And a close look at my own daily practice combining all three: waking up with the birds and enjoying the dawn chorus.

Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, grabs me hard because her story resonates so deeply with mine. So today I use both of our stories to explore mental abuse or epistemic abuse—attacking the mind of another, trying to control how and what they think. It’s key to authoritarianism. And we explore the 2000-year-old form of authoritarianism in Western history and how it rests on a religious idea that took hold as Rome was crumbling. The fixes we need today run even deeper than education because the academy too is rooted in authoritarian patterns, as Indigenous thinkers such as Daniel Wildcat (Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma) and Ilarion Merculieff (Unangan) remind us. We need a new worldview—one that begins with the knowing inside us, honoring the waters of life within each one.

When the failing avocado tree in our yard suddenly puts out perfect creamy fruit, and I find out it was because the compost I made healed the tree, I feel a kind of joy that has something a lot bigger to say about thriving. What the avocado tree teaches about right relations—between people or between countries—and how to build the kind of world where everybody can flourish.

Do we have everything within us to make good decisions? When Abraham Maslow lived among the Blackfoot people, he learned their answer was yes. Today we hear from Indigenous voices on knowing from within, or “sovereignty of mind.” And we look at the long habit in Western history of defining knowledge instead as the ideas handed down from outside authorities—a habit feeding the rise of authoritarianism and fascism today. Plus a moment from my own life when I took a step toward reuniting with my own heart.