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5 Steps to Be Brave

Danger takes many forms. For instance, reckless and impulsive behavior may lead to car accidents; the vagrancies of the environment might cause a dead branch to fall on a passing hiker; alcohol, or other judgment-impairing drugs, can lead to tragic overdoses. And then there is this: increased danger for people with certain characteristics that attract the attention of predatory actors. In nature, predators seek out the young, the sick, the injured, the old, the too slow, the too big, the too small, those who have a different color, making them easier to spot, etc. Any variation will place a target on the back of the individual, making them vulnerable. The herd is always the best protection for prey animals. Don’t stand out. Stay in the middle of the pack, run with the rest - at their speed and direction. Of course, humans are not herd animals, and while we definitely possess a “herd instinct,” there is evidence to suggest that for a large part of our history when we operated in a hunte...
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Personal Genius

Every spring I wander into a riparian landscape near Denver, CO, usually joined by my grown children and their various friends and partners, searching for the elusive blond morels (Morchella esculentoides) that fruit in this area. Morel season is brief and dependent on spring rains, which don't happen regularly in this part of the world. So when the showers finally do arrive you need to drop everything and just go. It's all about the thrill of the hunt, the excitement of discovery, and the tastiness of these weird-looking Ascomycetes.  The search always takes a long time, but once you hear the first, "I found one!" the rest are discovered en masse. I'm not a mycologist, but my guess is that the spread of each underground fungal organism, which is called its mycelium, sends up mushrooms simultaneously, which means you tend to find them in batches. Mycelium consists of microscopic threads called hyphae that join and tangle together to create a fibrous web. Mushrooms...
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Surfing the Wave in the Age of Fluidity

Introduction James Joyce famously wrote, "History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake." While I completely agree with the sentiment, I also believe that historical time anticipates and announces the  purpose of humankind . Meaning we could not reach the potential of our species without first developing a narrative that allowed us to build on our accomplishments, learn from our mistakes, and innovate into our future. Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna explained that history did not always exist, humorously saying, “It was not installed with the rocks.” Rather, it was created through the advent of writing, which recorded and “immortalized” the actions of individuals. Instead of the eternal repetition of mythic events – “We plant wheat this way because that is how the First Man planted wheat,” or “We build our city this way because God formed the world in this same pattern,” our ancestors were now able to document current events involving real people acting in uniqu...
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Freeing Nature from Our Psychic Projections

Mountains, rivers, forests, and oceans may exist independently of human perception, but the term “nature” is merely a projection of the human psyche onto unsuspecting environments. What we’re looking at, what we’re walking through, what we’re sailing across, what we’re cutting down and exploiting depends on the mental filters and emotive associations used to create meaning. When we look across the valley from a rise we may see the geographic skin of deep time, a color palette that will inspire our next painting, a mountain bike track, the home to an endangered species of butterfly, hidden oil resources, a paradise, a dangerous swamp, lost childhood, national pride, a threat, a new start, redemption…the list goes on and on. "Nature” is potentially all these things at the same time and the projections take only an instant. It’s difficult to hear the natural world speak when our minds are shouting at it in this way, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try because it has so much ...
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The Tree of Life in Genesis Was a Magic Mushroom

Here's the recap: In the first chapters of Genesis, God creates darkness and light, water and land, vegetation, the sun and moon, living creatures, and finally humans. The humans live in a paradise called the Garden of Eden in bliss and harmony with their surroundings. There are two trees in the garden endowed with great, Godly spirit – the Tree of Life and The Tree of Knowledge . God instructs the humans they can eat from anything in the garden except for the Tree of Knowledge saying, “For on the day that you eat it you shall surely die.” Of course, the humans eat from the Tree of Knowledge  right away, get kicked out of the garden, and are now doomed to eat bread made from the “sweat of your brow.”  This episode has been used to illustrate the consequences of disobedience, the dangers involved in intellectual inquiry, and even the inherent evil of women (since it was the woman who first ate from the Tree of Knowledge ). These are absurd interpretations based on willful m...
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