NASA's Terra Satellite Captures Image of Oil Spill on May 17

NASA's Terra Satellite Captures Image of Oil Spill on May 17

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/oilspill/20100517_spill_prt.htm

For those of you who are tracking the tragic course of this Gulf oil spill, here is a startling NASA photo just released showing the extent of the spill -- and this is only what we can see from space. Imagine the water column that is poisoned by this plume of deep-sea spillage. Please keep the people, the wildlife, and the ecosystems of this fragile Gulf of Mexico in your prayers, your sermons, your active meditations, (see below), Letters to the Editor, your letters to congressional representatives. It is time to "top-kill" this well. That should have been the first, not the last, resort.

Send this NASA image around to everyone you know. Seeing is believing. And taking action!

For my recent commentaries on this catastrophic spill, please see my Huffington Posts at these links:

When Oil Spills, All Things Are Connected:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brenda-peterson/when-oil-spills-all-thing_b_557679.html

Oil Spill on FaceBook: Social Networking Between Species

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brenda-peterson/oil-spill-on-facebook-soc_b_574112.html

Dear, Dear Readers

Along with good book reviews, one of the most nourishing things for any writer is to receive letters from readers.  Throughout my sixteen books, I’ve heard from many readers, but this new memoir has brought me the most gratifying and insightful letters of all. Perhaps this is because I Want To Be Left Behind is my most personal book, centered as much on human nature as on nature herself. I am so grateful to you, dear Readers, for taking the time to read my book and write me such heartfelt and nurturing notes.

I want to share here some of the letters that have cheered me on, delighted and informed, taught me and lent me a warm wind at my back as I continue to bring this book into the world. Many of these I’ve printed out and carried with me on this continuing book tour. Other letters I’ve posted above my desk to help me face a blank page or any criticism that might come my way. I take heart from you, my Readers.

From Robin:

“I appreciated your memoir, completely related to it, and hope that it touches other people in the same way it touched me . . . Although I am a little younger than you, our lives have followed similar paths . . . I was an intense seeker of God as a child and ended up getting ‘saved’ in a Bible Baptist church and then attending an Assemblies of God college . . . I like to call myself a pantheist . . . I believe that God resides in everything and transcends everything . . . Both my son and daughter are budding naturalists. Thanks again for such a wonderful memoir.”

From Gayle:

“You book has meant so much to me; I laughed, cried, and shared so many moments with you that it was crazy. I know every song, and sometimes guessed the next song before I read it . . . I want to thank you for writing my story and if I feel that way there must be hundreds out there like me that will feel the same. You have written a very healing book and I think it will help many.”

From Elizabeth:

“One thing that impressed me about your book is your clear love and appreciation for your family, your parents in particular . . . You have written a beautiful, brave book from the truth of your heart.”

From Leslie:

 “What a joy it was to read another’s tale of the challenge of growing up in a fundamentalist culture when you want to ask those hard, taboo questions . . . I was most affected by your choice of hymn titles and quotes to develop your story and move your tale along. I almost always cry when I think of the song “The Garden.” Every hymn you mentioned brought back floods of memoires of those long hours in church and Sunday School. From the church, I did take away a great love of the music. If I could just have the music without the dogma! You write so eloquently and respectfully on a very challenging subject.”

From Izabella:

“Love your book – live on a cove on the east coast, Rhode Island, and wish I had your words to express the beauty that I see on a regular basis, and at many times just out of the corner of my eye. Thanks again for the enjoyment I got reading your book.”

From Leska:

“Reading your book was one of my life’s pleasures . . . I felt buoyed, rolled, and lovingly poked at as I wove my way through your story of heartache and confusion around your family’s beliefs and your irrepressible love of each other and a good song. No simple answers. How can a family that can sing with such unpracticed harmony maintain so much discord? The story is a metaphor for all the conflict that surrounds us. Such a universal of the human experience. You take a drastic storyline and irreconcilable differences and keep working and folding the love into the mix. Your book made me feel that a lot more is possible than we give ourselves credit for. Thank you for writing this book for all of us.”

This book has received such wonderful reviews—from Booklist’s starred review to the L.A. Times to Christian Science Monitor. I am so grateful that both critics and readers are responding so favorably to my new memoir. It confirms in me the hope that there are others who seek a Divine presence in all that is alive; and that there are many others who cherish and celebrate finding rapture here on Earth. May we continue to find each other!

P.S. There are some new NPR interviews airing this month and an in-depth interview on Religion Dispatches at these links:

NPR To The Best of Our Knowledge: "Sacred Nature"
My segment starts at about 30:28 but the whole program is well worth listening to, including Bill McKibben and “Dark, Green Religion.”

Religion Dispatches.com: The Forest vs. the Faithful: A Born-Again Environmentalist Tells All

Religious Literacy or “Toward the Mystery”

 Photo by Robin Kobaly

While on my book tour in Palm Springs I was asked to speak at the William Edelen Symposium. Every Sunday this elder statesman of what he calls “religious literacy” gathers a large crowd of spiritual seekers to listen to his erudite talks and discuss their deepest beliefs. It is just the kind of spirited, intellectual communion that invites epiphany – and community.

Since this is Holy Week, with Passover and Easter, it’s good timing to talk about how opening our hearts and minds to the Divine Mystery in all creation is a true antidote to the religions that encourage only lock-step devotion or dogma.

As I looked out over the Symposium crowd of upturned, engaged faces I saw none of the fear or guilt that can so often typify a religious gathering. Instead, I saw humor, even joy, in those upturned faces. And most of all, the precious gift we can offer one another: true listening.

No attention deficit here. Only the poise and awareness that comes from people deeply engaged in their own spiritual path. A path that is inclusive of other cultures, faiths, and embraces all that is alive, and so sacred.

The great French mystic, Simone Weil, who was Jewish and also profoundly engaged with Catholicism, once defined prayer as “rapt attention.” The most expansive spiritual life, in my experience, is more inward than outward; it does not seek converts to one’s own beliefs, but rather engages with others in dialogue. It is curious rather than self-righteous, contemplative rather than judgmental.

Bill Edelen inspires this dialogue through his many books, his Sunday community meetings, his gracious spirit. I particularly enjoyed his book EarthWise, for its far-ranging intellectual grasp of both literature and religion. His writings have been cherished by such visionaries as Buckminster Fuller, Charles Shultz, and Joseph Campbell. An ex-Marine pilot and author, Edelen has the tough-minded intellectual rigor of a scholar. Though he sometimes gives his talks balancing on a cane, his words are bracing and his wisdom mighty, enduring. He looks like a favorite professor with his black frame glasses and tousled silver hair. But when he speaks, we all lean toward him like plants toward light.

Here is one of my favorite quotes from his website this week:

“To simply stand before this Mystery in wonder, astonishment and awe leaves us free to join the dance of spirit toward a more refined consciousness.”

From “Spirit Dance”

I also really enjoyed this archetypical Bill Edelen commentary:

“A Dead Sea scroll records a disciple asking Jesus, “Master, how can we get into the Kingdom of Heaven?” Jesus answers this way: ‘Follow the birds…the beasts…the fish…and they will lead you in.’”

My own spiritual searching has been to discover other souls, like Bill Edelen who, like me, don’t fit into any church. Who have too many questions for any dogma. There are a lot more seekers like me in the 21st century. As I write in my new book, spirituality, if not religion, is thriving. Ecumenical councils are coming together to work for social change and to face environmental challenges. In fact, Newsweek ran a cover story in 2009 on the diversity or religion flourishing, calling this trend in America “post-Christian.”

In Seattle, my homeland, 90 percent of those surveyed when asked to check a box for religion, chose “none such.” But the paradox is that Seattle is the best place to have a heart attack because more people have trained for CPR than in any other city. As I write, “Fewer churchgoers, more compassion.” Perhaps that’s why the Dalai Lama packed our football stadium with over 55,000 people to attend the spring, 2008 “Seeds of Compassion” conference.

When I study a religion I consider its capacity for joy instead of fear; for individual freedom over blind loyalty, for community service over the illusion of being “Chosen.” I observe what that religion embraces rather than what it condemns and how the faithful embrace rather than exclude others. And most of all, I look at whether that religion cares for the earth and all other life. I would say that in the end, gratitude is my religion. That and the strong sense that there is a higher wisdom at work here and in all worlds. As I said my book Build Me an Ark, “We float on divine waves.”

Whether you’re celebrating Passover Seder or Easter this week, whether you’re dancing a Spiral Dance or a Sufi dance; whether you’re sitting in Zen meditation or studying with a Buddhist master of compassion; whether you’re fishing an abundant stream as my friend, Jim, says is his way [or, as the cartoonist Ray Troll asks, “Fish worship, is it wrong?”] or whether you’re visiting a botanical garden to marvel at the magnolias – may you find spiritual sustenance and kinship. All that is alive is sacred.

For more information on William Edelen’s writings and his podcasts, visit here.

Deep Listening

 Photo by -zyber-

You might want to tune your ears to the New Dimensions Café for an excerpt from my interview with Justine Toms on “The Healing Power of Memoir.” You can listen free all week at this link.

Justine and Michael Toms have devoted their lives to what they call “Deep Listening.” New Dimensions radio began in the 1960s as a far-ranging dialogue with such visionaries as Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Meeker, Depek Chopra, James Hillman, Alice Walker, Jean Shinoda Bolen, and many others. The New Dimensions archives online is available to all members and is a library of unique wisdom. Here’s how New Dimensions describe their invaluable audio dialogues:

“. . . life-affirming, socially and spiritually relevant information, practical knowledge and perennial wisdom through the voices and visions of those who are asking new questions and are looking at the world in positive and inspiring ways. It is through the exchange of ideas and information that we can be empowered and enabled to meet the future with greater energy and clarity.”

Justine and Michael have written a wonderful book, True Work, that is a perennial bestseller. Justine’s new book is Small Pleasures: Finding Grace in a Chaotic World. It is full of lovely and insightful stories that seem to slow time and evoke a meditative pleasure in daily life. I particularly enjoyed her memoir pieces about her South Carolina ancestral home and her devotion to other animals.
Please do tune in to New Dimensions not only for my interview, but also for the hundreds of other voices offering a unique lens on living, understanding the world around us, and envisioning the future. I guarantee you’ll be enlightened!
                                                     ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Also, for those of you who are interested in lively commentary, you might want to visit my first Huffington Post blog, which is cross-posted in both the Books and the Religion section of The Huff. There is a fascinating dialogue going on in the Comments section and I’m reading along and joining in. Please visit here.

I’m still on book tour and truly enjoying the welcoming audiences and the continuing dialogue. This book has sparked much debate and I’m truly grateful for the warm and welcoming reviews. I’ll be blogging from my book tour in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

In the Desert With A Plant Mystic

 Photo by Robin Kobaly

For the past several weeks I’ve been on book tour for the new memoir – San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles, Palm Springs – and have at last happily landed home here by the Salish Sea. Though this lush, green landscape of sea and mountains is my chosen home, I also adore the desert. In that vast and arid wilderness one can still see the Native cultures who used desert plants for every purpose, from medicine to clothes to shelter.

In spacious and mesmerizing Morongo Valley, in the mountains just north of Palm Springs, my literary agent, Sarah Jane Freymann and I stayed with Robin Kobaly and her husband, Doug Thompson. I was there to speak at the William Edelen Symposium on “Religious Literacy.”

Doug and Robin are my long-time “podmates” who lead our group of naturalists, authors, NPR radio hosts, musicians, and publishers – all of us devoted to conservation through our own work. For many years our “Pod” has journeyed together to Baja, under the auspices of Doug and Robin’s SummerTree Institute to encounter gray whales in their remote Mexican biosphere birthing lagoons. There is a chapter in my new book “The Way of the Sea” devoted to this life-changing encounter between gray whales and humans. I also write about these birthing lagoons in my National Geographic book Sightings with co-author Linda Hogan. And Doug’s book/DVD Whales: Touching the Mystery, is the definitive book on Baja birthing lagoons.

Doug and Robin have led us all to discover whales in the Baja desert, but this was the first time I’d ever visited their home and the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve that Robin helped create and still tends. Under BLM management, the Preserve is an astonishing glimpse into what this vital desert must have looked like when Native tribes still respectfully lived on this land. And Robin, an internationally known ethnobotanist, guided us along the boardwalk deep along the Marsh Trail. Because of El Nino rains, the desert this year has bloomed more vibrantly than in the past seven years. Unexpected spring green adorned the landscape of Joshua Trees, cacti, cottonwood and diverse blooming plants.

“Oh, look here,” Robin would suddenly reach into what seemed to me like lowly scrub brush. “It’s stinging nettle. Did you know that every poisonous plant grows within sight of its antidote?”

As we walked along the path, Robin’s encyclopedic knowledge of plants astonished us. There were fragrant sage, yucca, creosote, wild cucumber, honey mesquite, and arrow weed; cat tails, willow and cottonwood trees, and a vital stream nourishing the marsh lands. Every time a bird flitted by, Robin glanced up and called out their names as if they were old friends: Gambel’s quail, Ladder-backed woodpecker, Red-tailed hawk, Bewick’s wren.

“People look at the desert and think there’s nothing here,” she said. “They just don’t know yet how to see all the abundant life,” Robin said. The sun glinted off her short blonde hair and she seemed like an illuminated plant saint lovingly blessing the flowers and the desert trees. “Native peoples used this cottonwood bark for diapers and skirts,” she told us. “They used these Yerba mansa seeds for spicy salt and seasoning.”

Farther along the marsh boardwalk, a group of school children ran by excitedly identifying the plants with their trail guide brochures. They were playing in the desert – wild and free. And happy. This desert is their birthright.

In her “Power of Plants” seminars, Robin teaches all ages how to plant drought-resistant yards and forego the thirsty lawn landscapes. She educates everyone from neighbors to government agencies to even tribal peoples in water use and desert conservation. Her program “Saving the Ancients” has been attended by hundreds of people wanting to learn about the mysteries of these enduring plants.

Once she was teaching a bulldozer driver how to recognize an ancient, but relatively small grouping of yuccas. “This plant has likely lived over five hundred years,” she told him gently. “You can bulldoze around it and save its life for the next generations.”

The workman’s eyes welled up at her words. “I had no idea,” he told Robin. “I really don’t want to hurt these old plants. I could have easily saved that plant, but the owner wanted all the plants removed.”

Now this bulldozer operator calls Robin to report, “There are ancient plants on this project. Could you talk to the owners before I go in to grade the site?”

“Education is the key,” Robin told us as our trail through the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve ended.

“All the miraculous medicines from this desert are here for us to remember and to preserve for our children. If we can just take the time to learn these often overlooked plants, then we will never again lose their power and their many gifts.”

Photo by Robin Kobaly

For Robin’s website “Power of Plants,” visit here.
For more information on Big Morongo Canyon Preserve, go here.
For more information on Doug’s book/DVD, Whales: Touching the Mystery, see here.
For the SummerTree Institute, go here.

Bestseller among Baptists or Moderates Speak Out

Photo by Bobesh

Every day this book brings surprises. Today it was the news that on the Borders website, my memoir is ranked #1 in the “Top 5 Baptist Churches Books” – in Australia. Thank you, dear Down Under faithful readers!

I am delighted by this news but I don’t know quite how to interpret it. Does this rating mean that I am again Top Ten on Prayer Lists? Or does it mean that Baptists are buying the book because they enjoy its humor and inquiry? With 16 million Southern Baptists in America – and a huge contingent of Baptist churches in Australia – I am simply grateful for the support.

Maybe it’s true as a woman in the audience said last night after my reading,
“Things are changing. All around the world, more of us moderates are speaking out.”

As I travel on this book tour I’m hearing from those moderates, both religious and political. They tell me that they are weary of extremes and polarities – of talking heads and the shock-jock talk radio shouting matches when no one listens. Only rants.

“Where is the civic discourse that so marks any democracy?” another reader asked at a reading. “Free speech doesn’t just mean a megaphone for your own beliefs. It means allowing others to speak their truths.”

Another audience member remarked, “For too long the Far Right has dominated the dialogue in matters of faith. How about being spiritual seekers of common ground?”

I know that there is much critical in my new book about the fundamentalist or far right wings of the Southern Baptist church. But I also write about some moderate Christians who inspired and instructed me, who embodied the New Testament beatitudes and loving kindness. Pastor Joe and his wife, Sue, Strother are profiled in Chapter Three of my new book. Here’s a glimpse:

"I still carry on a meditative inner dialogue with Pastor Joe and a real conversation with and Sue. Pastor Joe is one Christian who would have been called ‘green’ today. His sermons were about compassion more than conquest. During my adolescent years of doubt, it was Pastor Joe and Sue, an ex-parole officer, who taught me that my love of the earth was a devotion to the divine, and that Rapture was possible right here on earth."

Pastor Joe and Sue were more mystics than fundamentalists. They even allowed us teenagers to debate Biblical prophecy. We were encouraged to question. As I say in the book, “Sue’s sense of humor was darkly comic and irreverent, while Joe’s kindly scholarship translated into sermons full of real-life stories that navigated a complex moral compass.”

I can still hear Joe’s calm and musical baritone as he explained his interpretation of a scripture and then asked for other points of view. His was the epitome of true dialogue. An open-hearted call-and-response that is the best of spiritual discourse. And I am fortunate enough to be able to simply call up Sue, an early heroine and mentor in my life, and hear her full-throated laughter.

“If Christians spent more time simply being here, instead of planning their one-way vacations in heaven,” Sue once told me, “we’d have a kinder world.”

Their daughter, Donna, whom I used to babysit, has grown into a lively and very successful entrepreneur. She wrote me a letter that I carry now in my reader’s copy of the new book as I travel:
“It’s rare that a book allows you to follow the evolution of belief,” she wrote.  “You gently introduce the ability to hold more than one belief about God in a brain at the same time . . . something most religions don’t practice too often.”

She adds, “My father was a mystic. Mom was the earth to his heaven.”

In my life, the Strother family of compassionate Christians is another reason to be left behind.
And let’s hear it for the Aussies for boomeranging this book to the top of Baptist Churches; let’s hear the moderates among us who have been drowned out too long; let’s tune in to those who are softly and tenderly following their own “still, small voice.”

And Pastor Joe, I know you’re still listening.

Another Reason to Be Left Behind: Cats and Dogs and Dolphins and Bears, oh, my!

To continue my series of finding rapturous Reasons to Be Left Behind, now let me sing the praises of other animals – both wild and domestic. Throughout much of my career, I’ve followed wild animals – from the mysterious and forgiving gray whale in my book Sightings to dolphins in Between Species to wolves in my first memoir Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals. I also celebrate domestic animals, especially our daily companions of cats and dogs. What would I do without my ascended Zen master, Loki, and my mischievous and protective feline, Tao?

I come from a long line of animal lovers. My father raised Tenneesee Walkers; one niece volunteers at the zoo to work with aging elephants. Another niece is addicted to Animal Planet. Is it any wonder that I discovered at every turning point of my life, spiritual or psychological, that an animal guided me in making some big decision?

For example, my decades of studying wild dolphins have taught me about playfulness as a survival skill.  My niece carried on the family tradition of cetacean love when she volunteered to work at a dolphin research center one summer. She got a tattoo of a dolphin, which inspires me to do the same, if I have the courage.

We’ve always known that animals are intelligent and able to adapt to changing environments – something humans might try. But a recent British Sunday Times article cites new research in which dolphins are declared “the world’s most intelligent creatures, after humans.” The scientists go on to suggest “they are so bright that they should be treated as ‘non-human persons.'” A professor of ethics at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, Thomas White, wrote a series of academic studies suggesting that dolphins should have rights and that they “qualify for moral standing as individuals.”
   
I have a lot to say on this ethical and spiritual issue of other animals as worthy of equal rights with humans. Much of my writing – from the novel Animal Heart to Singing to the Sound addresses this. Stay tuned.
   
But for now as I work with my cats warming themselves by the space heater and we all listen to the waves off the Salish Sea, I’d like to give a practical reason for cherishing our fellow creatures: The health benefits of animal companionship.
   
The New York Times reports that while it is still not well understood, animals can help lower our blood pressure, ease our pain, comfort us in our grieving, and raise healthy children.  When researching the effect of visiting therapy dogs (like the Delta Society volunteers) with children in the hospital, Emily Grankowski said, “The dogs brighten them up.” This is also true for autistic children and elders who often have no physical touch except by petting cats or walking a dog.
   
I edited an anthology, Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, in which the poet, Judith Collas quips: “she never felt she was sleeping with the wrong dog.”
   
The creature comfort that comes from encountering wild animals and living alongside our domestic pets is so profound that I include them in my most important Reasons to Be Left Behind. Now, I better get up from this computer and the piles of work. Why? I’ve got to go walk the dog!