Author: Michael Stevens

The practice of Tonglen, giving and receiving, can be a profound and liberating experience. We breathe in, gracefully acknowledging the suffering of all beings. Then we breathe out, offering light and love, visualizing that...

There are so many ways to become intimate with nature: walking barefoot, bending to smell a flower, dropping sweat on a steep trail, becoming absorbed in the view from atop a mountain, tasting a...

As of this writing there have been 250 mass shootings this year in the U.S. What in the world goes on in the mind of a mass shooter? If we think we would never...

Purple sage (Salvia dorrii ) is a plant native to much of the western United States. It is not really a sage but a member of the mint family. I have come across this...

I received a call to conduct a ceremony for someone unknown to me who was in the end stage of dying. The caller said the dying man had a connection to Tibetan Buddhism and...

We have a number of blue scrub jays that visit our back yard. We offer them shelled peanuts from our feeding area and they happily feed on the legumes, stuffing up to five in...

I never thought of myself as a gardener. Yes, I could plant things and they would grow, mostly. I could till and tend. But I never had the ‘bug’ to be serious about it....

Hackleman Creek winds lazily through the ‘old Cascades’ in a central portion of the Willamette National Forest. It is named for Abram Hackleman, one of the first settlers of Albany, who came to Oregon...

An interesting fact about the Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) is that it only takes as much water as it needs. This allows it to adapt to a wide variety of microclimates from seashore (where...

I am hiking in a dry wash on a beautiful warm day in the high desert. Puffy clouds cast intermittent shadows over the landscape and a gusting wind cools my sweat-moistened skin. At my...