Betsey Crawford

Brian Swimme's Powers of the Universe Over the past few years, I have been exploring Brian Swimme’s 11 Powers of the Universe, the energies he sees governing the endless creation of the […]

Boundless possibility: the power of seamlessness Our universe’s constant bubbling of form and new realities is what cosmologist Brian Swimme calls seamlessness, one of his eleven powers of the universe […]

Ever since I was introduced to Thomas Berry’s work in 2000, his thinking has informed and enriched my own beyond measure. For this essay, I chose one of my favorite of his ideas: that we expand our vision beyond […]

My youngest nephew is standing at the gates of adulthood appalled by what he finds beyond them. He has a lot of company, of all ages. But I feel particular sympathy for the youngest and tenderest among us. It is […]

I have been exploring cosmologist Brian Swimme’s eleven powers of the universe to see what our oldest teacher tells us about creating a just and sustainable planet. These are the energies by which the cosmos i […]

A UNESCO World Heritage site, Joggins Fossil Cliffs is famous for fossils that bridge the time when our ancestors were moving out of the seas and onto land.
And what a land! Vast forests of the ancestors of ferns […]

The most creative people on the planet today are working on changing the stories we have told ourselves for the last several centuries. In some cases, the last few millennia. Some of the stories we are turning […]

When we did a round-robin reading of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address at the end of our pre-Thanksgiving class, I was moved to combine it with my photos. The Address expresses gratitude for the oldest and […]

The inability to register plants in one’s environment or to see the importance of the plant world are two of the symptoms of plant blindness. One study found that Americans can identify over 1,000 corporate logos […]

When a human language dies, says linguist David Crystal, “what is primarily lost is the expression of a unique vision of what it means to be human.”
When a plant language dies, the same happens. Gone are r […]

When my partner George died in October one of the things I dreaded was the coming rainy season. No more beautiful blue and yellow days, long twilit evenings, silken roses in overflowing gardens. I feared I had […]

In this essay I ponder one of nature’s most intriguing mysteries: why is so much so beautiful? Why all those luscious colors, gossamer wings, silken petals? Why rustling waves of grasslands, filled with flowers, c […]

We owe our existence to the spectacular collapse of early stars. So the challenging power of cataclysm has been with us since the beginning. We live on a planet of shifting tectonic plates, which means we will […]

Since the middle of March, when California’s shelter in place started, an acupuncturist friend has been offering weekly meditations via phone. She starts by asking us to imagine ourselves in a nurturing place in n […]

It doesn’t take a pandemic to tell us that our culture has its values and rewards upside down. But it may take a pandemic to show us that we are also completely dependent on sound ecosystems, where viruses such a […]

One of the most transcendent moments of my life happened on the Marin headlands, within view of the glittering city of San Francisco and the elegant curve of the Golden Gate bridge. You never know when the door […]