Shodo Spring’s Book Inspired by the Natural World
“As a whole we know how to control, not how to engage; how to destroy, not how to grow. This is our great loss, and the reason we mourn. We do not know how to be part of the family.”
— Shodo Spring, Open Reality
Where Shodo Spring Finds Optimism
Shodo Spring lives on a farm in southern Minnesota and has participated in public meditation as activism, and led a Compassionate Earth Walk along the planned northern route of the KXL pipeline. She is author of a new book titled Open Reality (Sea Crow Press). We asked her to comment on where she sees the energy that will sweep away old myths from 2025 and usher in a new future for 2026. Her answer:
“I see it everywhere. During the six years of writing, I kept seeing new and exciting works, rewriting history and bringing forth the beauty of the best of humanity — going beneath the corporate and capitalist layers, resisting the move toward fascism. I see it in today’s activism. … I think the new tale is being told in the streets of the U.S., in frogs and clowns standing up to ICE, in ordinary people filming the abuses, and in judges saying (again and again) ‘this is illegal, stop.’”
She continues: “The new story I’ve tried to tell comes from Buddhism and from my pagan roots as well: Everything changes, everything gives life to everything else, everything is alive and conscious. Every single thing witnesses us into existence, we are a word spoken by the universe, and we speak our words into existence.”
Excerpt from the Prologue
It is common to confuse the end of modern civilization with the end of human life, to think it’s too late to stop the many crises we face, to forget the lives of other beings. Here, now, we remember those other beings, and consider that something may be more powerful than our own creations.
Our bodies are water, moving with the ocean tides. Our bodies are matter, hungering for the feel of the earth underfoot. Each is a cousin of the microbes in the soil and a relative of the bur oaks up the hill.
I write not about the sixty percent of the human body composed of molecules of water, but of water that moves in the air, flows in and out, rises and swells like ocean tides, flows from high places to low, bubbles over rocks, thunders down from the sky, carves a new path through the soft earth and even through rock. That water is our birth, our home.
Humans have known forever that we are small in a large universe. Only modern humans have imagined ourselves as gods, all-powerful. And only with this fantasy have humans come to the edge of destroying life on earth. Yet we call this the only way to live.
I walk on the morning grass, dew cool against my bare feet, drops hanging on pine needles brushing against my face. My thirsty mouth takes in water from those needles one drop at a time; from a glass it swallows huge gulps of water, cooling, relieving desiccated tissues.
What if there were another way to live, embedded in a world of living, conscious, sacred beings? What if that were the way to save ourselves?
Questions to Ask Yourself
- What makes you happy? What kind of activities, places, food, people, opportunities help you feel personally better, satisfy your needs, help you relax? And the opposite: What makes you unhappy?
- What are you afraid of losing? Or whom (individuals or a kind of people) do you dislike, and why?
- What do you long for?
- What true things do you want people to say about you, about your character, your accomplishments? If you’re being introduced for an award, what would you want them to say? Or write your obituary. Don’t be shy; imagine you are at your best and have all the help in the world; what would it say?
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For 2025 coverage, Minnesota Women’s Press earned a community leadership award, three photography awards, and four editorial awards, including for coverage of social issues and for our Spring 2025 “Know Your Rights” special section supported by Unidos MN. Our publisher was named Journalist of the Year by Violence Free Minnesota for gender-based violence coverage.
