Welcome!
Join me to practice humans’ innate love of the Earth and all with whom we share this numinous planet. We’ll engage in the daily work of reconnecting with nature and healing ourselves.
terraphilia n. An intrinsic affection for and connection to Earth and the planet’s web of lives, human and moreso. Without this cell-deep bond we are longly, lacking, no longer whole.
Practicing terraphilia saved my life. Twice.
The first time, I was in graduate school and in my 20s when I was diagnosed with Lupus, a potentially fatal and incurable condition. I could not tolerate the medications used to manage Lupus, so I applied my field science training: I recorded my symptoms and searched that data for patterns that would help me learn how to survive. My journey from critically ill to well turned on reconnecting with nature on a daily basis, practicing the terraphilia I could not then articulate.
Fast-forward several decades to time two, when the love of my life, my husband, an abstract sculptor, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The practice of terraphilia carried us through the two-plus years of his grueling treatment, and kept me afloat as I cared for him and my mother through their deaths in the same year. Afterwards, practicing terraphilia gave me a reason to live, write and find happiness in my unlooked for solo life.
Practicing terraphilia makes us whole. It carries us through the hardest times we can imagine. And it allows us to reciprocate for the gifts of this numinous earth and the living community with whom we share it.
Together, we’ll explore terraphilia in our daily lives. We’ll look at ways to be the best humans we can be, whatever the challenges and times. Ways to give back to the nurturing life force of the planet. And ways to love ourselves—just as we are—in the doing.
Thanks for joining me!
Check Out These Posts
On my Year of Spiritual Thinking Project:
Feeling grateful for my mom, who gave me the gift of loving nature:
Why Subscribe?
To join a welcoming community and explore ways to reconnect with nature nearby and grow a reciprocal relationship with the earth and the community of lives around us. To explore your own terraphilia and how to live with love for each other and for this battered earth. To heal and restore the planet and ourselves.
No paywalls, No BS
Every Thursday (unless I’m traveling or doing fieldwork and thus offline), I’ll send a post on some aspect of Practicing Terraphilia. The kinds of posts will include:
Gratitude: a haiku/haibun and a photo with a short reflection and a question for you to ponder and respond to.
Reflections on practicing terraphilia in our daily lives from my personal point of view.
Glimpses into my life, and what I am learning on this journey.
Weekly Wildflower videos shot in nature nearby, introducing you to some of my plant-neighbors and how they live.
Audio readings from some of my books and other published writing, all related to practicing terraphilia.
All of these are available to everyone, because I believe we all need healing and reconnection to nature and each other.
You Make My Work Possible
If you chose to pay for a subscription, you have my deepest gratitude for supporting this work of my heart and spirit. That kind of support means the world to me because it is a tangible way of saying that what I do is valuable to you. And because it helps me eat and otherwise thrive, and that is a great gift!
What Readers Say
"I just subscribed and supported your work because the practice of Terraphilia has always been a large part of who I am. I just didn't have a name for it. Your giving voice ( or pen) to the beauty and lessons of nature and the Earth are nourishing balm for these times. Thank you." —Deborah R.
"I believe in your voice for “practicing terraphilia” and I want to add my voice to this important necessity of our lives today 💚" —Valerie J.
"Kindness. And gratitude. We need more of these and I love the way you address them. Good for the heart, for the world, for us! Thank you." —Sue S.
My Promise to You
All of my posts will be written and researched with thought and care, and they are my words and thoughts. The photos are also mine unless I credit them to someone else. Practicing Terraphilia is a human-powered publication. I may use Ai for basic research, but never to generate posts and photos. What I write will relate to our innate love of this numinous planet, and I’ll include ideas for things we all can do as we practice living our terraphilia. I will never spam you, or knowingly abuse your trust. I’ll listen and respond to all comments.
I look forward to hearing from you. Let’s talk in the comments section, sharing ideas and concerns, learning how to support each other and heal this numinous earth through ordinary yet powerful actions in our every day lives.
Thanks for joining this community!
Who’s Susan
I’m a botanist and certified plant-nerd with a lifetime of experience reading the patterns that plants form across wild landscapes—what I call “the community of the land.” My work is interpreting what those communities and interrelationships mean for the earth and we humans.
My thirteen books range from memoir and nature writing to kids and travel, and have won national and regional awards. Bless the Birds, Living with Love in a Time of Dying, the most recent, won the Sarton Award for memoir and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards! As a working freelancer, I’ve also written hundreds of magazine articles, columns, and essays.
As a writer, I have learned to read internal landscapes too, something that didn’t come easy to me as a scientist trained to be “objective”—an impossibility—and observe and report without personal opinions or lyrical description.
As my writing work gradually evolved from just-the-facts-ma’am science journalism to personal essays and memoir, I began to draw on my life-experiences and reflect on what they meant. Story is how we humans make meaning from the world, and how we connect with each other.
Some people listen to podcasts and audiobooks on roadtrips, I identify wildflowers, grasses and trees at 70 mph, and speculate in my head about who lives where and with whom, and what those interrelationships tell us about the earth and about being human.
Reconnecting humans to the rest of nature and nurturing our terraphilia is my ministry, the work of my heart and spirit.
I Practice What I Preach by Re-storying
I’m a “re-storyier” of unloved houses and landscapes. I usually work by hand: pulling cheatgrass and other invasive weeds to reduce wildfire risk, cutting down teenage Siberian elm trees to make space for native cottonwood trees. After weeding, I seed native plants to reweave the community of the land.
I’ve re-storyied nature nearby on blighted industrial sites, in yards and public parks, and I spent nearly two decades bringing a block of urban creek back to life.
I also “adopt” unloved houses, bringing them back to life. I’m not a flipper: I live in each one, listening to what it needs, and then begin with structure (foundation, walls, windows and doors, roof) and then infrastructure (heating and cooling, electrical, plumbing), before addressing aesthetics like paint and appliances and floors. Giving neglected buildings new life instead of tearing them down is one way I work at healing this earth.
Where I come from: I began my career as a plant ecologist in Wyoming where I researched the life and relationships of big sagebrush, and dissected piles of bear poop to study grizzly bear habitat. I turned to writing after realizing that I loved the stories behind the data as much as collecting that data.
