This month, Mary had the opportuinity to spend time with Dr Alexandra Adams. Alex is Director of the Center for American Indian and Rural Health Excellence (CAIRHE), an NIH-funded center focusing on building research partnerships with rural and Native communities and mentoring junior investigators. Her research focus is community-based and participatory. She works in close partnership with Native American communities to understand and solve health challenges using both scientific rigor and crucial community knowledge.

Alex has focused her career on the promotion of family and community wellness and healing trauma through community building. Addressing the effects of climate surprises on health has been central to her work. She also uses storytelling, filmmaking, and other strategies to engage communities and support health.

In their conversation, Alex and Mary explored her experience at the interface of Western medicine and rural, American Indian and other indigenous communities. Alex described ways for building healing relationships of trust and sharing - acknowledging the deep wisdom of local communities and of ancestral indigenous knowledge. What Alex describes is medicine at its most responsive. Fully honoring the fact that the health of the land is the health of the people and drawing across the arts to practice what is perhaps the greatest of all healing arts, listening.

You can learn more about Dr. Alexandra Adams by visiting her personal website and substack, Longing for Belonging. and her substack. Also check the website for the Center for American Indian and Rural Health Excellence (CAIRHE) where you can learn more about Alex’s initiatives with that organization. And here's the link to the Turtle Island Tales website and videos Alex described.

Through all of her creative endeavors, Alex lives fully in her relatedness with all beings. This is good medical practice, it’s good art, and it’s solidly consistent with climate repair. Let’s all join her.

MUSIC

Mystical Flute Music. Music by morel dua from Pixabay

Tabla Flute 102. Music by Johnson Cherian from Pixabay

Acoustic Guitar and Flute Fairytale. Music by Denis Pavlov from Pixabay

Original theme music, composed and performed by Gary Ferguson.

This month, Mary got to have a fascinating exchange with Dr. Dan Papaj, a Full Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with the University of Arizona. Vastly dedicated to pollinators - in particular, the Blue Swallowtail, Dan is an esteemed and longstanding researcher and faculty member. He completed his undergraduate work at Cornell University and earned his PhD in zoology from Duke University. He's a fellow in the Animal Behavior Society and has won fellowships with Bellagio and Fullbright. All along the way, he's retained inspiring relationships with his students. His inflluence now spreads through scholarly and ecological communities.

In their conversation, Mary and Dan dipped into the social life of bees, the evolutionary trajectory of humans and the impact of drought on the desert. Listen in for new insights into how it looks to an active entemolotist.

You can learn more about Dan by checking out his University of Arizona faculty profile. Just below, he’s also provided a few links to some of his writing, and to resources on cultural evolution. Check them out. Learn more. And as Dan suggests, always make choices for our relatives, the pollinators.

And a quick postscript. Early in the life of HILFH, we had the delightful honor of welcoming Sara Mapelli Tink as a guest (HILFH episode 5). Sara is known for her activism in support of bees - she dances with them covering her body. Check out her interview - it never gets old!

LEARN MORE

The role of similarity of stimuli and responses in learning by nectar-foraging bumble bees: a test of Osgood’s model

M Baek & DR Papaj. Animal Behaviour 219, 123036

The relationship between preference and switching in flower foraging by bees

DR Papaj & AL Russell. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 78 (3), 40

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Dan's recommendations for learning more about cultural evolution:

Cumulative cultural evolution. Culture and the Evolutionary Process. (1985). University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5970597.html

Dan’s comment, “Boyd and Richerson's 1985 Culture and the Evolutionary Process is still in print at U. Chicago Press and for good reason.”

An article by Gerbauly et al. on the development of lactose tolerance in humans. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/FMfcgzQcqtjBxVGRsHBrrNlBrnwFXxPC?projector=1&messagePartId=0.1

And a very cool photo of Bees ~

https://photoawards.com/winner/zoom.php?eid=8-222523-21

MUSIC

Jazz Restaurant Café Music. Music by

This month Mary had the chance to spend some time with Karen Tate, a global leader in Goddess Spirituality. Karen was raised a white woman in the South. In childhood she observed and experienced abuse – and further, saw that abuse routinely rationalized. It wasn't until her adult years that she recognized her unconscious involvement in excusing, and thus perpetuating, the normalization of cruelty and manipulation. Her most recent of seven books (most of which focus on aspects of Goddess Spirituality), is entitled, Normalizing Abuse: A commentary on the Culture of Pervasive Abuse. Drawing on Goddess Spirituality for tools, Karen strives for a world where abuse and exploitation - of people and of the natural world - are simply no longer acceptable.

Across her career, Karen has been a thought leader, speaker, author and activist - all of this at the crossroads of spirituality, personal transformation and social justice. She hosts the long-running Voices of the Sacred Feminine podcast, considered a treasure trove of wisdom for more than a dozen years. Karen has been named one of the Thirteen Most Influential Women in Goddess Spirituality and a Wisdom Keeper of the Women's Spirituality Movement.

In their conversation, Karen and Mary explore the ways Goddess Spirituality and abuse culture are evident as in our relationships with the more-than-human world we've learned to think of as separate - as Nature outside of us.

You can learn more about Karen Tate by visiting her website karentate.net. There you’ll find all of her books, Including Normalizing Abuse, and be able to gain access to her writings and her podcast. We can all learn a great deal about how to restore our health as members of the community of Nature by listening to the ancient wisdom of Goddess Spirituality. As Karen suggests, we are all suited to act from kindness and connection with each other and the whole of being.

Here are a few links that Karen wanted to share in addition:

Heide Goetner-Abendroth - https://goettner-abendroth.de/en/biography

The Center for Partnership - https://centerforpartnership.org/

Karen also offered these words to all of us as an afterthought. Regarding the way the world would look if the tenets of Goddess Spirituality were centered:

We'd pass assets through the mother line instead of the father line, adapt some of the matriarchal values and traditions to keep women and children safe and at the center of society rather than on the fringes.

MUSIC

Meditative Drone, Music by Natalia from Pixabay

New Heights, Music by Alana Jordan from Pixabay

Love Serenity, Music by