Season 5, Episode 9: Having An Attentive Heart at New Year with Stephanie Kaza

Written By Climate Change And Happiness
 

image credit | C Cai

Season 5, Episode 9: Having An Attentive Heart at New Year with Stephanie Kaza

Thomas and Panu reflected on the winter season and the new year with Stephanie Kaza, noted Buddhist and environmental scholar. Stephanie shared her journey from Ohio to Buffalo to Vermont to Oregon, highlighting the profound impact of natural landscapes on her psyche. The conversation stressed the significance of community, mindfulness, and seasonal rituals in connecting with nature and coping with eco-anxiety. As Stephanie noted, "Spring starts in January" and having a mindful attitude helps us to pay attention to the world and note the subtle and never-ceasing seasonal changes. Join us for a observant welcome to the new year. 

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Transcript

Transcript edited for clarity and brevity.

Thomas Doherty: Well hello, I'm Thomas Doherty.

Panu Pihkala: I am Panu Pihkala.

Doherty: And welcome to Climate Change and Happiness, our podcast to show for people around the globe who are thinking and feeling deeply about issues like climate change and other environmental problems and their connection with the earth and their connection with their place. This is the podcast where we really do get into the emotional side of things and our feelings. And we are really honored to have a guest with us today.

Stephanie Kaza: Hello, I'm Stephanie Kaza and I'm here in Portland, Oregon and near the Columbia River and Mount Hood and many other beautiful home-based spots here that I love.

Doherty: Yeah we're really glad to have Stephanie here. She's she's a local to where I live and we're going to talk about Stephanie's background and her role as a Buddhist scholar and an environmental scholar and a leader and someone who has worked with Panu and so we're going to we're going to talk about this and we're going to find a nice conversation here. And at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of 2026. Panu, do want to get us started?

Panu: Warmly welcome Stephanie also for my part. Lovely to see you and have another chance to talk with you. This is the character of the global world. So it's actually me who has most recently met Stephanie, even though Thomas and Stephanie are living in the same city in Portland. In autumn in Helsinki, that was a lovely exchange about environment and Buddhism and trees and many things.

I first came across your name when I was a young scholar of religion and ecology. So that was the first connection. But later on I've learned that you have been in many ways connected with the work that reconnects movement. And we did an episode remembering Joanna Macy, who I know you worked with and knew well. And this human and emotional dimension of environmental issues is in many ways familiar to you.

For the listeners, would you like to start by telling something about your journey to where you are now? I know this is an awfully broad question, but just to give listeners some orientation.

Kaza: Well, let me do that in a sort of geographic and a spiritual way. And I think that might help generate some sense of the emotional body that I've become. was born in Ohio where my parents were going to college at the conservatory of Oberlin, surrounded by music, I must say. And I did end up going back to college there. But then we moved to Buffalo, land of snow. It was so much snow in Buffalo, the land of winter. So when my father accepted a job in Oregon, it turned out to be a pivotal change for the whole family. And as we came across the country hauling a trailer where me and my three brothers slept in the bunk beds in the back, when we hit the Rocky Mountains, something happened to my psyche. I can't explain it now. I was only nine years old, but it was definitely an epiphany, a sense of awe. I was completely awestruck by the size of those mountains.

And of course then once we landed in Oregon, was beauty everywhere. We loved going to the coast to see the Grand Pacific Ocean. You could go up Mount Hood when you needed to see snow and mountains. And now I've of course, living here I've discovered the desert lands and the great rivers of Oregon. So, and as a matter of fact, I'm doing a jigsaw puzzle right now that's the state of Oregon. And every time I see a river or a coastal city, it reminds me of another beautiful place here. So I feel quite settled now in Oregon, though there was a long period of 24 years in Vermont where I was teaching at the University of Vermont. I tried the best I could to adapt to Vermont and learn that geography and feel a sense of bioregionalism there. I learned species names. I went for hikes.

But you know, I'm a West Coast person, so I'm very, very glad to be back. For me, spring begins in January, which is where we are now. So you won't see that many flowers here, but you will see the ferns and the mosses and the lichens are ecstatic with the rainfalls of the wintertime. And then pretty soon along in February, we have our earliest hellebores and witch hazel, and it rolls out across March, April, May.

I felt very deprived living in Vermont of all those months of spring and I'm very happy to be back here. So I will say just briefly in terms of spiritual journey that many of these epiphanies that have informed my psyche have been in the natural world and a number of them have been with trees. But what has supported them has been a cultivated pattern of paying attention.

Both as a naturalist, somebody in the field, what do you look for, know, color of bark and location, all that, but as a Buddhist practitioner, how to quiet the mind and how to remove some of the impediments that human beings are forever throwing in their way and making it hard to connect with other beings in the natural world. So for me, the Buddhist practice has been very important for how I pay attention to the world that I live in today.

Panu: Warm thanks for sharing all that and as a person who has been living mostly in Finland, the idea of a spring in January is of course relatively strange, although global warming is bringing elements of that into southern Finland also. But just as an anecdote, I clearly remember the first moment I saw the Rocky Mountains on a road trip in 2011 and awe and wonder, strongly present in my experience also. And dear listeners, you can notice that Stephanie is a person who pays close attention to where she is and all the relationality and interrelationality there. But I'll give the floor to Thomas now before going more deeply into that.

Doherty: Yeah, Stephanie, it's lovely to have you because your story is somewhat similar to mine. Of course, you might remember that I grew up in Buffalo also. And I remember, I have my coming out west experiences, being a river guide, climbing mountains, living in Arizona, and all this sort of stuff.

Yeah it's it's lovely. So you know I think we're just orienting Stephanie you're a great guest for the beginning of the year because we're you know it's nice to sort of adopt some sort of beginner's mind you know approach in the beginning of the year. It's we could do it any time obviously but the beginning of the calendar year gives us a structural you know permission to do that.

There's that famous quote about when your mind is stretched it can't go back to its original dimensions and it actually was about the original quote was about seeing the Alps. The person had seen the Alps for the first time. And so yeah I know Stephanie that you're in a kind of a mature stage of your career. And last year you were helping with many things in the world.

Kaza: Mm.

Doherty: Advancing the space for this integration of ecology and natural history and attention to the earth and also spirituality. And then you were around for the end of life for Joanna Macy who's a noted environmental leader. Where are you standing in terms of your career and life course. And you know this is not a huge question just off the top of your head like how do you how do see yourself aligning or do you have any practices that align help align yourself like how you see you on a live 2026 or where you see yourself going in the next the next little short period of your journey.

Kaza: Well, let's go back to that New Year's idea because I pay a really close attention to the seasons. It's also supported by Japanese Zen. have a tea ceremony is exquisitely aligned with how the seasons change. In fact, the Japanese think of the seasons as two weeks long because there's beginning of spring, middle of spring, late middle of spring, et cetera. So using that kind of approach,

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Kaza: The new year is a wonderful chance to see the year open up for those of us in a temperate climate from the solstice time. And I watched that really closely. I look at the sunrise and sunset patterns because there's a certain point in January where the day opens at both the end of the day and at the beginning of the day. And that's a real liberation moment to celebrate.

In Japan, they celebrate the New Year's and many other cultures do too, but in Japan it's about cleaning your house and preparing for the New Year. And I think of that as developing a stable base for where you're headed during the year. When you are not confronting a lot of clutter, emotionally or physically, it really helps you see what your path ahead will be.

So there's a certain amount of what I call therapeutic house cleaning that is helpful. And then of course, being out in the natural world. Now I am working on a new book project around Joanna Macy. So for me, I will need to stay pretty close to home and set up a kind of rhythm.

So what I see is stabilizing for a kind of stable mind and a stable heart is paying attention to the rhythms of the day, the rhythms of the week, and of the month. I pay also really close attention to the rhythms of the moon because I've learned that at the dark of the moon I'm really thin. I'm not nearly as creative and when that moon turns and comes out and begins its early crescent then again the sense of emergence and that's a theme I would highlight here.

New Year's is a perfect time to pay attention to the concept, the phenomenon of emergence. What is appearing that had been silent or absent before? How do you cultivate a mind that pays attention to emergence? And I will just say I find this an incredible practice in relationship to grief and loss, which of course is with us all the time around climate change.

But I have been around people who can't come out of their grief and loss. They're very overwhelmed by it. They're in the churn, in the tsunami, and looking for beauty and emergence. Anything that's arising helps lift a person up out of a space that feels like a kind of whirlpool you can't get out of. So January, back to January, is a perfect time for that.

Because even at the smallest level little things are happening. And I did learn this lesson in Vermont with a very skilled naturalist Ian Worley because boy I thought I thought Vermont was like nothing was happening across January and February and he would always always gently correct me. No, no you think nothing's happening but actually the trees are in March they're starting to photosynthesize. Look at the bark and all the various changes in the ice and the snow.

Doherty: Hmm.

Kaza: There's always, always something to look at and there's always something emerging.

Panu: Thanks so much for sharing that. In Finland, in ancient times, the change of the year was in around November. Quite the same as in the Celtic tradition with the Samhain. The dark time of the year and all the leaves are gone. That tends to support this kind of combination of outer and inner journey.

And sometimes when there's less to see in a way in the woods, for example, there's a possibility to see something which we don't usually see. So many things about what you say resonate with me in relation to Northern Europe seasons also. And that's a practical challenge, of course, in urbanizing societies, how to actually connect with those rhythms of the seasons and days.

Kaza: Well, I think it's very important to get outside as much as you can, not to hide in the winter just because it's cold or rainy, and to get outside and see the beginning and the end of the day, or to find a place where you can see the moon at night and learn how it's tracking across your neighborhood and your skyscape, and just be watching from day to day and building up a kind of internal knowledge of these things that becomes a kind of anchor.

Even in the midst of the chaos of crazy politics and people that you don't really want to emulate and, you know, civility shredding right and left, the natural world is still founded on many basic rhythms, the tides and the moons and so on. So climate change is certainly changing many aspects of our various ecosystems and some more quickly than others.

But there are rhythms that are still functional across time. And since we're staying with the January time, I would encourage people to plan something for the end of January when the dark quarter draws to a close. And that is from that end of October, early November time to Groundhog's Day or whatever you want to call it, early February. And then,

A whole new time is arising from the end of the dark quarter. So January can be a time for preparation, for cleansing, for planning, for seeing what's ahead, but just making oneself ready in some way, understanding that January doesn't last forever, as nothing does. And I will say, parenthetically, that's one of the great lessons from Buddhism, that all things are impermanent and it helps just to not cling so much to each thing because you know it's all passing, even your own life.

Panu: There's a beginning often hidden in the end, or what seems to be an end, but Thomas, what's on your mind?

Doherty: No, I’m just really enjoying the conversation. mean, I think it's just refreshing to come back to this. think so many so many of us and I would count as many listeners of this podcast just naturally gravitate to this, you know, Earth kind of an earth based life or reality that at the beginning and end of the day, is everything is Earth based and really relish coming back to these, you know, rhythms of nature and watching the sun and watch seasons and you know our we have to be somewhat militant about doing this because this is our society you know really pulls us away from all this sort of stuff so you know I think it requires you know discipline and action to sort of make space to go outside and to be in nature and all that sort of stuff so it's a good it's a good it's just a good reminder of things that we already know but I forgot because they're just long enough. They're just long enough that I forgot the lessons of fall. I forgot the lessons of winter and like, here I am again, the solstice. And, you know, really thinking about our own rituals. Like I have a tradition of a winter solstice bonfire that I do. You know, I've been doing it for years and years. And just it's just very simple but having an outdoor bonfire and having some candles and just recognizing that time so it's really it's refreshing to come back come back to this

Kaza: Well, let me add, I do a similar fire ritual when I can get to the right location because I have an altar where I put cards for people who have died. And this is one way of, a rhythmical, steady, stable way, honoring death and honoring these individuals. I write their name and then I find an image out of a collection of photos. And that reminds me of them or makes me think that's what their spirit is, whether it's a flower or a mountain. And then we hold a bonfire in January and burn them with respect and honor. And it's quite powerful.

You could see that if you didn't burn them once a year, the altar would get very, very crowded. And it does get more crowded towards the end of the year. And I find that a very helpful reminder again also about impermanence and just how the world actually is. Now I wanted to add a little postscript about what gets in the way of remembering those things. And it's often the things that distract us. So there's a lot out here now about distraction, about electronics, about you know all the ways that we jump to the interruption and we think the interruption is more important than the steady path that we've been walking. So this now is what takes what you said discipline to observe in ourselves, in our society, simple things like agreeing not to have your phones at the table at dinner. Something that simple. You're not going to look up the weather. You're not going to look up some comment that somebody made. You're going to stay in the present moment with that person. So I find that this is a new area of mindfulness, we should say, that we didn't really worry about so much 30 years ago because people didn't have cell phones.

But now the attention economy, maybe you've spoken on about this on the program is riveted around how to steal our attention and use it to make profit. So that consumer society is ever ready to grab you away from something that wasn't costing you anything. And I think this is a particularly good focal point across the holidays. And you've already made it through Christmas or whatever other holidays you celebrate or don't celebrate.

So January is a time to return again to your disciplines, to manage those distractions and manage the stability of your own presence in your own life. I just can't emphasize this enough because I've I find it a personal struggle. What time of day to be online, how long to be online, how quickly to answer texts. People have so many different expectations.

So social pressures digitally are actually distracting us from some of the more important things we do want to pay attention to. So I just encourage people, use this month to do a kind of natural personal review of habits. January is the perfect time for this. And you can probably pick up some new ways of managing your phone. The most recent one I heard was like, leave it plugged in as if it were a landline and only use it where you leave where its home base is. Well that would change some things wouldn't it? Or don't bring it into the bedroom etc. We could talk about this a long time but this is more an example of using January as a time to renew practices that support a stable life where your attention span is useful for you know more important things like climate change, for example.

Panu: That's marvelous and highly useful. In history, often when there's been important topics where discipline is needed, some kind of spiritual orders have been born to cherish that discipline. So I don't know if somebody has already set up a sort of order of, you know modesty and wisdom in cell phone use or something that this will give me something to Google later on but only to a certain amount I won't be Googling the whole evening. And so we are now in January probably when this episode comes out we are recording this at the end of November. So one nice practice that you could try listeners if you want to and I know that many of you already do this is to think about rituals for the seasons and the special times of the year. There's a great British author, Glennie Kindred, whose book, Celebrations, has been an inspiration for me in that regard this year. She advocates for the eight sort of marker days, socials disease and equinoxes, but also the days in between and setting up some kind of physical places of remembrance for them or doing some kind of activities, perhaps even small rituals. that has been very interesting. Together with colleagues we have been experimenting with various types of these and I would encourage folks to think about what might that be in your time and place.

Kaza: You know, I will add to that that we have come up with a practice on the major holidays, aside from the solstices and the equinoxes and the cross-quarter days, things like Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, Christmas, to go out for a walk in the morning, a long nature walk, and remember the Earth before there were human holidays. Kind of get your time scale correct. You can then go have your Thanksgiving dinner or your, you know, Valentine's Day, whatever, but on these big holidays where everybody is celebrating other things and often very filled with consumer purchasing or other celebrations to return to the world before human beings. It's a good exercise for the mind.

Doherty: Lovely. Yeah, this is really great. I, you know, we always talk, consider what we're going to talk about. And then once we have it, once we have a theme, it kind of does, it does bring us together. And so yeah, what we're talking about is, you know, the underlying thing for a lot of this podcast is environmental identity and our sense of our own identity in relation to nature and the natural world and all these, all these kind of recollective practices of back to the seasons and to the time and to observation. They help us. They help us to get in touch with that identity. know, Stephanie, you're so eloquent. You know, the people like Stephanie, who are scholars and writers and spiritual leaders, can just environmentally just environmentally dangerous, rolls off your tongue. Like everything you talk about is just it's a very expressive. But for regular people, we have to sort of, you know, we have to sort of make this up as we go along.

But yeah, I know. Practically, this comes down to these practices like I think having your set of holidays, that's an underlying theme from this from this. This episode, society has all of these different holidays and culture has all these different holidays or holy days, some of which are commercial, some of which are ancient. But you know, having your own, you know, set that's underneath that for yourself. And I know for me, discovering the Celtic the Celtic seasonal round was my life changed from you know after that and it helped me to understand Catholicism and my early childhood and you know even knowing that Bridges Day exists You know the groundhog day, you know where the seeds are germinating under the ground even when the snow covers the ground Just having that is so anchoring, you know, so that solstice to bridges day, you know period is what we're talking about now

So listeners, yeah, you want to think about your holidays under the holidays, you know, in the sense of yes, there's Christmas and all these commercialized holidays, but underneath that there's ancient, very, very ancient practices that eventually go to the first humans. And so I think that's what we're that's what we're channeling. That's what we're channeling here.

Kaza: You know, we should really bring out the point that to just do this individually might be a little lonely. And so I would really encourage people to find a community, even of several people, because one of the things we most need today in terms of the climate crisis is to know what communities we're part of and to support them and to do things with them. You know, be out in the streets with them or have the dinner parties or the bonfires with them.

Doherty: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kaza: And we lost a lot of ground during the pandemic and we're still catching up. So great compassion for the planetary peoples on how to reclaim those public civil spaces that really nourish us because they're in person. They're our whole bodies. We get to see people's hearts and feet and hats and you don't get that, you know, on a screen. So doing things in community to reinforce these—the holidays, the rituals, the shared love of the planet. This is incredibly important and it sometimes takes a bit of sleuthing. These communities don't just show up on your doorstep and sometimes a bit of experimenting. I mean, I've gone to a number of Buddhist communities, for example, and very often it's just not quite the right fit. And I don't always know. But when you keep exploring, sooner or later you find a group you can really, you should and want to invest in because they will become companions for you in approaching more difficult aspects of the world to come. So I don't have any specific ideas or recommendations whether this is an emergency preparedness group or a singing group. But some way that you're parts of communities where the people care about each other.

Doherty: Mm-hmm.

Kaza: I just think this is incredibly important today in a world that's doing the best to separate us from each other. But the human heart still really wants to be with people and wants to have someone to love. tribally, we're made to be social. So let's keep that as a really important part of how we start in the new year. Who are our communities?

Panu: That's wonderful and sometimes if we just manage to open our hearts it may be that the tribe finds us. it may go that way also. Stephanie, if listeners would like to engage more with your thoughts and texts and other stuff, so what would you recommend? What could people find?

Kaza: Well, the recent books are probably the best immediate option. My book called Green Buddhism, which takes an ecological and natural history perspective and combines it with Buddhist thought. Or the tree book, Conversations with Trees, is the current title. It came out again on the 30-year anniversary or 25-year anniversary. But I would also recommend a book by Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self. And the third edition of that, I was the editor for and worked very closely with Joanna on it. So I feel like in some ways it represents some of my thought as well. And if you are particularly interested in Joanna, I edited what we call a festrift honoring volume of her called A Wild Love for the World. And I wrote the introductions and so on. And it's a good global view of her life over time with the many different chapters from around the world. It was really a joy to work on. And I'm now working on a kind of primer of her key themes and major ideas and hopefully that will come out in a year or something like that. It takes a while to make a book. But those will give you some ideas of what I've been up to and there's many articles out there as well and on occasion I do more interviews like this so I'm happy to always speak with people who are looking for companionship on this journey.

Doherty: Lovely. I will.

Panu: Thanks for sharing those and that primer project might be a good topic for re-inviting you and talk more about your close cooperation with Macy and the work that reconnects, so something perhaps for the future. As always, would be so much more to talk about, but time is running, we try to keep this at roughly 30 minutes. Thomas, over to you.

Doherty: Yeah, definitely. Thanks so much for joining us. is really a lovely conversation, really restorative, really refreshing. And that last point listeners about balancing, I would say we could say don't do it alone. But what I would what I would maybe reframe that as is balance the value of solitude with the value of community. And, you know, each of you know what you need.

But one of the risks here for you know, eco anxiety and kind of unprocessed grief is isolation. So for many of these seasonal rituals, bringing your friends like I call my eco friends in my book, you know, the people that really get it and really you understand they understand you, you understand them. That's really key. Or your children or your family. There's natural groupings here.

And it's OK to be alone on a journey for a while, but you will. I think all of us can attest we will find our tribe if you keep if you keep looking. So don't do it alone unless you really want to do it alone. but really savor this season. Panu and Stephanie, thank you so much for the conversation and everyone be well.

 
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Season 5, Episode 8: A Manifesto for Flourishing