Welcome to another episode of Lurie Breaks It Down, a podcast where we dig deeply to connect the dots on the issues that shape our world.

I'm Lurie Daniel Favors, author, activist, attorney, and host of the Lurie Daniel Favors show on Sirius XMs Urban View, Channel 126. Now, I love being outside, yo. I love the beach. I love the woods. I like hikes. I like being outdoors. And not just like, we outside, we outside. No, I really like being

outside in nature. When spring hits, it feels like my personal energy levels get a major boost.

Now, in the first two years of my show on Sirius XM, of course, Urban View, Channel 126,

Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. Eastern. Every Friday of those first two years, we had a segment

called Soul Medicine. And in the Soul Medicine segment, we had guests like the amazing

Lindsay Fauntleroy who would talk with my audience and I about the connections between our

physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies as human beings and the impact of nature on each of those bodies.

One of the things that Lindsay told us repeatedly is that we are not humans living in nature.

Rather, as human beings, we are one of many parts of nature.

Whatever's happening to the other billions of beings on the planet doesn't skip us as humans. It includes us too.

Now, we used to know that. It seems a little counterintuitive that we would say it that way today,

but this is knowledge that we used to hold collectively. That's why in our indigenous communities,

our ancestors created cultures that empowered them to live in alignment and in harmony

with the cycles of nature. Literally, indigenous cultures study nature so that they can be in

tune with what nature is trying to tell them. Unlike other forms of life on the planet,

human beings in industrialized spaces have largely lost our ability to pay attention to the natural

cycles in which we all live.

And that's not just a modern phenomenon.

For example, people in the Dogon community, they for centuries have known about aspects

of our astronomy that European scientists could not figure out at all.

They knew that there was a star known as Sirius B, not to be

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