What should be our response to the generosity of the more-than-human world? In a world that gives us maple syrup, spotted salamanders, and sand hill cranes, shouldn’t we at least pay attention? Paying attention is an ongoing act of reciprocity, the gift that keeps on giving, in which attention generates wonder, which generates more attention—and more joy. Paying attention to the more-than-human world doesn’t lead only to amazement; it leads also to acknowledgment of pain. Open and attentive, we see and feel equally the beauty and the wounds, the old growth and the clear-cut, the mountain and the mine. Paying attention to suffering sharpens our ability to respond. To be responsible.
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer
Green-Crowned Hummingbird – photo by Watch the Birdy, bigstockphoto.com
We are always part of something, belonging to a greater wholeness. In fact, we always stand deeply connected with the entire world around us…Nothing can thrive in seclusion. We all depend on each other and we are nurtured in the web of connectedness—organically and in consciousness.
~ Soren Hauge
Sunrise, Serengeti, Tanzania – photo by bennymarty, bigstockphoto.com
One of the most important contributions of the ecological movement is that it has made us conscious of the interdependence of all forms of life, the delicate web of creation…Nor do we realize the degree to which our intention, our attitude, our individual participation can affect the life of the whole and the way the future will unfold.
~Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Kalalau Valley at Sunset, Kauai, Hawaii – photo by BackyardProductions, bigstockphoto.com
Every being has its own voice. Every being enters into communion with other beings. This capacity for relatedness, for presence to other beings, for spontaneity in action, is a capacity possessed by every mode of being throughout the entire universe. So too every being has rights to be recognized and revered…
~ Thomas Berry
Coral Reef – photo by mychadre77, bigstockphoto.com
Trees are a fascinating species on Earth. Unlike other creatures, trees can live for thousands and thousands of years. The oldest tree on record lived for over five thousand years! Unbelievable! It was still three thousand years old when Rome was at its greatest point. It’s amazing to think about and it’s absolutely crazy how long trees can live. They are amongst the oldest living creatures on the entire planet.
We know that trees are alive because they use energy to create their own energy. Even though they lack the organs that creatures like mammals have, trees still have their own set of unique organs.
~ Brandon Prows
Giant Sequoia, Sequoia National Park, CA – photo by Radomir Rezny, bigstockphoto.com
Modern peoples…have mainly forgotten that we live in relationship as brothers and sisters with all the beings and forces of the natural world. Our scientific redefinitions of the “unseen” as the “unreal” have caused us to forget that we are all luminous strands in a giant web of belonging.
~ don Oscar Miro-Quesada
Peacock-Eye Butterfly – photo by Elkov, bigstockphoto.com
When the earth is sick and dying,
There will come a tribe of people
From all races…Who will put their faith in deeds,
Not words, and make the planet
Green again…
~ Cree Prophecy
Dawn, Snake River, Wyoming – photo by Dean Fikar, bigstockphoto.com
There are theoretical descriptions showing how tasks can be accomplished by entangled groups without the members of the group communicating with each other in any conventional way…Some even propose that the entire universe is a single, self-entangled object.
~ Dean Radin
Milky Way – photo by raphoto, bigstockphoto.com
The elder within us feels her interdependence with all life and how she is, in essence, summoned into existence through her relationships with all other beings. Her heart naturally breaks open over the suffering of the world, and she will go to whatever lengths necessary to protect life, especially at the species and habitat levels.
~ Geneen Marie Haugen
Monument Valley, UT – photo by javarman, bigstockphoto.com
Felice Wyndham is an ecological anthropologist and ethnobiologist who has noted that people she has worked with can intimately sense the world beyond their body. “It’s a form of enhanced mindfulness,” she says. “It’s quite common, you see it in most hunter-gatherer groups. It’s an extremely developed skill base of cognitive agility, of being able to put yourself into a viewpoint and perspective of many creatures or objects – rocks, water, clouds.
“We, as humans, have a remarkable sensitivity, imagination, and ability to be cognitively agile,” Wyndham says. “If we are open to it and train ourselves to learn how to drop all of the distractions to our sensory capacity, we’re able to do so much more biologically than we use in contemporary industrial society.”
~ Jim Robbins, “Native Knowledge: What Ecologists Are Learning from Indigenous People”, published in Yale Environment 360
Lady Bird Johnson Grove – photo by shoenberg3, bigstockphoto.com
Truth be told, the entire world is conscious. The whole Universe is made of consciousness or “God-stuff”, even supposedly inanimate objects like rocks. As more and more people break the shackles of the false selves and realize their true natures, interspecies communication, including both animal communication and plant communication, will become more and more common.
~ Makia Freeman
African Bush Elephant, Kruger National Park, South Africa – photo by Paco Como, bigstockphoto.com
Stillness is vital to the world of the soul. If as you age you become more still, you will discover that stillness can be a great companion. The fragments of your life will have time to unify, and the places where your soul-shelter is wounded or broken will have time to knit and heal. You will be able to return to yourself. In this stillness, you will engage your soul. Many people miss out on themselves completely as they journey through life. They know others, they know places, they know skills, they know their work, but tragically, they do not know themselves at all. Aging can be a lovely time of ripening when you actually meet yourself, indeed maybe for the first time. There are beautiful lines from T. S. Eliot that say:
“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
~ John O’Donohue
Yangshuo Guilin, China – photo by kenny001, bigstockphoto.com
Plants, it turns out, really are highly conscious, intelligent and yes, they do have a brain. It’s just that no one ever looked in the right place.
Depth analysis of plant consciousness since the turn of the (new) millennium is finding that their brain capacity is much larger than previously supposed, that their neural systems are highly developed—in many instances as much as that of humans, and that they make and utilize neurotransmitters identical to our own. It is beginning to seem that plants are highly intelligent, feeling beings—perhaps as much or even more so than humans in some instances. (They can even perform sophisticated mathematical computations and make future plans based on extrapolations of current conditions. The mayapple, for instance, plans its growth two years in advance based on weather patterns.)
~ Stephen Harrod Buhner
Tree People of Central Park, NYC – photo by Devadana Sanctuary
Time and space. In the desert there is space. Space is the twin sister of time. If we have open space then we have open time to breathe, to dream, to dare, to play, to pray to move freely, so freely, in a world our minds have forgotten but our bodies remember. Time and space. This partnership is holy. In these redrock canyons, time creates space—an arch, an eye, this blue eye of sky. We remember why we love the desert; it is our tactile response to light, to silence, and to stillness.
~ Terry Tempest Williams
Cathedral Rock, Sedona, AZ – photo by twildlife, bigstockphoto.com
We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits.
But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe.
~ Wendell Berry
Bow Lake, Banff National Park, Canada – photo by roussien, bigstockphoto.com
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