One of the greatest sovereign powers that we all wield as human beings, although often unknowingly or without awareness, is the power of choosing where to place our attention.
~ Paul Levy
Dziki Wodospad Waterfall, Karkonosze Mountains, Poland – photo by Pav-Pro-Photography, bigstockphoto.com
We need to face the reality of our outer ecological crisis. We also need to sense inwardly the loss of the sacred, all the ways in which as a culture we have lost our sense of “interbeing” with all of creation.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Mount Bromo Eruption, Java, Indonesia – photo by muslian, bigstockphoto.com
A portion of an article, “The Earth is Just As Alive As You Are”:
Every year the nearly 400 billion trees in the Amazon rain forest and all the creatures that depend on them are drenched in seven feet of rain — four times the annual rainfall in London. This deluge is partly due to geographical serendipity. Intense equatorial sunlight speeds the evaporation of water from sea and land to sky, trade winds bring moisture from the ocean, and bordering mountains force incoming air to rise, cool and condense. Rain forests happen where it happens to rain.
But that’s only half the story. Life in the Amazon does not simply receive rain — it summons it. All of that lush vegetation releases 20 billion tons of water vapor into the sky every day. Trees saturate the air with gaseous compounds and salts. Fungi exhale plumes of spores. The wind sweeps bacteria, pollen, leaf fragments and bits of insect shells into the atmosphere. The wet breath of the forest, peppered with microbes and organic residues, creates ideal conditions for rain. With so much water in the air and so many minute particles on which the water can condense, rain clouds quickly form.
The Amazon sustains much more than itself, however. Forests are vital pumps of Earth’s circulatory system. All of the water that gushes upward from the Amazon forms an enormous flying river, which brings precipitation to farms and cities throughout South America. Some scientists have concluded that through long-range atmospheric ripple effects the Amazon contributes to rainfall in places as far away as Canada.
The Amazon’s rain ritual is just one of the many astonishing ways in which living creatures transform their environments and the planet as a whole. Much of this ecology has only recently been discovered or understood. We now have compelling evidence that microbes are involved in numerous geological processes; some scientists think they played a role in forming the continents…
~ Ferris Jabr
Costa Rican Rainforest Floor in Rain – photo by Devadana Sanctuary
We dedicate enormous talent and knowledge and research in developing a human order disengaged from and even predatory on the very sources from whence we came and upon which we depend every moment of our existence. We initiate our children into an economic order based on exploitation of the natural life systems of the planet.In reality there is a single integral community of the Earth that includes all its component members whether human or other than human. In this community every being has its own role to fulfill, its own dignity, its inner spontaneity.,
Our educational institutions need to see their purpose not as training personnel for exploiting the Earth but as guiding students toward an intimate relationship with the Earth. The planet itself that brings us into being, sustains us in life, and delights us with its wonders…
~ Thomas Berry
Rainbow at Iguazu Falls, Brazil – photo by lovelypeace, bigstockphoto.com
The Navajo teach their children that every morning when the sun comes up, it’s a brand-new sun. It’s born each morning, it lives for the duration of one day, and in the evening it passes on, never to return again. As soon as the children are old enough to understand, the adults take them out at dawn and they say, ‘The sun has only one day. You must live this day in a good way, so that the sun won’t have wasted precious time.’ Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect with our basic joy.
~ Pema Chödrön
Sunrise, Monument Valley – photo by Melissa Kopka, bigstockphoto.com
Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?
…We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.
~ Charles Eisenstein
Upper Antelope Canyon, AZ – photo by vichie81, bigstockphoto.com
Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.
~ Olivia Goldhill
Sri Lankan Leopards – photo by sonnydeez, bigstockphoto.com
Our chest, rising and falling, knows that the strange verb “to be” means more simply “to breathe”; it knows that the maples and the birches are breathing, that the beaver pond inhales and exhales in its own way, as do the stones and the mountains and the pipes coursing water through the ground under the city. The lungs know this secret as well as any can know it: that the inward and the outward depths partake of the same mystery, that as the unseen wind swirls within us, so it also whirls all around us, bending the grasses and lofting the clouds even as it lights our own sensations. The vocal cords, stirred by that breath, vibrate like spiderwebs or telephone wires in the breeze, and the voice itself, laughing and murmuring, joins its song to the water gurgling under the grate.
~ David Abram, Becoming Human
Yosemite Valley Sunset – photo by jeffbanke, bigstockphoto.com
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. Whether we stay or whether we go – to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.
~ David Whyte
Fitz Roy Mountain, Patagonia, Argentina – photo by Tadas Jucys, bigstockphoto.com
Our spiritual practice, our aspiration and awareness, are part of the lifeblood of the planet…If spiritual life is not about the whole, it has lost its true nature; it has instead been subverted by the ego and its patterns of self-concern.
~ Llewelyn Vaughan-Lee
Jungle in Serra dos Orgaos National Park, Brazil – photo by Tupungato, bigstockphoto.com
A closed heart creates a barrier between heart and mind that allows us to tell ourselves that we are all separate and different, rather than feeling the pain of how much we share similar hurts and yearnings. To experience compassion and lovingkindness as integral parts of daily life means to allow our hearts to open and let in the reality that we all have the capacity to feel rejection, humiliation, fear, rage, love, desire, hunger, and joy.
Fortunately, there is a comforting paradox at work here: the more you open your heart, the more flexible and resilient you become in the face of life’s daily challenges and unexpected demands. What develops is similar to the difference between a tree that is stiff and brittle and one that is supple and able to bend. The first tree is at risk for injury in high winds and storms; the second has a much better chance of surviving intact.
~ Nancy Napier, “Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, 2nd Edition”
High Mountain River, Nepal – photo by denbelitsky, bigstockphoto.com
The world we are experiencing today is the result of our collective consciousness, and if we want a new world, each of us must take responsibility for helping create it.
~ Rosemary Fillmore
Awakening – photyo by EdVal, bigstockphoto.com
When I Am Among the Trees
When I am among the trees,especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness, I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,”and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
~ Mary Oliver
Giant Sequoia, Sequoia National Park – photo by Pung Pung, bigstockphoto.com
One of the fundamental demonstrations of our natural instinct to Bond with each other is a will to give. Rather than domination, our most basic urge is to reach out to another human being, even at a cost to ourselves. Giving to others—the urge to empathize, to be compassionate, and to help others altruistically—is not the exception to the rule, but our natural state of being. Our impulse to connect with each other has developed an automatic desire to do for others, even at personal cost. Altruism comes naturally to us. It is selfishness that is culturally conditioned and a sign of pathology.
~ Lynne McTaggart
Li River, China – photo by streetflash, bigstockphoto.com
And here lies the crux of the matter: to say that nature is personal may mean not so much seeing the world differently as acting differently—or, to state it another way, it may mean interacting with more-than-human others in nature as if those others had a life of their own and then coming to see, through experience, that these others are living, interacting beings.
~ Ursula K. LeGuin
Bird of Paradise – photo by Kagenmi, bigstockphoto.com
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