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, AZ – photo by SeanPavonePhoto, bigstockphoto.com
The deeper we look into life the more it unfolds itself. It is not only human beings who speak; plants and trees and all nature speak. Nature reveals its secret. We communicate with the whole of life. We are never alone.
~ Inayat Kahn
Sunlight Streaming Through A Tree – photo by Zoltan Pelle, bigstockphoto.com
…every act we make, every word we speak, every thought we think is not only affected by the other elements in the vast web of being in which all things take part, but also has results so far-reaching that we cannot see or imagine them.
~ Joanna Macy
Seljalandsfoss Waterfall, Iceland – photo by World Image, bigstockphoto.com
Redeveloping the capacity for heart-centered cognition can help each of us reclaim personal perception of the living and sacred intelligence within the world, within each particular thing.
– Stephen Buhner
Archangel Falls, Zion National Park – photo by Pung Pung, bigstockphoto.com
Over the last few months the outer landscape of our lives has changed with the coronavirus pandemic, economic distress and lengthening food lines, and demonstrations for racial injustice. Meanwhile, now seemingly in the background, is the constant drumbeat of the climate crisis, a long-term devastation with unforeseen consequences. And yet the inner journey continues as before, its light even more needed. The soul continues to cry for a return to the Source, for the lover to return to the arms of their Beloved. We carry in the depths of our heart a longing to throw aside the illusion of separation and step into the oneness that is the true reality of life and love. And now, as the world goes through these upheavals, there is a vital need to stay true to this inner calling, this love story that underlies all of life.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Sunrise – photo by firewings, bigstockphoto.com
Just as we have forgotten how to deeply listen to the Earth, so we have lost the knowing of how to speak to Her. We no longer have rituals that bind us together, nor do we listen to the wind or the sound of plants growing. And we no longer know the words that can commune with Her, or the stories that sing to Her. All this is waiting to be rediscovered, because it is our heritage, belonging both to our past and our future, our shared journey together with the Earth. The beat of the drum and the cry of the flute, the sacred song and the sound of feet dancing, all these are the ways our ancestors knew to commune with the Earth. Different music, different songs for the seasons, for times of planting and harvesting, for the hunt. The scent of ceremonial tobacco hanging in the night air. And so we need to relearn how to speak to the trees and the rivers and the stars, to whisper our deepest secrets to the still night air, and remember how we are all one family, bonded from the very beginning.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Quaking Aspen Grove – photo by Gatego66, bigstockphoto.com
The world is magic, not a little bit, one-hundred percent. Every atom, from one end of the cosmos to the other, is magic, magic, magic.
~ Terence McKenna
Marble Caves, Patagonia, Chile – photo by Manon van Goethem, bigstockphoto.com
Mystical experience of nature can be of particular relevance to our troubled age, bringing deeper into our consciousness and emotions the logic that nature sustains humanity as humanity must, in turn, sustain nature. Rationality alone, however, cannot be our guide in the task of restoring our environment. A spiritual connection to nature must inspire the emotional commitment that is the yin, complementing the yang of intellectual understanding.
~ Carl von Essen
Setting Sun, Half Dome, Yosemite National Park – photo by durktalsma, bigstockphoto.com
Throw a pebble into a pond. It sends a shiver across the surface of the water. Ripples merge into one another and create new ones. Everything is inextricably interrelated. We come to realize that we are responsible for everything we do, say, or think, responsible in fact for ourselves, everyone and everything else, and the entire universe.
~ Sogyal Rinpoche
Irish Creek, Clare Glens, Limerick – photo by Patryk Kosmider, bigstockphoto.com
If we can have a holistic view of soil, soul and society, if we can understand the interdependence of all living beings, and understand that all living creatures—from trees to worms to humans—depend on each other, then we can live in harmony with ourselves, with other people and with nature.
~ Satish Kumar
Lupin Field, Lake Tekapo, New Zealand – photo by World Image, bigstockphoto.com
Waking up from the trance of separateness creates powerful new possibilities for the future. It is in this spirit of hope that we can come together to nurture a different dream for the world, one that, “brings forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling socially just human presence on this planet.”
~ Alexis Lassman
Java Landscape – photo by Andrushko Galyna, bigstockphoto.com
Since it is impossible to be outside the reach of collective consciousness, we are faced with a constant opportunity to make a difference by cleaning up our small contribution to the human morphic field. No one else can do this for us; each of us must choose the quality of thought, feeling, and being we want to bring into our individual lives and, thereby, into the reach of everyone else.
~ Nancy Napier, “Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, 2nd Edition”
Costa Rican Sunset – photio by TamiFreed, bigstockphoto.com
As a species, we are on the cusp of an evolutionary choice. Standing at the dawn of this perfect storm, we find ourselves at the beginning of a process of civilizational transition. As the old paradigm dies, a new paradigm is born. And many people around the world are already making the evolutionary choice to step away from the old, and embrace the new.
~ Nafeez Ahmed
Merced River and Yosemite Falls – photo by haveseen, bigstockphoto.com
When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines.
~ Peter Wohlleben
Sequoia – photo by Adrushko Galyna, bigstockphoto.com
An updated worldview is called for that places life as we know it as in, among and inseparable from Earth itself. Humans, for instance, do not live “on” the planet, they are the planet. The terms animate and inanimate no longer serve when we view earth as a living entity. Following on, planetary psychology accepts that earth as a living planet is conscious and accepts the responsibility to investigate just how human and other than human beings share in that one consciousness.
~ David Chalmers
Rainforest Cascade, Bolivia – photo by alekseigl, bigstockphoto.com
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