For each act of hatred that makes the news, a dozen of acts of goodness go unseen in our world.
~ Bishop Desmond Tutu
Sunrise – photo by firewings, bigstockphoto.com
Love is the real power. It’s the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower. Your children, the people you work with–everyone blooms.
~ Marion Woodman
Moonrise, Carmel, CA – photo by Rinderart, bigstockphoto.com
We cannot step outside life’s songs. This music made us; it is our nature.
Our ethic must therefore be one of belonging, an imperative made all the more urgent by the many ways that human actions are fraying, rewiring, and severing biological networks worldwide. To listen to trees, nature’s great connectors, is therefore to learn how to inhabit the relationships that give life its source, substance, and beauty.
~ David George Haskell, from The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors
Trees of Yosemite – photo by CreativeEdge, bigstockphoto.com
With a cosmology of a living universe, a shining miracle exists everywhere. There are no empty places in the world. Everywhere there is life, both visible and invisible. All of reality is infused with a vital presence and this creates a profound relatedness among all things.
~ Duane Elgin
Lake in Snow – photo by arcadi62, bigstockphoto.com
Water sustains all life. Her songs begin in the tiniest of raindrops, transform to flowing rivers, travel to majestic oceans and thundering clouds and back to earth again. When water is threatened, all living things are threatened.
~ Indigenous Declaration on Water, 2001
Niagara Falls, NY – photo by lucky-photographer, bigstockphoto.com
We are caught in a period of ‘technological entrancement’ where the worldview of the Global North has become dysfunctional and destructive, creating a radical separation between the human world and the natural world. The dream of the West must be transformed.
There is a different dream that is emerging, a worldview that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all living things, where often, one of the most important roles a human being has is to act as caretaker of the environment and protector of the natural systems that give us life.
~ Alexis Lassman
Seahorse – photo by lanaid, bigstockphoto.com
We can be inspired by [the] scientific view of nested interdependence—from galaxies and stars to planets and ecosystems—so that we sense how personally we are woven into the fabric of life. We are part of this ongoing journey…We can thus recognize ecological, economic, and social change as not only necessary but inevitable.
~ Mary Tucker and Brian Swimme, “Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth”
Spiral Galaxy – photo by NASA, ESA, and the LEGUS Team
There is action to be taken in the outer world, but it must be action that comes from a reconnection with the sacred—otherwise we will just be reconstellating the patterns that have created this imbalance.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Mitre Peak, Milford Sound, New Zealand – photo by hardyuno, bigstockphoto.com
We are all activists, activating one story or another through the power of our attention and the way we participate in our communities. We can choose to activate and embody the story of separation or the story of interbeing. We can choose what kind of world we want to bring forth together with the people we are in contact with. We can ask ourselves:
What am I choosing to activate through the power of my attention?
How does my participation contribute to the world I would want to live in?
~ Daniel Christian Wahl
Grand Canyon – photo by Dreamframer, bigstockphoto.com
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.
~ Melody Beattie
Sunrise, Cliffs of Costa Brava, Spain – photo by Andrey Shapovalov, bigstockphoto.com
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
~ Hermann Hesse
Oak Leaves in A Forest – photo by Maglido Photography, 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
Sunset, Mount Tibrogargan, Queensland, Australia – photo by Martin Vligursky, bigstockphoto.com
I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.
~ Terry Tempest Williams
Milky Way Over Borneo – photo by Alen Thien, bigstockphoto.com