We need to change our way of thinking and seeing things. We need to realise that the Earth is not just our environment. The Earth is not something outside of us. Breathing with mindfulness and contemplating your body, you realise that you are the Earth. You realise that your consciousness is also the consciousness of the Earth. Look around youwhat you see is not your environment, it is you.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Bryce Canyon National Park, UT – photo from bigstockphoto.com
From an article speaking about coming back to our senses:
It’s by beginning to honor and value our direct sensory experience: the tastes and smells in the air, the feel of the wind as it caresses the skin, the feel of the ground under our feet as we walk upon it. And how much easier it is to feel that ground if you allow yourself to sense that the ground itself is feeling your steps as you walk upon it.
~ An excerpt from ‘The Ecology of Magic’, a Scott London Interview with David Abram, anthropologist, philosopher, magician and author of The Spell of the Sensuous
Rio Celeste Waterfall, Costa Rica – photo from bigstockphoto.com
For those of us who wish to learn directly from the wildness of the world, to learn directly from plants the medicinal uses they possess, it is essential to begin to feel with the heart…
The plants respond to the gesture of intimacy contained within the field projected by your heart…this is reinhabiting your interbeing with the world.
~ Stephen Buhner
Forest-Fern and Fallen Log – photo from bigstockphoto.com
Oh Eagle, come with wings outspread in sunny skies.
Oh Eagle, come and bring us peace, thy gentle peace.
Oh Eagle, come and give new life to us who pray.
Remember the circle of the sky, the stars, and the brown eagle,
the great life of the Sun, the young within the nest.
Remember the sacredness of things.
~ Pawnee Prayer
Bald Eagle, photo from wikipedia.com
There’s only one being shining out of all of our eyes. We spend all day finding reasons to hate people or feel better than other people, but it’s not true. There’s only one being.
~ Krishna Das
Tropical Sunrise – photo from bigstockphoto.com
when you look at the interconnected network of plant roots and micorrhizal mycelia in any discrete ecosystem, you are looking at a neural network much larger than any individual human has ever possessed…
While humans and many other animals…have a specific organ the brain, which houses its neuronal tree, plants use soil as the stratum for the neural net; they have no need for a specific organ to house their neuronal system.
~ Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence
Misty Forest – photo from bigstockphoto.com
We are not here on Earth to be alone, but to be a part of a living community, a web of life in which all is sacred. Like the cells of our body, all of life is in constant communication, as science is just beginning to understand. No bird sings in isolation, no bud breaks open alone. And the most central note that is present in life is its sacred nature, something we need to each rediscover and honor anew. We need to learn once again how to walk and breathe in a sacred universe, to feel this heartbeat of life. Hearing its presence speak to us, we feel this great bond of life that supports and nourishes us all. Todays world may still at times make us feel lonely, but we can then remember what every animal, every insect, every plant knows – and only we have forgotten: the living sacred whole.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, “Loneliness and the Sacred Web of Life”
Silver Falls State Park, OR – photo from bigstockphoto.com
A closed heart is brittle and may shatter when confronted by a crisis. An open heart is soft and supple, drawing from a strength that makes room for what life brings its way. It is as though, in opening our hearts, we create all the internal space we need to allow awareness and feelings to move through us, as the wind moves through the space between the branches of a tree, or between the leaves on the branches. The more open our hearts, the more room we have inside to meet ourselves and others with a willingness to connect and be aware. The love that is generated spontaneously by an open heart pours into our experience even as it flows out to others.
~ Nancy Napier, “Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, 2nd Edition”
Meditation – photo from bigstockphoto.com
our collective transformation is borne of the remembrance of the inalienable truth that We Are All One; that each of us is an intrinsically unique expression of the One Creative Life Force; that we are all sourced from Source, and that Source – the Creative Force of Life, the Great Spirit – is a force of Love.
~ From Wake Up World Facebook Page, by guest writer Little Bear
Oregon Coastline – photo by Andriy Blokhin, bigstockphoto.com
The accelerating changes of these times offer us increased opportunities to advance in consciousness – by integrating our spiritual hearts wisdom with our human intelligence into a oneness relationship caring for ourselves and others is caring for the whole.
~ Doc Childre
Humpback Whale at Sunset, Alaska – photo by Paul Wolf, 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, “Lessons in Courage”
Yangshuo Guilin, China – photo from bigstockphoto.com
consciousness is not confined within the brain but is an infusing presence throughout the universe that enables us, in cooperation with the brain, to connect meaningfully with the world beyond our physical body.
~ Duane Elgin
Baobab Trees At Sunset, Madagascar, photo by Dudarev Mikhail, bigstockphoto.com
What the idea of “thinking like a planet” implies is that we are the planet. We are Gaia. If anything, this is what an understanding of ecology (both physical and spiritual) teaches us: that we cannot separate ourselves from the web of interconnectedness and interdependency that makes up the web of planetary life. We simply cannot affect one part of our world without affecting in some manner all other parts, including ourselves. Some of these consequences, as we are learning, can be disastrous. It is in our best interests to learn to think in terms of the whole system of which we are one part.
~ David Spangler
Grand Teton National Park – photo by Sue Smith, bigstockphoto.com
The life and passion of a person
leaves an imprint on the ether of a place.
Love does not remain within the heart,
it flows out to build secret tabernacles
in a landscape.
~ John ODonohue
Sunset, Monument Valley – photo by Kris Wiktor, bigstockphoto.com
According to John Perkins in his e-guide All My Relations, We are Each Other, “All my Relations” is a worldview shared by many indigenous cultures around the world, “particularly those of the North American continent,” that maintains “we are all family, bound to humanity as a whole as well as to the Earth, the plants and animals that share it with us, and to the stars and other heavenly bodies in the universe.” Although philosophical values differ from culture to culture, there is a common thread among many indigenous communities that the land is not owned – animals, rivers, oceans, and mountains are not an endless resource to be pillaged for personal gain. Instead, the Earth is seen as alive, and an entity to be in relationship with that does not exist outside the self.
~ Alexia Lassman
Mahua Waterfall, Borneo – photo from bigstockphoto.com
