During the past era our focus has been on a transcendent, often disembodied spirituality. As a result we have forgotten the very practical nature of our true self. In the dimension of oneness everything is included. There is nothing higher or lower, nothing that is not sacred. Spiritual knowledge belongs to the whole of life, to each cell of creation. The soul is present within the whole body of each of us and also within the body of the earth. Spiritual principles offer us a very practical way to work with the energies of life.

~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Ban Gioc Waterfall – photo by Huy Thoai, bigstockphoto.com

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To truly embody the idea that we are all one, we require “vision,” which is much more than seeing. To achieve vision of the intricate web of energy that connects us all requires a transformational shift in our being.

~ Dr. Barry Taylor

Costa Rica – photo by Devadana Sanctuary

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In earlier epochs of human history, people lived in harmony with the natural world, and regarded plants as sentient, aware, intelligent, alive, and healers in their own right. Tribal shamans earned powerful status as spiritual leaders and liaisons between plants and the spirit world.

~ Kathleen Daley

Forest Fern – photo from bigstockphoto.com

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The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

~ Black Elk

Desert Landscape at Dusk – photo from bigstockphoto.com

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Some of us are drawn to mountains the way the moon draws the tide. Both the great forests and the mountains live in my bones. They have taught me, humbled me, purified me, and changed me: Mount Fuji, Mount Shasta, Mount Kailas, the Schreckhorn, Kanchenjunga. Mountains are abodes for ancestor and deity. They are places where energy is discovered, made, acquired and spent. Mountains are symbols, as well, of enduring truth and of the human quest for spirit. I was told long ago to spend time with mountains.

~ From The Fruitful Darkness, by Joan Halifax

Grand Teton National Park – photo from bigstockphoto.com

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…the intermediaries between the human community and the more-than-human community – the animals, the plants, the trees, even whole forests are considered to be living, intelligent forces. Even the winds and the weather patterns are seen as living beings. Everything is animate. Everything moves. It’s just that some things move slower than other things, like the mountains or the ground itself. But everything has its movement, has its life. And the magicians [shamans/healers] were precisely those individuals who were most susceptible to the solicitations of these other-than-human shapes. It was the magicians who could most easily enter into some kind of rapport with another being, like an oak tree, or with a frog.

~ 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.

Merced River, Yosemite – photo from bigstockphoto.com

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The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

~ Wendell Berry

Roots of Majestic Beech Tree – photo from bigstockphoto.com

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As Wind carries our prayers for Earth and All Life, may respect and love light our way.
May our hearts be filled with compassion for others and for ourselves.
May peace increase on Earth. May it begin with me.

~ Tibetan prayer flag, ‘Lung ta’ (‘Wind Horse’)

Falling Water Falls, Arkansas – photo from bigstockphoto.com

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The divine oneness of life is within and all around us. Sometimes walking alone in nature we can feel its heartbeat and its wonder, and our steps become steps of remembrance. The simple practice of ‘walking in a sacred manner’ in which with every step we take we feel the connection with the sacred earth is one way to reconnect with the living spirit of the earth.

~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, “Praying for the Earth”

Grand Canyon at Dusk – photo from bigstockphoto.com

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The Poet Dreams of the Mountain

Sometimes I grow weary of the days with all their first and starts.
I want to climb some old grey mountain, slowly, taking
The rest of my life to do it, resting often, sleeping
Under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.
I want to see how many stars are still in the sky
That we have smothered for years now, forgiving it all,
And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.
All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!
How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.
I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.
In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

~ Mary Oliver

Mt. Rainier National Park – photo by Andrushko Galyna, bigstock.com

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Every living being is connected intimately, and from this intimacy follows the capacity of identification and as its natural consequences, practice of non-violence… Now is the time to share with all life on our maltreated earth through the deepening identification with life forms and the greater units, the ecosystems, and Gaia, the fabulous, old planet of ours.

~ Arne Naess

Tropical Jungle – Southeast Asia, photo from bigstockphoto.com

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Whenever you sit in a chair…you can ponder how, in order for the chair to exist, a long, long list of things had to happen. Initially, there had to be sunlight, dirt, the seed of a tree, insects, microbes, water, and many other elements that contributed to the tree’s development. Then there had to be people and machines to make lumber from the tree, someone else to design the chair, and yet other people to actually make it. Next came the trucks that carried the chair from its origins to the place where you acquired it. Then there were all the people involved in the marketing of it, and any other elements involved in the journey the chair took from seed to completion. If any of these elements had been missing, the chair wouldn’t exist.

What is true for the chair is true for everything: remove any one of the complex array of elements in the material creation of anything, and it no longer exists. Just as the chair can’t become a chair
without all the other participants along the way, you can’t be you without an amazing, complex interconnection with all the contributors that make your life possible.

~ Nancy Napier, “Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, 2nd Edition”

Iguazu – photo from bigstockphoto.com

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We live in a world of energy. An important task at this time is to learn to sense or see the energy of everyone and everything – people, plants, animals. This becomes increasingly important as we enter the World of the Fifth Sun, for it is associated with the element ‘ether’ – the realm where energy lives and weaves. Go to the sacred places of the Earth to pray for peace, and have respect for the Earth which gives us our food, clothing, and shelter. We need to reactivate the energy of these sacred places. That is our work.

~ Carlos Barrios, Mayan Elder & Ajq’ij of the Eagle Clan

Sedona, AZ – photo from bigstockphoto.com

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When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees,
higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky
with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place,
and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity?

~ Seneca

Sequoia National Park – photo by Jorg Hackemann, bigstockphoto.com

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…We have been wrong. 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. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

~ Wendell Berry

Deep Jungle, Nepal – photo from bigstockphoto.com

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