I have no other wish than a close fusion with nature and I desire no other fate than to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.
~ Claude Monet
Full Moon, California – photo by Don Smith Photography, used with permission
Peace originates with the flow of things,
its heart is like the movement
of the wind and waves.
The Way is like the veins that
circulate blood through our bodies,
following the natural flow of the life force.
If you are separated in the slightest
from that divine essence,
you are far off the path.
~ Morihei Ueshiba
North Cascade Waterfall – photo by Mirwais Azami Photography, used with permission
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
Alaska Sunset – Photo courtesy of Maria Miller
The soil is all of the earth that is really ours. The seasons, with their heat and their cold make the soil. The storms make the soil, with water, the most powerful substance on Earth. The winds make the soil, spreading dust across thousands of miles. The tides make the soil, stirring the river deltas and their fertile slimes. And above all, the trees and the plants, the dead and the digested, the eaters and the eaten, make the soil…We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. ‘It must be somewhere up there on the horizon,’ we think. And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet.
~ An Excerpt from Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, by William Bryant Logan
Athabasca River, Jasper National Park, photo by Devadana Sanctuary
LOST
Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you.
~ David Wagoner
Photo by Devadana Sanctuary – Banff National Park, Canada
How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth,
With its swirling vaporous atmosphere,
Its flowing and frozen climbing creatures,
The croaking things with wings that hang on rocks
And soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas
How utterly rich and wild
~ Edward Abbey
Jasper National Park, photo by Devadana Sanctuary
I have come to terms with the future.
From this day onward I will walk easy on the earth.
Plant trees.
Kill no living things.
Live in harmony with all creatures.
I will restore the earth where I am.
Use no more of its resources than I need.
And, listen to what it is telling me.
~ M. J. Slim Hooey
Along the Ice Fields Parkway, Banff National Park, Alberta – photo by Devadana Sanctuary