The earth and myself are of one mind. The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies are the same.
~ Chief Joseph
Lower Glade Creek Falls, WV – photo by Jeff Burcher Photography, used with permission
Opportunities for global communication and information exchange are increasing at this time in part due to our growing capacity to align our individual consciousness with the patterns of energy that flow throughout the planet.
~Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Earth’s Formation, Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii – photo by Don Smith Photography, used with permission
The distinction between life and lifeless is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on them with such a condescending air? It is they that are an immortal part of us.
~ John Seed, “Thinking Like a Mountain”
Big Dipper – photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission
Continuing a quotation posted a while back on prayer as “speaking to the world”…
Can we not also speak to these powers, and listen for their replies? Can we not cry out to the winds, whisper to the river and the deer, offer our tears to a tree, challenge the mountain with our questions? Outrageous as it may seem, such animistic (or participatory) modes of discourse are simply necessary, I believe, if we wish to really enact a respectful relation to these other beings, to remember the wild alterity of the waters, the winds, and the breathing land itself. If, finally, we wish to ensure an ethic of restraint in our human engagements with the more-than-human earth.
~ David Abram, “Between the Body and the Breathing Earth”
Olympic National Park, photo by KR Backwoods Photography, used with permission
A sacred landscape is not simply a backdrop for action, but rather a place filled with names, associations and memories that link together everything present there. Humans become linked to the rocks, trees, animals, rivers, mountains and these bonds guide future human interaction with that place.
~ Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments
Antelope Canyon, photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission
The first piece, 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
Horsetail Fall, Yosemite – photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission
Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means “to draw out.” What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies…Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us ‘open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.’ The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it.
~ David Orr
Garapatta State Beach, Big Sur, CA – photoi by Don Smith Photography, used with permission
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
~ Mary Oliver
Milky Way over Lake Crescent – photo by TAO Photography, used with permission
Our planet is a dancing creature of spirit and matter spinning on an axis of love in an infinite living universe.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Cannon Beach, OR – Mirwais Azami Photography, used with permission
The mountains, I become a part of it
The herbs, the fir tree, I become a part of it.
The morning mists, the clouds, the gathering waters,
I become a part of it.
The wilderness, the dew drops, the pollen
I become a part of it.
~ Navajo Chant
North Fork Skokomish River, photo by KR Backwoods Photography, used with permission
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
Yosemite and full moon – photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission
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?
~ Luci Anneu Seneca
Olympic National Park – Elwha Valley – photo by TAO Photography, used with permission
I thank you God/Goddess for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.
~ e.e. cummings
Bryce Canyon, photo by KR Backwoods Photography, used with permission
I paused to listen to the silence. My breath, crystallized as it passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper. The wind vane pointed toward the South Pole. Presently the wind cups ceased their gentle turning as the cold killed the breeze. My frozen breath hung like a cloud overhead. The day was dying, the night being born – but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence – a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps. It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe.
~ Richard Evelyn Bird
Yosemite – photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission
It was not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were the dimmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths.
~ Thomas Cole
Murhut Falls, photo by KR Backwoods Photography, used with permission
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