If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the Beloved, not real estate.
~ Terry Tempest Williams
Geiranger Fjord, Norway – photo by Andrey Armyagov, bigstockphoto.com
…In our hearts there is a thread that connects it all together, the heart that still knows the meaning of love and companionship, care and community. Our hearts that can recognize the simple magic in birdsong, the essential beauty of a sunrise, the joy of a child’s laughter. Our hearts have not forgotten that we are all a part of one living community, bonded together since the very beginning, since the early days when we walked and played, sang and dreamed in harmony with the Earth and its magical nature. That thread is still present, even if it is covered over by the confusions of today, by our materialistic dreams. Like the otters playing in the water, it is too simple to be caught in distortion, too primal to be fractured. It can be found in the most ordinary things, a bowl of soup cooked with love and attention, a few kind words exchanged with friends or strangers.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Stripe-Tailed Hummingbird – photo by billberryphotograph, bigstockphoto, com
It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you.
~ John O’Donohue
Our Amazing World – Rainforest Twin Waterfalls – photo by acarapi, bigstockphoto.com
Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go. Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.
~ L.R. Knost
Serengeti at Sunrise, Tanzania, East Africa – photo by bennymarty, bigstockphoto.com
Enchantment…has nothing to do with fantasy, or escapism, or magical thinking: it is founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world; a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life.
~ Sharon Blackie
A Bridge Between Worlds – Elf Garden, Iceland – photo by Ragnhildur Jonsdottir
Ecology and spirituality are two sides of the same coin—understanding and making sense of our own interbeing with the world, and our interdependence. You can enter into an embodied experience of wholeness and meaning through the door of the natural world or through spiritual practice. In fact, the two are ultimately not separate but they are pathways to the same oneness of existence in and through relationships. A oneness we experience most of the time from the limited perspective created by the ‘illusion of separation’.
~ Daniel Christian Wahl
Redwood National Park, CA – photo by Maks_Ershov, bigstockphoto.com
When I look into the eyes of an animal, I do not see an animal. I see a living being. I see a friend. I feel a soul.
~ A.D. Williams
Jaguar, Brazil – photo by Photocech, bigstockphoto.com
Be still and the earth will speak to you.
~ Navajo proverb
Earth – photo by Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC
You are comprised of: 84 minerals, 23 Elements, and 8 gallons of water spread across 38 trillion cells.
You have been built up from nothing by the spare parts of the Earth … You are recycled butterflies, plants, rocks, streams, firewood, wolf fur, and shark teeth, broken down to their smallest parts and rebuilt into our planet’s most complex living thing.
You are not living on Earth. You are Earth.
~ Aubrey Marcus
Blue Morpho Butterfly – photo by Gray Photography, bigstockphoto.com
…the indigenous world embraces a much larger and dynamically interactive reality than does our Western point of view. For many indigenous peoples, the fact that we live in a larger context than what our five senses can perceive is a given. That there are non-visible beings who interact with us on a daily basis is also a given. We in the West have become accustomed to thinking of these kinds of assumptions about reality as naïve or based on fantasy. For people who live in societies that take these wider realities as a given, they are anything but fantasies.
~ Nancy Napier, “Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, 2nd Edition”
Monument Valley, Navajo Land – photo by Gueshni, bigstockphoto.com
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
~ Aesop
Rare Eastern Lotus – photo by Seagull J, bigstockphoto.com
Every tree, every plant, has a spirit. People may say that the plant has no mind. I tell them that the plant is alive & conscious. A plant may not talk, but there is a spirit in it that is conscious, that sees everything, which is the soul of the plant, its essence, what makes it alive. The channels through which the water & sap move are the veins of the spirit.
~ Pablo Amaringo
350-year-old Saman Tree, St. Kitts, West Indies – photo by RaksyBH, bigstockphoto.com
This dimension of our ecological crisis, our forgetfulness of the sacred, is hardly recognized, is a hidden tragedy, and yet I believe it is our primary spiritual responsibility at this time: to reconnect with what is sacred all around us, and thus make life both whole and holy. We can no longer afford to live in separation, in isolation, but need to become once again part of the great conversation with the rivers and the winds, the seas and the stars. Then we will reconnect with the Earth and Her ancient wisdom, and together walk into the future that is waiting, a future in which the light in our hearts and our love for the Earth can heal and redeem the wasteland that our culture has created. Together we will find a way to live in harmony with all of life’s multihued unity.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Volcanic Los Hervideros Coastline, Spain – photo by RossHelen, bigstockphoto.com
Speaking about an experiment done with plants and the response of a plant that didn’t make it to a pole before another one:
What is interesting is the behaviour of the loser: it immediately sensed the other plant had reached the pole and started to find an alternative. This was astonishing and it demonstrates the plants were aware of their physical environment and the behaviour of the other plant. In animals we call this consciousness.
~ BBC News on “Science and Environment”
Plant Life after the Rain – photo by yayabaidillah, bigstockphoto.com
In reality there is a single integral community of the Earth that includes all its component members whether human or other than human. In this community every being has its own role to fulfill, its own dignity, its inner spontaneity.,
~ Thomas Berry
Greater Egret – photo by tornado98, bigstockphoto.com
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