Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
~ Arundhati Roy
Redwood National Park, CA – photo by pmphoto, bigstockphoto.com
What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It’s the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between oneself and something that is profoundly different from oneself: a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web.
~ David Abram
Tropical Glass Frog, Amazon Rain Forest – photo by kikkerdirk, bigstockphoto.com
When we walk into a forest, we’re not walking into a place that is full of separate interacting individuals…We’re walking into a living network, a place where every creature exists only through relationships with others…Every leaf on a tree has hundreds of species of bacteria and fungi living within its leaves. Without those other species, the leaf cannot function; it gets overrun by pathogens…What is true for a tree is also true for an individual human. Our bodies are made of dozens and dozens of interacting species—not just human cells, but bacterial and fungal cells and viruses and microbial components and so forth, and without the interconnections among all those members of the community, our bodies don’t function.
~ David George Haskell
Living Network of Life – photo by Smileus, bigstockphoto.com
when the world
goes mad
be wildly kind
to everyone
everyone
everyone
everyone
~ you can’t control
much
but you control how
you treat others
in these breaking news
heartbreaking times
when nothing feels
certain
let your raw kindness
be a certainty
allow your compassion
to become a North Star
stamped up in
the sky for
others to follow
back home
~ John Roedel
Cala Lilies – photo by Carmen Sorvillo, bigstockphoto.com
In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms.
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Swallowtail Butterfly in Tropical Forest – photo by Jag_cz, bigstockphoto.com
The difficult magic of animistic perception, the utter weirdness and dark wonder that lives in any deeply place-based relation to the earth, is the felt sense of being in contact with wakeful forms of sentience that are richly different from one’s own—the experience of interaction with intelligences that are radically other from one’s own human style of intelligence.
~ David Abram
Adult Male Waterbuck, iSimangaliso Wetland Park, South Africa – photo by bennymarty, bigstockphoto.com
The air that wraps Earth is a single entity, the matrix that holds us all. It is a global commons from which we draw a crucial element of life, sharing as we do molecules that have been breathed in and out of every living thing that has ever breathed on Earth. Molecules that pass through us have passed through brontosaurs, neolithic hunters, Roman emperors, hummingbirds, snails.
~ David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature
Sky Blessings – photo by SkyLynx, bigstockphoto.com