Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?
…We are not just a skin-encapsulated ego, a soul encased in flesh. We are each other and we are the world.
~ Charles Eisenstein
Upper Antelope Canyon, AZ – photo by vichie81, bigstockphoto.com
Devadana Sanctuary
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Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.
~ Olivia Goldhill
Sri Lankan Leopards – photo by sonnydeez, bigstockphoto.com
Our chest, rising and falling, knows that the strange verb “to be” means more simply “to breathe”; it knows that the maples and the birches are breathing, that the beaver pond inhales and exhales in its own way, as do the stones and the mountains and the pipes coursing water through the ground under the city. The lungs know this secret as well as any can know it: that the inward and the outward depths partake of the same mystery, that as the unseen wind swirls within us, so it also whirls all around us, bending the grasses and lofting the clouds even as it lights our own sensations. The vocal cords, stirred by that breath, vibrate like spiderwebs or telephone wires in the breeze, and the voice itself, laughing and murmuring, joins its song to the water gurgling under the grate.
~ David Abram, Becoming Human
Yosemite Valley Sunset – photo by jeffbanke, bigstockphoto.com
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. Whether we stay or whether we go – to be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.
~ David Whyte
Fitz Roy Mountain, Patagonia, Argentina – photo by Tadas Jucys, bigstockphoto.com
Our spiritual practice, our aspiration and awareness, are part of the lifeblood of the planet…If spiritual life is not about the whole, it has lost its true nature; it has instead been subverted by the ego and its patterns of self-concern.
~ Llewelyn Vaughan-Lee
Jungle in Serra dos Orgaos National Park, Brazil – photo by Tupungato, bigstockphoto.com
A closed heart creates a barrier between heart and mind that allows us to tell ourselves that we are all separate and different, rather than feeling the pain of how much we share similar hurts and yearnings. To experience compassion and lovingkindness as integral parts of daily life means to allow our hearts to open and let in the reality that we all have the capacity to feel rejection, humiliation, fear, rage, love, desire, hunger, and joy.
Fortunately, there is a comforting paradox at work here: the more you open your heart, the more flexible and resilient you become in the face of life’s daily challenges and unexpected demands. What develops is similar to the difference between a tree that is stiff and brittle and one that is supple and able to bend. The first tree is at risk for injury in high winds and storms; the second has a much better chance of surviving intact.
~ Nancy Napier, “Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, 2nd Edition”
High Mountain River, Nepal – photo by denbelitsky, bigstockphoto.com
The world we are experiencing today is the result of our collective consciousness, and if we want a new world, each of us must take responsibility for helping create it.
~ Rosemary Fillmore
Awakening – photyo by EdVal, bigstockphoto.com
When I Am Among the Trees
When I am among the trees,especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness, I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,”and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
~ Mary Oliver
Giant Sequoia, Sequoia National Park – photo by Pung Pung, bigstockphoto.com
One of the fundamental demonstrations of our natural instinct to Bond with each other is a will to give. Rather than domination, our most basic urge is to reach out to another human being, even at a cost to ourselves. Giving to others—the urge to empathize, to be compassionate, and to help others altruistically—is not the exception to the rule, but our natural state of being. Our impulse to connect with each other has developed an automatic desire to do for others, even at personal cost. Altruism comes naturally to us. It is selfishness that is culturally conditioned and a sign of pathology.
~ Lynne McTaggart
Li River, China – photo by streetflash, bigstockphoto.com
And here lies the crux of the matter: to say that nature is personal may mean not so much seeing the world differently as acting differently—or, to state it another way, it may mean interacting with more-than-human others in nature as if those others had a life of their own and then coming to see, through experience, that these others are living, interacting beings.
~ Ursula K. LeGuin
Bird of Paradise – photo by Kagenmi, bigstockphoto.com
People who believe that everything is fundamentally one differ in crucial ways from those who do not. In general, those who hold a belief in oneness have a more inclusive identity that reflects their sense of connection with other people, nonhuman animals, and aspects of nature that are all thought to be part of the same “one thing.”
~ Scott Barry Kaufman
Winter Sunset – photo by Syntheticmessiah, bigstockphoto.com
The Universe is one indivisible, dynamic whole in which energy and matter are so deeply entangled it is impossible to consider them as independent elements…
What quantum physics teaches us is that everything we thought was physical is not physical.
~ Bruce H. Lipton
Northern Lights, Yukon Territory, Canada – photo by PiLens, bigstockphoto.com
When we can truly see and understand the earth, love is born in our hearts. We feel connected. That is the meaning of love: to be at one. Only when we’ve fallen back in love with the earth will our actions spring from reverence and the insight of our interconnectedness…the earth is always there for us, offering us everything we need for our nourishment and healing: the miraculous grain of corn, the refreshing stream, the fragrant forest, the majestic snow-capped mountain peak, and the joyful birdsong at dawn.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Sunrise, Three Sisters, Australia – photo by lovleah, bigstockphoto.com
Increasing numbers of researchers, in a multiplicity of fields, are beginning to acknowledge that intelligence is an inevitable aspect of all self-organized systems—that sophisticated neural networks are a hallmark of life. Some researchers are becoming quite vocal in attacking what they call the “brain chauvinism.” Kevin Warwick, a cyberneticist, observes succinctly that, “Comparisons (in intelligence) are usually made between characteristics that humans consider important; such a stance is of course biased and subjective in terms of the groups for whom it is being used.” In other words, rationalists, who have long attacked the concept of plant intelligence and consciousness and awareness in nature as antirational romantic projection, have themselves been merely looking at and for their own reflection in the world around them—and, of course, finding the world wanting. But what especially activates their antirational subjectivity is whenever the organism in question appears to not have a brain, such as with bacteria, viruses, and most especially plants.
~ Stephen Harrod Buhner
Plant and Fungi Earth-Kin, Netherlands – photo by Sinica Kover – bigstockphoto.com
Indigenous peoples across the globe have lived in harmony with their traditional lands for generations, living off the land and its resources while maintaining the integrity of the ecosystem itself. For indigenous peoples, sustainability is a necessity, for without it their own livelihoods are at risk. Traditional ecological knowledge and practices have been so successful that, although indigenous lands account for less than 22 percent of the world’s land area, their traditional territories are home to approximately 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity. This has led to a growing appreciation for the value of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in promoting sustainable land management and scientific discovery and in providing environmental data to support climate adaptation strategies.
~ Hannah Rundle
Canyon de Chelly, Navajo Nation, AZ – photo by Paul Brady, bigstockphoto.com
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