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Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer
Tunnel View, Yosemite National Park, CA – photo by Gary Tognoni, bigstockphoto.com
When a bird sings its sacred songs, it casts medicine all around the earth to the hard to reach places. When we drum and sing our songs, the same thing happens. The power of the heart is the most powerful medicine we have. When you think about it, it’s the only thing that can save everything: Because it is everything.
~ Isaac Murdoch
Southern Red Bishop Bird Singing in Kruger National Park, South Africa – photo by CreativeNaturePhotography, bigstockphoto.com
You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to highest advantage to others. Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or to the disadvantage to anyone.
~ R. Buckminster Fuller
Forest River, Provincial Park, Ontario Canada – photo by Brian Lasenby, bigstockphoto.com
We struggle over words when the slime mold solves the maze, because our concepts don’t fit the data. It is not that nature lacks intelligence, but that our own concepts do.
~ Jeremy Narby
Not Slime Mold – White Mushrooms in Tropical Rainforest, Borneo – photo by Stephanscherhag, bigstockphoto.com
The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships: the strength of a touch, the blessing of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you just as you are and finding in you an unexpected goodness.
~ Rachel Naomi Remen
Lotus Blossom – photo by Ange DiBenedetto
And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.
~ Roald Dahl
Elf Garden, July 2013 – photo by Ragnhildur Jonsdottir
We are not here on Earth to be alone, but to be a part of a living community, a web of life in which all is sacred. Like the cells of our body, all of life is in constant communication, as science is just beginning to understand. No bird sings in isolation, no bud breaks open alone. And the most central note that is present in life is its sacred nature, something we need to each rediscover and honor anew.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Pancake Rocks, Punakaiki, New Zealand – photo by Rawpixel.com
What an irony it is that these living beings whose shade we sit in, whose fruit we eat, whose limbs we climb, whose roots we water, to whom most of us rarely give a second thought, are so poorly understood. We need to come, as soon as possible, to a profound understanding and appreciation for trees and forests and the vital role they play, for they are among our best allies in the uncertain future that is unfolding.
~ Jim Robbins
Giant Sequoia Trees, Sequoia National Park, California – photo by lucky-photographer, bigstockphoto.com
Close your eyes for a moment and imagine how you would relate to the rest of the world if love was always moving through you. ~ Don Miguel Ruiz
The Twelve Apostles at Sunset. Australia – photo by kavram, 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
Forest and Sunbeams, Czechoslovakia – photo by KoTangens, bigstockphoto.com
Our natural state of being is in relationship, a tango, a constant state of one influencing the other. Just as the subatomic particles that compose us cannot be separated from the space and particles surrounding them, so living beings cannot be isolated from each other…
Late Summer Lotus – photo by Terésa Stern
If the Earth is to be remembered and thought of as a sacred, living being and related to as a sacred, living being, then it asks of us to respond from a real place inside of ourselves.
~ Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee.
Yosemite Valley at Sunset – photo by topseller, bigstockphoto.com
…the sacred is not some special, separate category of existence. It is not to be captured and tamed with fixed verbal structures of dogma and belief, or confined in man-made buildings. For sacredness is inherent in the very essence of life and the multiple patterns of its arising. Sacredness is the radiant expansion of the heart, the devotion to life that rises in contemplation of the inexhaustible mystery that is unity in diversity, the One manifesting through the whole of creation.
~ Eleanor O’Hanlon
Icelandic Sunset – photo by Ragnhildur Jonsdottir
Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
~ Martin Luther King Jr.
Chaba Flower – photo by PJ_JoE, bigstockphoto.com
The key takeaway [of quantum mechanics]…is that we are all part of one unified field interacting and co-existing with one another…Kami (spirit) and people are not separate; they exist within the same world and share its interrelated complexity.
~ Akiko Ogawa
Alaskan Sunset – photo by Maria Horton Miller
