The current state of the world evokes great anguish and despair for anyone paying attention, but this is especially true for those with mature hearts, who feel the world’s degradation all the more acutely. We must learn to behold and hold all this dying and loss, including our own, and still act to preserve and protect what we can.
~ Geneen Marie Haugen
South Rim, Grand Canyon – photo by David Hintz, bigstockphoto.com
Devadana Sanctuary
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Perhaps one of the most powerful keys to determining our experience of the months ahead comes from a shift in thinking that invites us beyond asking, ‘What can I get from the world that exists,’ to asking, ‘What can I offer to the world that is awakening?’ The way we answer this question as individuals becomes our collective answer to what comes next.
~ Gregg Braden
Sunset, Olympic National Park – photo by Andrushko Galyna, bigstockphoto.com
Compassion increases in effectiveness as we mature in the core qualities of the heart, such as unconditional love, allowance, acceptance and an unattached desire for the highest outcome for all concerned.
~ Doc Childre
Costa Rica – photo by tzooka, bigstockphoto.com
An indigenous culture with sufficient territory, and bilingual and intercultural education, is in a better position to maintain and cultivate its mythology and shamanism. Conversely, the confiscation of their lands and imposition of foreign education, which turns their young people into amnesiacs, threatens the survival not only of these people, but of an entire way of knowing. It is as if one were burning down the oldest universities in the world and their libraries, one after another — thereby sacrificing the knowledge of the world’s future generations.
~ Jeremy Narby
Havasu Falls, Arizona – photo by Gleb Tarro, 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…
~ Lynne McTaggart
Malachite butterfly,Mainau Island, Germany – photo by reisegraf.ch, bigstockphoto.com
I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Waves of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
~ John O’Donohue
Ocean Dawn – photo by gagarych, bigstockphoto.com
Mindful that we are not separate from the Earth, but an integral part of its living wholeness, shifts our own story to one of “interbeing,” a shift that will change both our attitude and actions. Similarly the awareness that our spiritual aspiration does not just belong to our own self but has a connection with the sacred within all life, opens a doorway to a deeper resonance and participation. We will be present within the miracle and mystery of life in new ways.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Mountain Flowers – photo by kvd design, bigstockphoto.com
Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them.
~ Nikola Tesla
Himalayan Mountains at Sunrise – photo by denbelitsky, bigstockphoto.com
Would that begin to heal the wound? If we were to see not just the half of the tree that towers above the ground but the half that lives beneath it. If we were to see that great complex of roots connected to all of the other trees in the woodland by networks of mycelium that act almost as a neural network, connecting up communities of living beings, sending and receiving signals. If we were to see this network, this community, as alive, as in some way aware. If we were to understand that when we tug on one leaf it is connected to everything else in the world.
If we saw trees as living, connected, aware—would we change our ways in relation to them, and would that change us?
~ Paul Kingsnorth
Tree Roots Reaching Out and Down- photo by Yastremske, bigstockphoto.com
For some people, opening themselves to compassionate responses initially creates its own kind of pain. When we recognize that all people—actually, all beings—are capable of suffering, our relationship to others changes. As the ripples of compassion move out beyond the circumference of our own suffering or that of our loved ones and friends, we may find it increasingly impossible to ignore the plight of people we’ve never met…Their situation and their capacity to suffer become piercingly real.
~ Nancy Napier, “Sacred Practices for Conscious Living, 2nd Edition”
Lotus Blossom – photo by Ange DiBenedetto
The environment is so fundamental to our continued existence that it must transcend politics and become a central value of all members of society.
~David Suzuki
Valley of Fire State Park, NV – photo by Fyletto, bigstockphoto.com
Luther Standing Bear, a Lakota elder, said of his tradition, “there was no such thing as emptiness in the world. Even in the sky there were no vacant places. Everywhere there was life, visible and invisible, and every object gave us a great interest in life. The world teemed with life and wisdom…”
~ Duane Elgin
Sky and Clouds – photo by underworld1, bigstockphoto.com
You are not separate from nature. We are all part of the One Life that manifests itself in countless forms throughout the universe, forms that are all completely interconnected.
~ Eckhart Tolle, from Stillness Speaks
Sunrise – photo by Yanika, bigstockphoto.com
Wisdom requires not only the investigation of many things, but contemplation of the mystery…The rational approach starts from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong, answers to admitting its own lack of understanding…
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
Honey Fungus – photo by Sid10, bigstockphoto.com
During the past era the focus has been on a transcendent, often disembodied spirituality. As a result we had forgotten the very practical nature of our true self. In dimension of oneness everything is included. There is nothing higher or lower, nothing that is not sacred. Spiritual knowledge belongs to the whole of life, to each cell of creation. The soul is present within the whole body of each of us and also within the body of the Earth. Spiritual principles offer us a very practical way to work with the energies of life.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Summer Dawn, Udmurtiya, Russia – photo by mastafo, bigstockphoto.com
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