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Redeveloping the capacity for heart-centered cognition can help each of us reclaim personal perception of the living and sacred intelligence within the world, within each particular thing.
~ Stephen Buhner
Summer Sunrise, Yosemite National Park – photo by Bill45, bigstockphoto.com
Concerning matter, we have all been wrong. What we have called matter is really energy, whose vibration has been lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter. There is only light and sound.
~ Albert Einstein
View from Tiger Wave Temple, Thailand – photo by Olena Tur, bigstockphoto.com
Everything interesting happens at the edges. As we are moving to restore our relationships with nature, including one another, in an extremely diverse and globally connected planet, the knowledge we need is held by those who are crossing boundaries between fixed viewpoints, restoring relationship with place, holding multiple ways of being, and reintegrating feminine wisdom…
It is unreasonable to assume we will re-enter a collective state of healing that is based on a common, seamless view. Instead, wholeness and healing manifest when we honor our collective wounding and allow our brokenness and resulting stories and diversities to be seen and held. It is our cracks, our brokenness, our edges that reorder our vision of the world, so that we may see more clearly, from a perspective that is much larger than a myopic view.
~ Jeanine M. Canty
Our Beautiful Planet – photo by Maria Marganingsih, bigstockphoto.com
Felice Wyndham is an ecological anthropologist and ethnobiologist who has noted that people she has worked with can intimately sense the world beyond their body. “It’s a form of enhanced mindfulness,” she says. “It’s quite common, you see it in most hunter-gatherer groups. It’s an extremely developed skill base of cognitive agility, of being able to put yourself into a viewpoint and perspective of many creatures or objects – rocks, water, clouds.
“We, as humans, have a remarkable sensitivity, imagination, and ability to be cognitively agile,” Wyndham says. “If we are open to it and train ourselves to learn how to drop all of the distractions to our sensory capacity, we’re able to do so much more biologically than we use in contemporary industrial society.”
~ Jim Robbins, “Native Knowledge: What Ecologists Are Learning From Indigenous People”, published in Yale Environment 360
Seven Sacred Pools near Sedona, AZ – photo by twildlife, bigstockphoto.com
Waking up from the trance of separateness creates powerful new possibilities for the future. It is in this spirit of hope that we can come together to nurture a different dream for the world, one that, “brings forth an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling socially just human presence on this planet.”
~ Alexis Lassman
Mountain Lake in Summer – photo by viktoriya89, 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
Sunset, Reykjanesta Cliffs, Iceland – photo by rasica, bigstockphoto.com
No matter what problem you look at, every ecological problem comes from this illusion that we are separate from nature.
~Vandana Shiva
Forest River – photo by vsarts, bigstockphoto.com
…everything that has form in this world has a spiritual dimension…everything in this world is connected…everything we do to bring harmony, anywhere and at any time, has repercussions elsewhere.
~ Claude Poncelet, The Shaman Within
Cathedral Rock, Sedona, AZ photo by alexeys, bigstockphoto.com
There’s a longing for many of the Western countries for something mystical about the landscape in a way that people feel that they have lost in their daily lives. It can be looked at as being slightly eccentric but for the Icelanders it’s more of a sense of the landscape being alive.
We still talk about [Trolls and Elves]…They have meaning in a cultural sense and they have meaning in an environmental sense. Those creatures are protectors of the land.
~ From Spiritual Ecology Facebook Page, quoting BBC Earth
Black Sand Dunes, Stokksnes Headland, Iceland – photo by jojjik, bigstockphoto.com
Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements—the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life— weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode…
~ Lawrence M. Krauss
Milky Way – photo by Den Belitsky, bigstockphoto.com
Within minutes of sensing vibrations from pollinators’ wings, the plants temporarily increased the concentration of sugar in their flowers’ nectar. In effect, the flowers themselves served as ears, picking up the specific frequencies of bees’ wings while tuning out irrelevant sounds like wind…
~ National Geographic article
Tulip Blossoms – photo by Bozhena Melnyk, bigstockphoto.com
…look at our understanding of the ecosystem. It is one ecosystem. We are all part of one world in a way that was inconceivable in my parent’s generation… …Oneness is not an idea, oneness is a life force. Oneness is the life force of the planet trying to break through this hierarchical structure that is killing it… Oneness is a practical tool – we have to live according to this oneness…
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
New Zealand Landscape – photo by DmitryP, bigstockphoto.com
It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
El Matador State Beach, CA – photo by bennymarty, bigstockphoto.com
I think that responsible living in the biosphere means learning to see other species as beings like us, in that they have intentions, make decisions, and they know what they’re doing. They have points of view.
I think that responsible living in the biosphere means learning to take the interests of other species into consideration and allowing them room to live. And I think it means learning to relate to them and to think through the kinship we have with them…
~ Jeremy Narby
Long-Eared Owl – photo by Martin Grossman, bigstockphoto.com
We talk often about the ripple effects of kind acts. Science is now confirming that kindness is actually contagious because seeing others perform acts of kindness elicits a natural neurochemical response within us which makes us act more altruistically towards others. This phenomenon is called “moral elevation”. Even watching acts of kindness can improve pathways in our brain!
~ KindSpring.org
Rhododendrons, Carpathian Mountains – photo by Bilanola, bigstockphoto.com
