The trees are our lungs, the rivers our circulation, the air our breath, and the earth our body.
~ Deepak Chopra
Madison Falls, photo by TAO Photography, used with permission
Devadana Sanctuary
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It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said: Being here is so much. It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.
~ John O’Donohue
Rialto Beach – photo by KR Backwoods Photography, used with permission
The process of expanding identification is not merely psychological but is grounded in reality. The process of identification is possible because there is an underlying whole of which we are, each of us, a part.
~Arne Naess
River of Light, Grand Canyon – photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission
The World Soul is not just a psychological or philosophical concept. It is a living spiritual substance within us and around us. Just as the individual soul pervades the whole human being – our body, thoughts, and feelings – the nature of the World Soul is that it is present within everything. It pervades all of creation, and is a unifying principle within the world.
~ Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Royal Creek – photo by KR Backwoods Photography, used with permission
Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
~ Hermann Hesse
Tahiti, photo by Devadana Sanctuary
Cover my earth mother four times with many flowers.
Let the heavens be covered with the banked-up clouds.
Let the earth be covered with fog; cover the earth with rains.
Great waters, rains, cover the earth. Lightning cover the earth.
Let thunder be heard over the earth; let thunder be heard;
Let thunder be heard over the six regions of the earth.
~ Zuni Prayer for Rain
Big Sur, CA – photo by Don Smith Photography, used with permission
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground they spit upon themselves.
This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.
~ Chief Seattle
Red Veil, Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite – photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission
That which created the universe is the universe. I am part of the universe, so I am not cosmic, I am cosmos. A drop of water is not aquatic, it is water. We are part of everything interconnected.”
~ Grandfather Tlakaelel
Light Breathes Life, Oregon Coast – photo by Chris Williams Photography, used with permission
May morning be astir with the harvest of night;
Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,
Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse
That cut right through the surface to a source.
~ John O’Donohue
Central Park, NYC – photo by Devadana Sanctuary
The heart of this book [the Sacred Balance] is the scientifically supported fact that each of us is quite literally created by air, water, soil and sunlight, and what cleanses and renews these fundamental elements of life is the web of living things on the planet. Furthermore, as social and spiritual creatures, we need love and spirit if we are to lead rich, full lives.
~ David Suzuki
Shay Run, WV – photo by Jeff Burcher Photography, used with permission
The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, ‘We are serving the same thing,’ but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.
~ Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
Antelope Canyon, photo by KR Backwoods Photography, used with permission
All living things are individual instruments through which the Mind of the Universe thinks, speaks and acts. We are all interrelated in a common accord, a common purpose, and a common good. We are members of a vast cosmic orchestra, in which each living instrument is essential to the complementary and harmonious playing of the whole.
~ J. Allen Boone
Cape Kiwanda, OR – photo by Chris Williams Exploration Photography, used with permission
A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower has to “inter-be” with everything else that is called non-flower. That is what we call inter-being. You cannot be, you can only inter-be. The word inter-be can reveal more of the reality than the word “to be”. You cannot be by yourself alone, you have to inter-be with everything else
Looking into a flower, you can see that the flower is made of many elements that we can call non-flower elements. When you touch the flower, you touch the cloud. You cannot remove the cloud from the flower, because if you could remove the cloud from the flower, the flower would collapse right away. You dont have to be a poet in order to see a cloud floating in the flower, but you know very well that without the clouds there would be no rain and no water for the flower to grow
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Butterfly and flowers – courtesy of TAO Photography
Each day is a ceremony – if only we could remember. But in the barrage of stimulus and inputs and tasks…we forget, at times, that this, all of this, is holy. One of our essential tasks as human beings, is, and has always been, the enactment of remembrance. This is how we make holy what is beautifully offered. This enactment becomes a response to the call of the world – a way that we confirm, affirm and grow our relationship with the web of Life.
~ Laura Weaver
South Falls – photo by KR Backwoods Photography, used with permission
We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman happens to the human. What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world. If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human
is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day
and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.
~ Thomas Berry
Storm Clouds and Horsetail Fall, Yosemite National Park – photo by Don Smith Photography, used with permission
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