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Portal to Multidimensional Living

Devadana Sanctuary

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The air that wraps Earth is a single entity, the matrix that holds us all. It is a global commons from which we draw a crucial element of life, sharing as we do molecules that have been breathed in and out of every living thing that has ever breathed on Earth. Molecules that pass through us have passed through brontosaurs, neolithic hunters, Roman emperors, hummingbirds, snails.

~ David Suzuki, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature

Twilight Moon, Canyonlands National Park, UT – photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission

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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Photo by Zastrozzi Dh Photography, used with permission

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Trees are solar collectors. Most people equate that with the sun’s energy. But the sun is only one star, and there are billions of stars that influence the Earth with their radiation. I believe energies inside the earth are transmuted and transmitted into the cosmos by the trees, so the trees are like antennas, senders and receivers of earth energies and stellar energies.

~ David Milarch, “The Man Who Planted Trees”

Central Park Trees – photo by Devadana Sanctuary

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Around us, life bursts with miracles–a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles.

~ Thích Nhat H?nh

Thor’s Well, Cape Perpetua, OR – photo by Don Smith Photography, used with permission

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Opportunities for global communication and information exchange are increasing at this time in part due to our growing capacity to align our individual consciousness with the patterns of energy that flow throughout the planet.

~Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Earth’s Formation, Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii – photo by Don Smith Photography, used with permission

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The distinction between life and lifeless is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on them with such a condescending air? It is they that are an immortal part of us.

~ John Seed, “Thinking Like a Mountain”

Big Dipper – photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission

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Continuing a quotation posted a while back on prayer as “speaking to the world”…

Can we not also speak to these powers, and listen for their replies? Can we not cry out to the winds, whisper to the river and the deer, offer our tears to a tree, challenge the mountain with our questions? Outrageous as it may seem, such animistic (or participatory) modes of discourse are simply necessary, I believe, if we wish to really enact a respectful relation to these other beings, to remember the wild alterity of the waters, the winds, and the breathing land itself. If, finally, we wish to ensure an ethic of restraint in our human engagements with the more-than-human earth.

~ David Abram, “Between the Body and the Breathing Earth”

Olympic National Park, photo by KR Backwoods Photography, used with permission

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A sacred landscape is not simply a backdrop for action, but rather a place filled with names, associations and memories that link together everything present there. Humans become linked to the rocks, trees, animals, rivers, mountains and these bonds guide future human interaction with that place.

~ Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments

Antelope Canyon, photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission

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The first piece, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the Universe and all its powers and when they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells the Great Spirit and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.

~ Black Elk

Horsetail Fall, Yosemite – photo by Gary Hart Photography, used with permission

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Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means “to draw out.” What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies…Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us ‘open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.’ The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it.

~ David Orr

Garapatta State Beach, Big Sur, CA – photoi by Don Smith Photography, used with permission

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I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

~ Mary Oliver

Milky Way over Lake Crescent – photo by TAO Photography, used with permission

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