Click thumbnail to view larger image.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult … Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
Always stay on the bridge between the invisible and visible, and learn the lessons of both worlds.
A tree uses what comes its way to nurture itself. By sinking its roots deeply into the earth, by accepting the rain that flows towards it, by reaching out to the sun, the tree perfects its character and becomes great…Absorb, absorb, absorb. That is the secret of the tree.
Modern peoples…have mainly forgotten that we live in relationship as brothers and sisters with all the beings and forces of the natural world. Our scientific redefinitions of the “unseen” as the “unreal” have caused us to forget that we are all luminous strands in a giant web of belonging.
…you need insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. With that wisdom you know that it is not a battle between “good guys” and “bad guys,” because the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. With insight into our profound inter-relatedness, you know that actions undertaken with pure intent have repercussions throughout the web of life, beyond what you can measure or discern. By itself, that insight may appear too cool, conceptual, to sustain you and keep you moving, so you need the heat of compassion. Together these two can sustain us as agents of wholesome change. They are gifts for us to claim now in the healing of our world.
There is a road in the hearts of all of us, hidden and seldom traveled, which leads to an unknown, secret place. The old people came literally to love the soil, and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. Their teepees were built upon the earth
We do not know what it might mean to once again work with the divine forces within creation. In the West we have long since lost touch with this heritage, even though it is buried deep in our psyche. Yet it is a simple shift of awareness to reclaim this consciousness, and in doing so we will step into the future that is being born at this moment of crisis. We will become alive in a new way as we help the world wake up from the dream that is destroying it. We will be active participants in the real ecological work that is needed.
Look at the lake in front of the gate. When the sun shines, it radiates light and brightness. When the wind comes, there arise ripples and waves. There is a time for peaceful contemplation; there is a time for dynamic action; and all the time the lake remains itself.
More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuoustenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.
The communication of the world did not occur in the visible realm of Newton, but in the subatomic world of Werner Heisenberg. Cells and DNA communicate through frequencies. The brain perceived and made its own record of the world in pulsating waves. A substructure underpins the universe that is essentially a recording medium of everything, providing a means for everything to communicate with everything else. People are indivisible from their environment. Living consciousness is not an isolated entity. It increases order in the rest of the world. The consciousness of human beings has incredible powers, to heal ourselves, to heal the world – in a sense, to make it as we wish it to be.
The Earth is what we all have in common.
The forest makes your heart gentle. You become one with it… No place for greed or anger there.
There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone.
This is the difference between worldviews: one that views a land as a rich ore body, or a playground, and another that views it as a source of great spiritual and cultural wealth…. This is the story of the time in which we find ourselves.
The river is one of my favorite metaphors, the symbol of the great flow of Life Itself. The river begins at Source, and returns to Source, unerringly. This happens every single time, without exception. We are no different.
