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… people’s hearts must change before structures can change. This change is the basis of genuine reform and renewal. We need to understand, to really grasp on an elemental level, that the definitive revolution is the spiritual awakening of humankind.
~ Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart
Monument Valley Sunrise – photo by wisanboonrawd, bigstockphoto.com
Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.
~ Henry Beston
Orion’s Belt Panorama – Mvln, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia.com
In a real sense all life is inter-related. All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ocean Sunrise – photo by Enguene Ga, bigstockphoto.com
The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships: the strength of a touch, the blessing of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you just as you are and finding in you an unexpected goodness.
~ Rachel Naomi Remen
Tree Wisdom, Timaru, New Zealand – photo by Artazum, bigstockphoto.com
Given the distant common ancestry between octopuses and humans, conscious octopuses would mean that consciousness has evolved on earth twice. Godfrey-Smith believes it’s plausible that there are more than two branches of evolution where consciousness independently developed…Based on the current evidence, it seems that consciousness is not particularly unusual at all, but a fairly routine development in nature.
~ Olivia Goldhill
Octopus – photo from Wikipedia
There is a kindness that dwells deep down in things; it presides everywhere, often in the places we least expect. The world can be harsh and negative, but if we remain generous and patient, kindness inevitably reveals itself. Something deep in the human soul seems to depend on the presence of kindness; something instinctive in us expects it, and once we sense it we are able to trust and open ourselves.
~ John O’Donohue
The Gentle Presence of Lotuses – photo by kenny001, bigstockphoto.com
We don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of nows, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
~ Howard Zinn
Rainforest Bridge – photo by jack-sooksan, bigstockphoto.com
From the standpoint of daily life…there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other.
~ Albert Einstein
Iceland Sunset – photo by Radnhildur Jonsdottir
Fungi are their own kingdom of life — as animals and plants are. They include microscopic yeasts and big mushrooms, some of them psychedelic. They are in bread. They are in medicine. They clean up oil spills. Only a small fraction of fungi species have been identified.
Fungi stitch things together.
Some kinds stitch life and death together, literally. They decompose dead things — leaves, twigs, giant trunks of ancient trees — and turn them into soil so more trees and twigs and leaves can grow. I came to think of them as agents of reincarnation.
~ Somini Sengupta
Forest Mushrooms – photo by Sergey Pankin, bigstockphoto.com
What if we expanded our sense of community to truly include all living beings? Included their perspectives, needs, and gifts? What would be the state of our environment then?
~ Susan Eirich
Band-bellied Owls, Ecuador – photo by Martin Grossman, bigstockphoto.com
When I Am Among the Trees
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come into the world to do this,
to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
~ Mary Oliver
Oak Forest in Summer – photo by JanBussan, bigstockphoto.com
Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects for Western culture is to accept that we are totally dependent on the earth for all our needs.
~ Mary Jane Rust
Forest Path – hoto by Mikhail Dudarev, bigstockphoto.com
…sacredness is inherent in the very essence of life and the multiple patterns of its arising. Sacredness is the radiant expansion of the heart, the devotion to life that rises in contemplation of the inexhaustible mystery that is unity in diversity, the One manifesting through the whole of creation.
~ Eleanor O’Hanlon
Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia – photo by 209444248, bigstockphoto.com
There are no more ancient bookends than sunrise and sunset. For millennia we have lived between their cycles. We have come to internalize their rhythm. Unconsciously we are aware of them even if we do not see them. My ancestors taught that it was important to acknowledge these daily transformations: the promise of a new beginning and the invitation to a deep rest. Hope and peace. We live in the balance between sunrise and sunset. We live between expectation and fulfillment. I will greet the sun when I first see it and I will embrace the night when it comes quietly to claim me. I will search for wisdom between the bookends of time.
~ Steven Charleston
Arizona Sunset – photo by Glen Loftis, bigstockphoto.com
In honor of the life and work of James Lovelock:
Life and the material environment evolved tightly coupled together as a single entity. In other words, what we have is…a scenario, not a static place into which organisms fit themselves. The environment itself cannot realistically be viewed as a place but must more properly be viewed as an organism—a living field which itself adapts to changes or even initiates them.
~ James Lovelock
Sunset, Na Pali Coast, Hawaii – photo by Backyard Productions, bigstockphoto.com
