For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need.
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Coast Redwoods from Inside Tree – bigstockphoto.com
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For someone visiting earth for the first time, the real treasures here would all be free. The smell of a sunlit prairie, the taste of a cold cup of spring water, the crunch of trackless snow underfoot, these are some of the earth’s supreme treasures. On intergalactic maps, if there are such things, the place where we live must surely be designated as a magical garden in space, a place of astounding beauty.
~ Steve Van Matre
Mountain River and Snow – photo by denbelitsky, 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 by Colorshadow, bigstockphoto.com
I think it’s a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. That there isn’t their life and our life. Nor your life and my life.
That it’s just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled with it as deep as entanglement goes.
~ Kate Forster
Male White Lion – photo by EnjoyLife, bigstockphoto.com
Awareness may not diminish the enormity of our pain in all circumstances. It does provide a bigger basket for tenderly holding and intimately holding our suffering in any and all circumstances, and that, in turns out, is transformative—and healing.
~ Jon Kabat-Zinn
Invitation to Awareness – photo by scorpp, bigstockphoto.com
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.
~ James Baldwin
Sunrise, Mesa Arch, Canyonlands National Park, UT – photo by Bill45, bigstockphoto.com
For our indigenous partners in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, they don’t just live in the forest—they are the forest. They commune with Arutam, the spirit of the forest, to receive its guiding wisdom. May the forest be with us all.
~ Pachamama Alliance
Amazon Jungle – photo by pxhidalgo, bigstockphoto.com
I have always thought of all creatures – all organisms, really – as relations. Whether wandering alone in deep wilderness or just leaning against a tree growing beside an urban sidewalk, I have had no difficulty feeling, as if in dreamtime, the roots of our relatedness – ecologically, yes, but also with an overlay of the sacred, the holy.
~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Bald Eagle in Rocky Mountain HIgh Country – photo by Designwest, bigstockphoto.com
I am inviting you to go deeper, to learn and to practice so that you become someone who has a great capacity for being solid, calm, and without fear, because our society needs people who have these qualities, and your children, our children, need people like you, in order to go on, in order to become solid, and calm, and without fear.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Lotus Blossoms – photo by Ange DiBenedetto