A circle of trees . . . I felt I was bringing the journey home to the ordinary dimensions of my life, rooting it in the place I lived every day. I lay back on the earth and looked up through the branches of an oak, feeling suddenly like the sun was my own heart pulsing up there with light. Wind swirled, and it seemed to me it was my own breath billowing through the branches. The crocus bulbs were buried in my tissue, the cedars growing from my body. The birds flew inside me. Stones sat along my bones . . . a jubilant, stunning loss of boundary, a deeper sense of oneness than I’d ever felt.
I knew that I was part of one vast, universal quilt; I knew that this quilt was itself, the Holy Thing, the manifestation of the Divine One. And I loved this universal quilt, every stitch, color, and fiber, with a heartbreaking love. It was one clear moment in time, like going to the Deep Ground that underlies all things and seeing, really seeing, what is and being pierced by the unbounded nature of it.
~ from THE DANCE OF THE DISSIDENT DAUGHTER by Sue Monk Kidd
"First, my child," said Old Turtle, "remember that there are truths all around us, and within us. They twinkle in the night sky and bloom upon the earth. They fall upon us every day, silent as the snow and gentle as the rain. The people, clutching their one truth, forget that it is a part of all the small and lovely truths of life."
~ from OLD TURTLE AND THE BROKEN TRUTH by Douglas Wood
