Julia Butterfly Hill spent 738 days 180' high in a 200' redwood estimated to be 1,000 years old. One day, through her prayers, an overwhelming amount of love started flowing through her, filling up the dark hole that threatened to consume her. She suddenly realized that what she was feeling was the love of the Earth, the love of Creation.
"Everyday we, as a species, do so much to destroy Creation's ability to give us life. But the Creation continues to do everything in its power to give us life anyway. And that is true love."
Those are red letter days in our lives when we meet people who thrill us like a fine poem, people whose handshake is brimful of unspoken sympathy, and whose sweet, rich natures impart to our eager, impatient spirits a wonderful restfullness which, in is essence, is divine...The perplexities, irritations, and worries that have absorbed us pass like unpleasant dreams, and we wake to see with new eyes and hear with new ears the beauty and harmony of God's real world. The solemn nothings that fill our everyday life blossom suddenly into bright possibilities.
Lesson of the moment: I am not a little autonomous being, deciding this or that about my own life without interference. I am a thread in a tapestry of people.
~ Deborah Good in LONG AFTER I'M GONE: A FATHER-DAUGHTER MEMOIR
A fragment of fence long trampled
by those who needed most to pass.
Pilgrim, immigrant, refugee,
all journeys severe, all made in longing.
Most cross over what's already breached,
but the step is long and touches down
In a world that takes heart
in the breaking of what divides.
~ Steve Godwin from "What Divides" in FINDING HEART
