Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the bids, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each separate fragment, you will understand he mystery of the whole resting in God. When you perceive this, your understanding of this mystery will grow from day to day until you come to love the whole world with a love that includes everything, excluding nothing.
Tending a garden nourishes the human desire to give form to mystery and offers ground for growth, not only for plants that nourish and delight, but for engagement of self and the world. There is a sacramental element in watching a living thing flourish under our care toward its full potential, and what this nurturing opens in us becomes written on the human soul.
~ from "The Patient Reach for Light" by Anita Lange in "Parabola" Spring, ‘05
To see all things at their origin, their beginning, puts us in kinship with all that lives: trees, birds, stars seem foreign to us only inasmuch as we perceive them outside of our common origin with them. To drink at the source of all that lives and breathes expands the heart and makes the blood sing, echoing the song of all the vital fluids in the world. To dwell near all beginnings is to draw infinitely near to that which creates both the unity and the diversity of all beings.
~ from THE SACRED EMBRACE OF JESUS AND MARY, by Jean-Yves Leloup
"Is there enough Silence for the Word to be heard?"
Every blessing, dear friends, in this season of new growth.
To spend time in Nature's tapestry of Life is like opening an amazing gift: an instruction book of Love and Life given to us by the Creator, Source of All Being. Here we can see how we participate in the seasons of our lives, the interplay and interconnectedness of all things that sustain our lives, the beauty and wisdom of unity in diversity, and the intricate patterns of every variety of flora and fauna. Celebrating, honoring, and learning from this Divine Gift is in a very real sense to reverence our own lives and the life of the planet, which depend on Nature's abundant bounty. May we share and care for Nature's gifts with equity and gratitude. May we gift ourselves with times in the Silence while basking in some of Nature's sacred settings, even if it be in our own backyard. Here, peace, harmony, and renewal will be sure to nest in your heart.
The Mikmaq on the Atlantic coast have no sound for Nature. They have "space" or "place of creation" ... they have cultural literacy with the ecosystem ... every aspect of nature to Mikmaqs is Spirit. They live in harmony with this intelligible essence. The Mikmaq can perceive the web.
I bind unto myself today The virtues of the starlit heavens, The glorius sun's lifegiving ray, The whiteness of the moon at even, The flashing of the lightning free, The whirling wind's tempestuous shocks, The stable earth, the deep salt sea Around the old eternal rocks.
Arriving daffodils will make no sound, will blow no trumpets -- only the earthworm close to its root, burrowing underground, will hear the upsurge, feel the green stems yearn.
Beauty returns to Earth, devoid of noise, devoid of clamor. Now it lifts its head epitome of stillness and of poise and in unbroken silence all is said.
~ Fanny De Groot Hastings, thanks to Sally Hopkins
