I felt myself a steady, fixed point on the earth round which a whirling gathered and spun a center. Then it was that I seemed to be no one, to belong to no one, and suddenly beholding the russet light of the turning sumach tree in the pasture, I thought,
I am leaf and I am wind and I am light. Something in the world likes faces and leaves and rivers and woods and wind together and makes of them a string of medallions with all our faces on them, worn forever round our necks, kin.
Every day is a fresh beginning.
Listen my soul to the glad refrain.
And, in spite of old sorrows
And older sinning,
Troubles forecasted
And possible pain,
Take heart with the day and begin again.
Gardening can provide an opportunity to slow down, be still, breathe, and connect with
another form of life. For me, it is an experience of communion; I become one with this
precious life in my garden and it heightens my experience of love in the world. And
that is what spirituality is all about: growing in love.
All around us, life arises and decays in complicated, in-between spaces. The human
challenge is to make a similar confident, quiet passage through the paradoxes of life.
If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has the power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.
Human consciousness, then, should not be
what utterly separates us from the rest of
"nature." Rather, consciousness is where this
dance of energy organizes itself in increasingly
unified ways, until it reflects back on itself in
self-awareness. Consciousness is and must be
where we recognize our kinship with all other
beings. The dancing void from which the
tiniest energy events of atomic structures flicker
in and out of existence and self-aware thoughts
are kin along a continuum of organized
life-energy...
To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing
universe—to participate in the dance of life
with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it,
organs that draw nourishment from it—is a
wonder beyond words.
~ Joanna Macy and Molly Brown in COMING BACK TO LIFE: THE UPDATED GUIDE TO THE WORK THAT RECONNECTS
