spring

The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and the body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them... To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible. To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.

The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendor of life, yields a new thought with every petal.

All of God's creatures have divine knowledge within, even the tiniest ant, and we're all trying to get in step and march to the Divine Music.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

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...

When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim, "AH," you are participating in divinity.