A Monday meander: The greening

So pretty in pink.

I am thinking about time in both directions now — not just a future that will roll on without me, and without so many of the creatures I love, but a past I was not alive to remember.  I think about the American chestnuts, today so rare that their locations are often closely kept secrets among researchers trying to understand why this scant handful survived.  All the vanishing plants and creatures I love so dearly are, I know, only the barest remnant of the abundance this landscape once sustained.  There were twice as many songbirds the year I was born as there are now, and even that teeming number is paltry by comparison to those who lived when chestnuts reigned over the eastern forests.

… The world will always be beautiful to those who look for beauty.  Throats will always catch when the fleeing clouds part fleetingly and the golden moon flashes into existence and then winks out again.  Tears will always spring up at the wood thrush singing through the echoing trees, at the wild geese crying as they fly.  A soul touched by the scent of turned soil or sun-warmed grass, a spirit moved by crickets singing in the grass, will spend a lifetime surrounded by wonder even as songbirds drop one by one from the poisoned sky and crickets fall silent in the poisoned grass.

Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong.  The tragedy is not the failed world’s barren ugliness.  The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails.  Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world.

~ Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

A few prompts behind

At the start of the day.

As we apprentice ourselves to the way of nature, we begin to understand that all of life is in a continuous cycle of giving and receiving. It is the honoring of this cycle that makes us feel at home in ourselves and in relation to the rest of nature.

~ Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home

Many of us feel that longing to return, for a spiritual homecoming. This is not a return to some imaginary past when America was great. It is a return to a relationship with the holy and the wild that echoes the intimacy our ancestors knew, but also heals the wounds that severed us from the rest of our human and more-than-human kinfolk in the first place.

We re-member ourselves back into sacred relationship by responding with an open heart to the Holy Wild who calls us back into communion. It may feel like a series of odd synchronicities — a small bird who lands on the railing close to you and looks you straight in the eye for an instant, a sense of welcoming you can’t explain nor deny when you slow down on your daily walk and notice the saplings and crows as individual beings, or a feeling of being witnessed by other people who are walking a similar path of return.

~ from the Center For Wild Spirituality newsletter

Security blankets and stuffies

Sitting in church. (Antioch Church in Princess Anne, MD. They have a bear in each pew as comfort for those who need them.  If someone feels the need to take the bear home with them, someone else comes along with a new bear.)

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home–they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

A day away

Dancing with the sunrise. (Yesterday. Do you see the dancer in the sky?  Or maybe you see an angel?)

When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.

~ bell hooks

A Monday meander: After the first frost

Still hanging in there.

He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or to make him sad. I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, ‘Am I not annoyed with them?’ I asked too if he had ever seen the banshee. ‘I have seen it,’ he said, ‘down there by the water, batting the river with its hands.’

~ W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

A Monday meander: Beauty

Black-eyed Susan in the front meadow.

When we awaken to the call of Beauty, we become aware of new ways of being in the world.  We were created to be creators.  At its deepest heart, creativity is meant to serve and evoke beauty.  When this desire and capacity come alive, new wells spring up in parched ground; difficulty becomes invitation, and rather than striving against the grain of our nature, we fall into rhythm with its deepest urgency and passion.

~ John O’Donohue, Beauty

A Monday meander: The light and shadows of early July

Morning spin.

To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.

~ Terry Tempest Williams