A bit more from last week’s snow day

Izzy, contemplating what might be out there.

In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness – from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.

~ Rebecca Solnit

We belong to the earth, we belong to the sky.  We inter-are.  Wisdom, compassion, body, mind are not separate.

~ Roshi Joan Halifax

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.

~ David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

A Monday meander: The woolly bear and winter

Outside of the county health department, after my last Covid test (it came back negative, by the way).  What do you think the woolly bear is predicting?  A mild or severe winter?

Life is no different than the weather. Not only is it unpredictable, but it shows us a new perspective of the world every day.

~ Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun

We listen too much to the telephone and we listen too little to nature. The wind is one of my sounds. A lonely sound, perhaps, but soothing. Everybody should have his personal sounds to listen for — sounds that will make him exhilarated and alive, or quiet and calm. . . . As a matter of fact, one of the greatest sounds of them all — and to me it is a sound — is utter, complete silence.

~ Andre Kostelanetz, Sunbeams, January 2022

Pocomoke River State Park

Bald Cypress “needles”

I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change, I thought that with thirty years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy…and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don’t know how to do that.

~ Gus Speth

The entrancement with industrial civilization…must be considered as a profound cultural disorientation. It can be dealt with only by a corresponding deep cultural therapy.

…At such a moment a new revelatory experience is needed, an experience wherein human consciousness awakens to the grandeur and sacred quality of the Earth process. This awakening is our human participation in the dream of the Earth….We probably have not had such participation in the dream of the Earth since earlier shamanic times, but therein lies our hope for the future for ourselves and for the entire Earth community.

~ Thomas Berry

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

Visiting the trees

A beautiful carpet found on my walk early this morning.

Slowly, spending more and more time outside, focusing on the wisdom of my senses rather than on what was going on inside my head, I began to weave myself back into the fabric of the Earth.

~ Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted

oh woman
remember who you are
woman
it is the whole earth

~ Joy Harjo, excerpted from “The Blanket Around Her”

A love project

The intensity of color at the end of the season. (In the scrounger’s/flower garden a couple of days ago.  The zinnias are still going strong, the new blooming and replacing the old.)

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

~ e. e. cummings

Don’t forget love;

it will bring all the madness you need

to unfurl yourself across

the universe.

~ Mirabai

Walking with the Walktoberists

A map, to help us find the way. (A sandy topographic map in the Nature Center at Blackwater Falls State Park.)

Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.

~ Jim Harrison, from After Ikkyū and Other Poems (Shambhala, 1996)