“When we dance the earth trembles. When our steps fall on the earth we feel the shudder of life beneath us, and the earth feels the beating of our hearts, and we become one with the earth. We shall not sever ourselves from the earth. We must chant our being, and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth. We must keep the earth.”
― N. Scott Momaday, Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land
The animals of the planet are in desperate peril. Without free animal life, I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.
– Alice Walker
The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightening and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees — all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related.
– Thomas Berry
“Do billboard salesmen record their sales on charts? If so, who’s at the top of the billboard charts for billboard sales?”
― Ryan Lilly
Anything that’s shiny, shines due to its reflective quality. Reflection. People usually think that you are shiny because you are shiny. But what does it actually mean? It means that you reflect back to others the beauty in themselves and the love and care that they give to you. It’s never actually about you. It’s actually about everyone else. Your capability to reflect determines how luminous you are.
— C. JoyBell CThis. Is where you ARE. Be active in what you’ve got, not suckling some prescribed monastic salvation belonging to another era that isn’t yours.
Start living all these luminous philosophies in the down-n-dirty texture of the real world for others to see and trip over and align with. Try not segregating yourself so much, limiting your choices to one world or the other.
— Laurie Perez, The Look of Aime Martine
Continue reading “A Monday meander: A nor’easter rolls through”
Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart.
— Joan D. Chittister
I think sometimes I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves
I have come to understand my spirituality as an ongoing internal lyrical state of consciousness, semi-consciousness and unconsciousness in which I find meaning, comfort, refuge, inspiration, mystery and strength.
It seems more like the dreaming of my inner child’s creaturely heart than my rational mind – although they are both interwoven. It is somewhat like music. It is like nature. It offsets the influence of my worried contemporary self or the hard speedy material world that would overwhelm me if it were not for this nourishing sense of otherworldliness, and the lyrical wisdom and feeling that arises there in my spiritual self.
With spirit, one is able to have and hold many feelings, and live a felt life. The spirit supports and negotiates between our feelings, instincts and intuitions. It is good at conflict resolution. It supports our prophetic vision and our creativity. With spirit and feeling we may find a way through the darkness.
~ Michael Leunig, Spirituality, Art & Innocence
Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.
— Abraham HeschelI think that every discovery of the world plunges us into jubilation, a radical amazement that tears apart the veil of triviality.
— Dorothee Soelle
breezes at dawn 