“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
Does the robin sing because the cold of winter is leaving or the warmth of spring is coming? Or might he be singing because each without the other would lessen both?
~ Craig D. Lounsbrough
Like the robin, we sometimes sing to show how strong we are, and we sometimes sing in hope of better times. We sing either way.
~ Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
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
Everything in life is speaking in spite of its apparent silence.
— Hazrat Inayat Khan
All the love I have received—
its wordlessness
I hear in the sky, in the wind.Rabindranath Tagore, from “Sickbed #27,” trans. Wendy Barker & Saranindranath Tagore, Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 1999)
“Do billboard salesmen record their sales on charts? If so, who’s at the top of the billboard charts for billboard sales?”
― Ryan Lilly
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
Angels are wonderful but they are so, well, aloof.
It’s what I sense in the mud and the roots of the
trees, or the well, or the barn, or the rock with
its citron map of lichen that halts my feet and
makes my eyes flare, feeling the presence of some spirit,
some small god, who abides there.If I were a perfect person, I would be bowing
continuously.
I’m not, though I pause wherever I feel this
holiness, which is why I’m so often late coming
back from wherever I went.Forgive me.
~ Mary Oliver
breezes at dawn 