A little throwback and some new walking shoes

A throwback to 2017.

In the psychological climate of our own times, our emotions are almost always considered to be virtually identical with our personal authenticity, and the more freely they flow, the more we are seen to be honest and “in touch.” A person who gravitates to a mental mode of operation is criticized for being “in his head”; when feeling dominates, we proclaim with approval that such a person is “in his heart.”

In the Wisdom tradition, this would be a serious misuse of the term heart. Far from revealing the heart, Wisdom teaches that the emotions are in fact the primary culprits that obscure and confuse it. The real mark of personal authenticity is not how intensely we can express our feelings but how honestly we can look at where they’re coming from and spot the elements of clinging, manipulation, and personal agendas that make up so much of what we experience as our emotional life today. . . .

~ Cynthia Bourgeault, from Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations

A detour: Attracted to the light

In the Vayo Meditation Garden, Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. (June 2017)

We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.

~ Loren Eiseley

Flowers

Wildflower path. (Bremen, Maine. June 2017)

How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

I must have flowers. Always and always.

~ Claude Monet

Smile

Daisies (and fields of wildflowers) always make me smile.  (Taken in Maine, June 2017.)

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.

~ Joseph Addison

Warming up

Six crows at sunrise.

It has often been said that our environmental crisis is a crisis of perception. We do not readily see the patterns that would reveal our dependence on the natural world, nor are we commonly aware of the systems within which we are deeply embedded. Our attention, entrained on objects and focused on flat screens, is far removed from the dynamic and animated nonhuman world. We are as good as blind to the wonder at our feet or the daily spectacle of an ever-changing sky.

~ Laura Sewall