A Monday meander: Attention

Peach blossoms.

This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

~ Mary Oliver

Awe and wonder are the same emotion, but with a slightly different twist, because wonder is only connected to positive emotion and awe is the same emotion, but with negative — or not “negative”, but scarier thoughts associated with it. So to describe what wonder and awe and astonishment are, they are the emotion that arises in one in the face of something so vast and so powerful and so transcendent and so unexpected that it makes one rethink what you’re looking at, because you can’t comprehend it. You can’t quite take it in on one side.

~ Fabiana Fondevila

What’s in a name

A tangle of trees and ice.  (February weather.)

It is when we are confronted with poignant reminders of mortality that we become most aware of the strangeness and wonder of our brief life on Earth.

~ Kathleen Basford

If this time is our only time, and it is, then surely we do owe it to ourselves, and to each other, to pay attention, to look deeply, to listen closely, and to respond to all of it, somehow, with love and gratitude.

~ Katrina Kenison

A Monday meander: A Saturday hike

Saturday sunrise.

Learning about the languages of trees, their social networks, and our own human microbiome forces us to rethink our relationship with “things.” If trees have memories, respond to stress, and communicate, then what can they tell us? Will we listen? Where does one species end and another begin? What happens when we know plants can talk?

~ Katie Holten, Deciphering Words in the Woods (Emergence Magazine)

Immense things

In the Mystery Woods.

The work right now is to become immense. We have to get our arms around immense things. Violence and hatred and bigotry and racism. And also around love and compassion and devotion and a certain fidelity to protect what is alive. We have to become immense. This is not a time to become small.

~ Francis Weller

A Saturday saunter

Ice on the beach at the Point.

The least movement is of importance to all nature.  The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

~ Blaise Pascal

A snow day

An angel in the garden, just before sunrise.

We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts.  We can serve the world though.  That is everyone’s calling, to lead a life that helps.

~ Barry Lopez

I had forgotten

Rings of sunrise. (A double exposure of tree rings and sunrise clouds.)

When suffering constricts the heart, awe stretches it back out, making us more compassionate, more loving, more present.

~ Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger

…a ‘threshold’ appears first as a boundary and then once approached, you realize that it is only the limit of one layer of understanding while, at the same time, it acts as the doorway to the next, deeper layer.

~ Michael Chambers, English Professor