To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standard by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.
All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.
Close your eyes and offer your attention entirely to the cacophony of sound around you. Listen closely for the distinction between notes: melodic trills and stutters; woody raps and metallic clicks. Immerse your ears in the musings, debates, and proclamations of these frogs. How does this change the way you sit in this landscape?
Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.
Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything . . . It is the presence of time, undisturbed. It can be felt within the chest. Silence nurtures our nature, our human nature, and lets us know who we are. Left with a more receptive mind and a more attuned ear, we become better listeners not only to nature but to each other. Silence can be carried like embers from a fire. Silence can be found, and silence can find you. Silence can be lost and also recovered. But silence cannot be imagined, although most people think so. To experience the soul-swelling wonder of silence, you must hear it.
Live in each season as it passes… Breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Be blown on by all the winds. Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of Nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons. Grow green with spring, yellow and ripe with autumn. Drink of each season’s influence as a vial.
~ Henry David Thoreau
I have sometimes questioned my devotion to the minutiae of the seasons—what a boring story they might make, an anti-narrative. How quaint to write the date every summer when I see the first passionflower blooming in the field. How out of proportion to the news of the day. But when I read Thoreau, I am validated in my own impulse to write about the seasons. Taking note of seasonal events is a practice that can catalyze us to experience them more fully, to drink and taste them. It is a way to sear them more deeply into our skin, blaze them into our eyes and hearts. My journals extend off the page, on my many walks, my hands full of fruit and forage, my pores open; I am blown on by all the winds, resigned to the influences. The swells of subtle emotion that the seasons conjure in us as they pass again each time contain within them all the spirals of our seasons past, the hopes of seasons to come. I suppose this is also to say, if it is not clear by now, that phenology is to me not just record-keeping but a kind of scripture. In this repetition and refrain, a single season gathers our memories and dreams as we add new layers of meaning to our lives—as we orbit the very meaning of being alive.
~ Holly Haworth, from “A Circling Story” in Emergence Magazine
breezes at dawn 