Messages

  • How to Start Singing Again

    “I thought of myself as a former Peace Corps volunteer who had loved living in a mud hut, and now I had more bathrooms than I could keep clean. I thought of myself as a person who used canvas shopping bags twenty years before it was mainstream, but now with two cars and two electronics-addicted teenagers, I’d developed a low-level despair about my inability to protect the planet they would inherit. I’d been reading about how global warming was withering maize crops in Botswana, the southern African country where I had taught decades earlier – the place that had originally taught me about social responsibility. Our new house was so big, no one heard me when I cried…”

  • You Enter Naked and Brave

    “Once upon a time, all humans knew their lives, their food, their survival, their sense of meaning and kinship with God or the gods was connected with all their relations: the hawks and soil and ferns and mosquitoes. Like all the other wild creatures, they belong to the land, and they knew it. They were untamed and self-willed and listened to their own intrinsic authority. They were part of a grand conversation, a relationship of reciprocity and respect, connecting them with all the other beings and elements of life.”

  • Life Is Sweet in All Creatures

    “I considered that life was sweet in all living creatures, and the taking it away became a very tender point with me. The creatures […] were lent us to be governed in the Great Creator’s fear: and I feel free to refer my readers to his order and allowance in early times, while all the Lord’s works were in harmony, and pronounced by him to be very good…”

  • Our Life’s Task

    “Religions typically give prime importance to a reality greater than the individual self, a reality to which awe and respect, and sometimes even love or fear, is due. Guidance is sought and expected from this greater reality, which may or may not be conceived of as God, and which may encompass all of life, and even all that exists.”

  • Set Your Urgent Life Aside

    “It has hatched and is desperate / to mate and die. Now, at 2 a.m. / in its middle age, the luna moth rests cockeyed / on my window ledge, lurching again at light…”

  • What Our Quaker Work Is Striving Toward

    “All species and the Earth itself have interdependent roles within Creation. Humankind is not the species, to whom all others are subservient, but one among many. All parts, all issues, are inextricably intertwined. Indeed the web of creation could be described as of three-ply thread: wherever we touch it we affect justice and peace and the health of all everywhere.”

  • Every Blade of Grass Receives God’s Care

    “It is not only the scriptures of truth, but the sun and moon in their orbits, and the stars in their courses, will all testify of the mercy, goodness, and power of God. Neither shall we be induced to worship these, notwithstanding their brilliancy. We shall neither bow our knees, nor lift up our hands to any created object, because this would be denying that God who is above us all. Not only these, the most brilliant objects of his creative wisdom with which we are acquainted, but all the works of his hands proclaim themselves the workmanship of deity.”

  • Discover the Uses of Uselessness

    “To learn why you feel compelled to remake and consume the world, live alone in the wilderness for at least a week. Take no books or other distractions. Take simple, adequate food that requires little or no preparation. Don’t plan things to do when the week is over. Don’t do yoga or meditation that you think will result in self-improvement. Simply do nothing.”

  • What Does Quakerism Teach About Connecting to Nature?

    “One of our biggest difficulties, I think, is that we live so much in language and so much in a mediated world of electronic media and print media, all of which tends to distance us from our connection to the natural world. Getting into that sense beyond language is not only healthy for personal spiritual renewal, but it’s also crucial to reconnecting with the natural world, which is a nonverbal world.”

  • A Person Is More Than a Machine

    “Of course inanimate nature, that part of nature most easily thought of as made of atoms, cannot be totally unlike ourselves. According to the doctrine of evolution, inanimate nature is merely an early stage of ourselves. The only sound way to hold to the particulate, mechanistic doctrine is to insist that we also are mere particles in motion, a machine which is part of a larger machine.”

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