Comforting Thought: Real love runs on a lower voltage than our culture leads us to believe

When we pay attention to the sensations in our bodies, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear. Love seems to open and expand us right down to the cellular level, while fear causes us to contract and withdraw into ourselves. Yet so often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love – perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.

Comforting Thought: Wild hearts breed protection of a wild earth

“We enter as pilgrims, as wayfarers knowing there is something we are seeking. Something nameless, beautiful, waiting and wanting.” ~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Comforting Thought: Love is the energetic opposite of fear

When we pay attention to the sensations in our bodies, we can feel that love is the energetic opposite of fear. Love seems to open and expand us right down to the cellular level, while fear causes us to contract and withdraw into ourselves. Yet so often, fear keeps us from being able to say yes to love – perhaps our greatest challenge as human beings.

Comforting Thought: What natural sound would you preserve forever?

Silence The song of the cicadas Penetrates the rocks In Japanese there are many onomatopoeic words for the sounds in nature. shito shito: the sound of light rain zā zā: the sound of heavy rain  kasa kasa: the light sound of leaves rustling under foot  hyū hyū: the sound of wind blowing goro goro: theContinue reading “Comforting Thought: What natural sound would you preserve forever?”

Comforting Thought: Kindness is a muscle we exercise

Kindness is not a fixed trait that we either have or lack, but more like a muscle that can be developed and strengthened. We exercise kindness in any moment where we recognise our shared humanity- with all of the hopes, dreams, joys, dissapointments, vulnerability and suffering that this implies. Such simple but profound awareness levelsContinue reading “Comforting Thought: Kindness is a muscle we exercise”

Comforting Thought: Holding a Frog

“Holding a frog – if you are quiet and slower than slow, you do not have to ‘catch’ a frog at all – you can just slide your hand beneath one and lift it up without inciting any hint of fear or effort to escape.” Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Comforting Thought: Illnesses come from our lack of connection to nature

Many of our illnesses, stresses and anxieties are due to a lack of connection with nature. Taking a hands-on approach to the natural world will help you to restore that connection. Feel the breeze on your face, let the water of the stream ripple through your hands, lie on the ground, take your shoes off and go barefoot.

Comforting Thought: Knowledge Deepens Appreciation

“Aldo Leopold said that our ability to perceive the quality of nature begins ‘as in art, with the pretty’ After that it expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. What he was getting at is this: knowledge deepens appreciation. Seeing cranes feeding in a wetland he saw notContinue reading “Comforting Thought: Knowledge Deepens Appreciation”

Dissapearing into the desert

“The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names… Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wishedContinue reading “Dissapearing into the desert”

Environmentalism boils down to faith in the end

Faith in the possibility of change, the prospect of a better future. For green shoots in the rubble, fresh water in the desert. And our faith is often tested. Everywhere I have looked, everywhere I have been – places bent and broken, despoiled and desolate, polluted and poisoned, I have found new life springing fromContinue reading “Environmentalism boils down to faith in the end”