If your heart is heavy, if you feel exhausted from it all, plant your fingers in the soil of our Mother Earth, breathe in her breath that gently touches your skin as it passes, and walk barefoot on her body.
Let our Mother heal you. And let us care for her in return. This exchange of nurturing is what she needs now, as do we.
I share this poem written by a late, great elder of our time, Thomas Berry.
Video of Earth’s Desire by Thomas Berry
Earth’s Desire
By Thomas Berry
To be seen in her loveliness
to be tasted in her delicious fruits
to be listened to in her teaching
to be endured in the severity of her discipline
to be experienced as the maternal source whence we come
A short contemplation of nature and now for this Sunday morning. This is where I find divinity and strength, though hard at times it may be. I sit or take a walk outside if even for a few moments, and notice the smallest of creatures in flight or running across the path. And I remember, everything is divine, everything will pass out of this world. This world is so beautiful if I can just stop and breathe into it.
Click the picture for the video or read the poem below
One or Two Things
Mary Oliver
1 Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born.
2 The butterfly’s loping flight carries it through the country of the leaves delicately, and well enough to get it where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping here and there to fuzzle the damp throats of flowers and the black mud; up and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes
for long delicious moments it is perfectly lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk of some ordinary flower.
3 The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever,
4 which has nevertheless always been, like a sharp iron hoof, at the center of my mind.
5 One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning—some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain.
6 But to lift the hoof! For that you need an idea.
7 For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. “Don’t love your life too much,” it said,
The Grace Tree 