ecospirituality
Storage
When I moved from one house to another
there were many things I had no room
for. What does one do? I rented a storage
space. And filled it. Years passed.
Occasionally I went there and looked in,
but nothing happened, not a single
twinge of the heart.
As I grew older the things I cared
about grew fewer, but were more
important. So one day
“Around us, life bursts with miracles--a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain
... See more“Our interconnected relationships were long supported by wisdom traditions, stories, and rituals that gave us meaning and made sense of the world. This knowing lives in our bones -- the understanding that we are not separate from Earth but are Earth becoming aware of itself. Our bodies are made of soil and sunlight, our breath one with the winds, o
... See more“Maybe the first step on the way to the awakening is the simple act of being glad you’re alive. What a magic that is. Just to stop for a minute. That in itself is a politically subversive act because we’re taught so much dissatisfaction.”
“In an age when anthropocentrism is fueling mass extinction and ecocide, it seems vitally important to practice thinking like other beings. Or even, when we feel ambitious, trying to think alongside elementals and the deep-time oscillations of entire ecosystems.
We have behaved like ordinary cells for too long, pretending there is no movement from the inside to the outside or vice versa. We have believed, for too long, that our minds belong to us as individuals. But advances in everything from forest ecology to microbiology show us we are not siloed selves but relational networks, built metabolically by our every biome-laced breath, thinking through filamentous connectivity rather than inside one neatly bounded mind.”
“Thinking, then, is constituted less by an organ and more by a relational process. Life is an elemental verb, stitching us into other habits of mind, pouring our ideas into morphologies and minerals better suited to navigating complex systems.
I think my mind is not just in my body. It is in my entire web. My entire web of relations—fungal, geological, microbial, vegetal, ancestral—that weave together my specific ecosystem.”
“all poetry, all mysticism, all great wisdom comes from a willingness to leak into other being’s minds. To be a salmon. A stallion. A grain. To know that while we may superficially function as individuals, we are really part of a long-term project in supracellularity whereby all our physical matter flows and recycles and recombines. To be a better salmon, be a man for a while. To be a better man, be a river. To be a better river, let yourself be invaded by the nucleus of a distant ocean.”
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