“Conversation is perhaps our greatest hope not only for healing the rifts in human understanding but also for restoring and reinspiring our relationship with the natural world, which is our first and most profound home. Care of the world is always essential, and care arises from conversation.” —Thomas Dean, Introduction, Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of…
In his book To Bless the Space Between Us, John O’ Donohue offers prayerful poems that can only otherwise be known as blessings. “The word blessing evokes a sense of warmth and protection; it suggests that no life is alone or unreachable. Each life is clothed in raiment of spirit that secretly links it to…
“To make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.” —Emily Dickinson When I was a child, I was known for being able to fall asleep anywhere. Once I laid down on a busy sidewalk to snooze while…
“The spiritual function of fierce terrain … is to bring us to the end of ourselves, to the abandonment of language and the relinquishment of ego. A vast expanse of jagged stone, desert sand, and towering thunderheads has a way of challenging all the mental constructs in which we are tempted to take comfort and…
“Enlarge the space of your tent. Stretch out your tent cloth unsparingly.” —Isaiah 54:2 Reflection: “Building a future of freedom requires love of the common good and cooperation in a spirit of subsidiarity and solidarity … Our efforts must aim at restoring hope, righting wrongs, maintaining commitments, and thus promoting the well-being of individuals…
I owe my “I am-ness” to the Stranger. That existence undefined and uncontrollable. The next unpredictable. The Stranger. Those ancestors in my blood, those that are not, and those in future unknown. Next in the grocery line and yet unseen around the corner. The Stranger. Those at body birth, continuance of essence, and those at…
“… All that is eternal in me Welcomes the wonder of this day, The field of brightness it creates Offering time for each thing To arise and illuminate. I place on the altar of dawn: The quiet loyalty of breath, The tent of thought where I shelter And all beauty drawn to the eye. May…
Pleased to meet you, Little Oak. I see you’re growing at an angle. Growing like you’re reaching. Like you’re stretching yourself. Like a pre-teen searching the sky. I’m rooting for you. Praying for you. Singing songs for you in your sleep. I’ll be thinking of you, dreaming of your future. And you may see me…
In last Monday’s blog (https://prairiewoods.org/interior-wilderness/), we offered an exercise to plunge deeper into our interior wilderness in the aftermath of loss. Whatever “storm” we have recently endured, environmental, communal or personal, the loss profoundly affects our sense of self, our identity. Once we have begun exploring our interior wild-scape after a loss, and we begin…
So many of us still remember the first moment we heard about September 11, 2001, when extremists hijacked four planes flying above the United States. Two planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Another into the Pentagon, the top military building in Washington D.C. Close to three…