October 2017 | BREATHING
This newsletter opened exactly a year ago, and is blossoming thanks to your contributions and responses to the Earth. It began with, “I’d like to say a little about how Earth-love looks and feels. Indeed, with your help it could pass into daily usage, not as some trendy phrase, but a simple daily practice that we model for each other.
For me Earth-love starts with the breath. For you it may begin with a footstep, a bike ride, cooking, washing, gardening, any number of daily activities that engage you.
Earth-love doesn’t require us to change what we do, but to simply bring some loving awareness to those moments.” (You can read the newsletter and past ones at my Earth-Love Blog.)
I shared how at age 28, while suffering with asthma, I realized that I couldn’t control even a single breath, and how over the years, I’ve come to appreciate a little of what I’m given by this great Being who supports us every microsecond in so many ways.
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In Spiritual Ecology: 10 Practices to Reawaken the Sacred in Everyday Life, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and Hilary Hart in their chapter, Breathing, relate, “Because you are always breathing, you always have access to the sacred; you always have a refuge in the Real.” The first suggested practice is:
“Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you can pay attention to your breath. Listen to your breath, feel your breath, be aware of your breath. Sensing how the breath infuses the body, you attune to a tenderness and quietness within life. In today’s over-stimulated world, most of us need access to this refuge that is gentle and rhythmic, simple and alive.”
I am sound
I am silence
I am darkness
i’m cruelty
i’m kindness
i’m hurry
i’m ease
i’m worry
i’m peace
i’m gratitude
i’m greed
Earth seeds me
Earth breathes me
Earth needs me
I am ray
I am spark
Earth am I
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