Branch by Branch (vol. 4, no. 3)

Here are a few things I’m sharing this month:

1. Question I’m living with:

• “In this trembling moment…is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?” – Barry Lopez (Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World)

2. Quote I’m considering:

• “Rooted lives are radically intertwined with the vitality of the planet. In a time that evokes fear and paralysis, rooted ways of being-within-nature assure us that we are grounded in the natural world. Our bodies, our thoughts, our minds, our spirits are affected by the whole of the earthen community, and affect this whole in return. This is both a mystical sensibility and a scientific fact. It is an awareness that makes us tingle with its responsibility, its beauty, its poetry. It makes our lives our most foundational form of activism. It means everything we do matters, and matters wondrously.” – Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature and Spirit)

3. Poem I’m pondering:

“Kinship” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Very slowly burning, the big forest tree
stands in the slight hollow of the snow
melted around it by the mild, long
heat of its being and its will to be
root, trunk, branch, leaf, and know
earth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song.

Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life as strong
now as in the seedling two centuries ago.

4. Something inspiring:

• Live feed of a watering hole in the Namib Desert that streams live 24/7. See zebras, wildebeests, warthogs and ostriches. (ht Recomendo)

5. The blog’s still on hold as I write my Rewild School book; however here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

• “Did we step into the shade of the Ceiba tree, touch reverently its thickly buttressed, towering trunk, look skyward into its canopy and branch by branch by branch get pulled into a deeper exploration of the connection between our human-interiorities and social change? We did. Did we create a class where the pursuit of self-knowledge, self-awareness and the taking of an inner-pilgrimage took precedence over the memorization of data, facts, concepts and figures? We did. And, did we create a class where learning was more valuable than knowing, questions more valuable than answers and saying “I do not know” was not the ending but the beginning of a conversation full of nuance, complexity and systems thinking? We did. And, did we create a class where the fundamental objective of our coming together was the transfiguration of ourselves into shapers of the present and makers of history? We did.”

Thanks so much. And, have a great day! – shawn