“The idea of a document’s being “scriptural,” that is, having authority, is integral to Western thought. We no longer remember that wisdom, knowledge, and teaching were conveyed primarily by oral means, that in early Celtic times it was the word that had authority, not what was written. The druids did not write their teachings down; they conveyed them by word of mouth directly to the ear of the hearer. Nothing intervened.

Beyond oral traditions of transmission is another level of understanding that human beings have largely forgotten but that animals still live by and understand – the gospel of the grass. The connective principles of the green world have their own authority and primacy in the transmission of living wisdom. The Book of Job compares all life to grass, and speaks of the way in which the upspringing green shoot that withers away is cast into the fire to be burned. Yet this green shoot feeds the human and animal worlds. The green grain ripens into the golden harvest that makes our very bread.

Before people spoke, or wrote, or even existed, the grasses were growing and swaying in the wind. If we are able to listen to the wisdom of the green world with our instinctive senses, we may hear the primal scripture that has its own spiritual language and understand the knowledge that transcends all religious boundaries.”

Caitlin Matthews

“If I am in my soul, when I look at others, I see their souls. I still see the individual differences – men and women, rich and poor, attractive and unattractive, and all that stuff. But when we recognize each other as souls, we are seeing each other as aspects of the One. Love is the emotion of merging, of becoming One. Love is a way of pushing through into the One. We treat love and hate and the other emotions like they are all on the same level, but they’re not. Hate, fear, lust, greed, jealousy – all that comes from the ego. Only love comes from the soul. When you identify with your soul, you live in a loving universe. The soul loves everybody. It’s like the sun. It brings out the beauty in each of us. You can feel it in your heart.”

Ram Dass

“The slippery green frog
that went to his death
in the heron’s pink throat
was my small brother,

and the heron
with the white plumes
like a crown on his head
who is washing now his great sword-beak
in the shining pond
is my tall thin brother.

My heart dresses in black
and dances.”

Mary Oliver

“The mere lapse of years is not life. To eat, to drink, and sleep; to be exposed to darkness and the light; to pace around in the mill of habit, and turn thought into an instrument of trade-this is not life. Knowledge, truth, love, beauty, goodness, faith, alone can give vitality to the mechanism of existence.”

James Martineau, Unitarian minister and theologian, born on this day in 1805

“Civil rights are civil rights. There are no persons who are not entitled to their civil rights… We have to recognize that we have a long way to go, but we have to go that way together… We cannot afford to be separate. We have to see that all of us are in the same boat.”

Dorothy Height, civil rights activist, who died on this day in 2010

“In the presence of whales a hush falls over people. Sacred awe, so profound that it becomes the deepest of meditative silence. Even when children are present they intuitively drift into the quietest of quiet. We have entered a temple of soaring grandeur, into a sacred space that transcends all cultures, all language, and all religions. Our hearts, our bodies, our thoughts, and voices respond. It is a place of “ah” where awe dwells.

What is it about silence, this sacred hush? In this silence there is a soft gentleness. Unconsciousness drifts away and one becomes supremely conscious. This is not imposed silence that evokes an urge to rebel and make noise, this is not the cold silence of anger refusing to speak, or the awkward silence of not knowing what to say. It is the silence of reverence.

In this silence, as in all types of meditation, the clutter of life falls away, all of the details and “shoulds”, plans and goals dissolve. The whales and the sea absorb them. The sense of internal and external ceases. As the quiet ensues, the mind and body expand, becoming different, somehow more, deeper, wider. We are touching and being touched by awe. In this cathedral of the sea, the awe radiates into exquisite love and we are engulfed in an embrace.”

“Heaven is my father and earth is my mother, and I, a small child, find myself intimately between them. What fills the universe I regard as my body: what directs the universe I regard as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters: all beings are my companions. Those who are tired, infirm, crippled, or sick: those who have no brothers or children, wives or husbands: all are my sisters and brothers who are in distress and have none to turn to.”

Zhang Zai, Chinese philosopher and politician (1020 – 1077)

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”

From Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, who died on this day in 2014

“Walk out on your driveway, or on a pavement around your home and study the concrete closely; it’s starting to break. The earth will only tolerate tarmac for so long. How do those buds make their way through inches, even feet, of solid industrial paving, to send a few gentle sprouts up to the open air?

Build, raze, or pave how you will, manicure your lawns as you choose, dig swimming pools or raise towers, and yet sooner or later, nature will break through. But this is not a cause for despair at how your plans are being confounded – for you are a part of nature as well. Like these April sprouts, keep growing, keep pushing up through the crevices toward the sun.”

Brian Nelson

“Owning up to being an animal, a creature of Earth. Tuning our animal senses to the sensible terrain: blending our skin with the rain-rippled surface of rivers, mingling our ears with the thunder and the thrumming of frogs, and our eyes with the molten gray sky. Feeling the polyrhythmic pulse of this place – this huge windswept body of water and stone. This vexed being in whose flesh we’re entangled. Becoming Earth. Becoming animal. Becoming, in this manner, fully human.”

David Abrams