The wilderness alongside every moment, sprawling in each direction, holds more than the silence that theologians imagine of God.

Spirit of spring and new life, spirit of decay and death, We turn to your wisdom and strength as we seek to live lives of meaning and love. The cycle of life is powerful. Everything that lives, dies. Everything that dies has lived. There is no escaping this cycle. What then, can we learn from its...

December twenty-first, the Winter Solstice. (The point along the Earth’s annual solar orbit when the northern hemisphere is at its furthest point from the sun). The last harvest of the year is celebrated shortly before the Winter Solstice. In ancient times people would feast knowing the months...

Now the autumn shudders In the rose's root, Far and wide the ladders Lean among the fruit. Now the autumn clambers Up the trellised frame And the rose remembers The dust from which it came. Brighter than the blossom On the rose's bough Sits the wizened orange, Bitter berry now; Beauty never...

Night has its own kind of beauty, different than the beauty of day. Night is a time of sleep and dreams and inward visions, A time of pause within activity. Darkness is an invitation to imagining and storytelling, And to using ears instead of eyes to listen to the world in its stillness....

On this green bank, by this soft stream, We place with joy a votive stone, That memory may their deeds redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. —Ralph Waldo Emerson A green heron stands motionless on the bank of Emerson’s soft stream. In its beak it holds a fish, just the right size for...

(Ahmedabad, India, 2001) Mother Earth is shouting but we do not hear. She is filled with anguish, for all we understand is death. And in her agony she suffers too over the fact that she must kill her own to get our attentionn...

(In the) Spirit of Love and Remembrance, we mourn and honor [pet's name]. In life he embodied: the one-ness of all living things. In death he bears witness: to love beyond the bounds of race, kin, or species. This is a love with which it is tasked upon us: to unite, heal, and consecrate. From the...

Please join with me in the spirit of meditation and prayer. We know the leaves are dying. We know that their blaze of beauty is a preparation for death. It is a time when we appreciate the effort of nature to rise above the ordinariness of life and death. It is a time when we visibly comprehend...