As I breathe and flourish as nature, I have evolved as a pattern hunter and explorer, working at the human’s intersection between the individual and the collective, focused on relationships, collaborations, and behavior change.

Snags are where owls hold secret meetings and woodpeckers expertly stalk insects and a zillion microscopic worlds turn round. I sensed their underworldly importance as a keystone species of sorts, something dead but upright and life giving. Always leave a snag standing.

When I first moved to Champlain Valley Cohousing in Charlotte Vermont, I was shown a large oak tree out in the forest land owned by the community. We walked through the thick forest of young trees and underbrush that had grown around a tree they called the Mother Oak, shading her from the sun and taking nutrients from the soil. I was stunned by her majestic presence 

Druidry is an ancient and evolving spiritual path that originated in the British Isles. Druids align with the spirit of the earth below, the moon and stars above and the elements around and within us. Trees are our teachers and Nature is our church. We gather in groves as well as circles of standing stones to do our magic.

Bolivian manifesto defining the rights of nature from World Future Fund.

We have made the walk from water to earth many times as humans, yes? I think about how we came from the ocean as a species. We grow in a fluid inside our mother’s wombs similar in makeup to the ocean before we ever take our first breath. And we walk the Medicine Wheel each and every year from the water of the west in autumn to the earth of north in winter, until our very last breath. 

We offer gratitude to Ocean, the one great Ocean of the world, whom we call by so many names. Grandmother Ocean, thank you for Life! For the lives of our most ancient ancestors whom you cradled and fed, For the lives of all who came after, who stayed in your waters or ventured on land. For the lives of all the plants whom you water through the clouds, and for the  tiny phytoplankton who give us breath. We thank you Ocean, for the lives of all our relatives.

By Lauren Valle
To My Enlightened Self

Silent self, self made of stone
Self that witnessed the birth of the ocean and
bathed in the torrents of mucus and blood
Self that melts the boundaries between her own beauty
and the beauty of the world

By Rachel Corby

There is something that has been happening to me throughout my adult life. That something is an increasing feeling of aliveness and wonder. Although it existed strongly within me for every moment of my childhood it had begun to weaken in my teenage years, leaving me bereft, alienated, lonely, confused and depressed.

By Kate Gilday

I pause before stepping into the forest, halting to listen, to take in the beauty before me, and breathe in the fragrance of the evergreens welcoming us with outstretched branches.  In these few moments, before entering this wild place I ask permission to step onto and off the path ahead, to wander among the trees and through the streams we will encounter.

By Timothy P. McLaughlin

In the effort to become more like water,

I’ve taken to walking the dried arroyos of New Mexico.

Gliding along their twisting, sandy trails,

following the water’s worn tracks round trees and brush

and endless rock,

For hundreds and hundreds of year the Abenaki People lived on both sides of the Connecticut River in what are now called Vermont and New Hampshire in the United States around the villages called Haverhill and Newbury. By the time European settlers arrived in these areas, the Abenakis had been growing sweet corn on the oxbows of the river for centuries.  It was very different from the sweet corn of today. Abenaki corn grew only about three feet high and produced one ear per stock, that ear being about four inches long and containing 8 to 12 rows of kernels.

Recognizing the growing global threat to the diversity, integrity and sanctity of seeds, we would like to honor a few of the organizations which have taken significant steps to  protect seeds and to preserve our rights to save seeds.