Wild Earth Spiritual Community-North New Jersey

09/25/2024

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09/11/2024

Event Cancelled due to family emergency

Our monthly gathering is this Sunday, September 15, at Loantaka Brook Reservation in Morristown. Please join us for this opportunity to receive peace from nature in this turbulent time. We gather at 3 pm until 5. We share thoughts, hopes and dreams, wander, share more of our observations, grow together in life with the beauty and power of nature and each other.

May this wisdom from John O'Donohue, Irish poet and Celtic spiritual guide, inspire you (thanks to Monday Note in Nature from our friends at the Center for Spirituality in Nature--you can find them online and sign up to receive this weekly offering).

Monday Note From Nature

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.

–Excerpt from For Equilibrium, a Blessing by John O'Donohue

(photo by Hans Isaacson on Unsplash)

09/11/2024

Our monthly gathering is this Sunday, September 15, at Loantaka Brook Reservation in Morristown. Please join us for this opportunity to receive peace from nature in this turbulent time. We gather at 3 pm until 5. We share thoughts, hopes and dreams, wander, share more of our observations, grow together in life with the beauty and power of nature and each other.

May this wisdom from John O'Donohue, Irish poet and Celtic spiritual guide, inspire you (thanks to Monday Note in Nature from our friends at the Center for Spirituality in Nature--you can find them online and sign up to receive this weekly offering).

Monday Note From Nature

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.

–Excerpt from For Equilibrium, a Blessing by John O'Donohue

(photo by Hans Isaacson on Unsplash)

07/18/2024

Our monthly gathering is this Sunday, July 21 at Loantaka Brook Reservation, off Kitchell Road in Morristown. We gather at 3 and usually plan to stay until 5 or a little earlier. It is a time of focusing on Earth and all her beings and our mutual relationship with all these kin. It is a eco-spiritual time, usually an occasion of joy and warmth and discovery.

06/19/2024

Monday Note From Nature

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light’s great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun—
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

—Night in Day by Joseph Stroud

******** And as you feel the heat and plenty of summer, please plan to join us for our monthly gathering this Sunday, June 23 at 3 -5 pm, Loantaka Brook Reservation, Morristown. And if you want more information, please contact Robin at [email protected]

Photo by Endless Day Of Summer on Unsplash

06/11/2024

Our friends at the Center for Spirituality in Nature shared this poem, "Avowal," by Denise Levertov.....witnessing to our opportunity to be guided by nature into communion with the divine

Monday Note From Nature

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.

—Avowal by Denise Levertov

05/23/2024

My latest post from The Faithful Heretic which may interest Wild Earth folks!!

Learning to Live with Our Kin

05/14/2024

Our friends at the Center for Spirituality in Nature have shared this testament to the web of forest life, indeed the web of all life.

Monday Note From Nature

For the forest, the shared purpose is life itself, existence;
everything extraneous stripped away by its necessity.
Perhaps the goal of the spiritual life
is to strip away everything frivolous as well,
to pare it all back to the necessity of connection with the other.
If we worship in the sincere presence of that power
that takes away our forever-unmet need of things superfluous,
we enter the real ecology of the meeting,
where all is web.
―James W. Hood

Note: please join Wild Earth Spiritual Community--North New Jersey this Sunday, May 19 at 3 pm at Loantaka Reservation, Kitchell Pond.

05/06/2024

Our friends at the Center for Spirituality in Nature shared this poem, a testimony from Rowen White to the value of planting and earth.

Monday Note From Nature

An expression of faith
In life Herself
Is to sow seeds into dark soil
Not knowing what awaits.
Returning to the patience
Reverence
Grace
Humility
Practiced by our ancestors.
Who knew how to feed the hungers of time that call down the rains
With a simple song.

It is those kinds of people
Whose memory courses through my veins, like wild rivers.

Reminding me to wake up amidst the confusion
To do what must be done to feed the children.
To tuck vibrant seeds into fertile soil
And patiently tend the garden, back bent in service.
To those whose faces look up at us from the well-worn path we walk.

The garden that our ancestors left for us is beautiful.
May we water it well with our tears and our laughter, our stories, and our songs.

Today I choose to plant seeds of hope into the winds of an unknown future.

May we grow from this tiny seed of remembrance.
This intimate immensity.
Coming totally apart, emerging out of the hard shell of generations of protection and prayer; a seed coat tempered by love and loss, joy and pain.
Completely coming undone to reorient to this new form.

It's a New dawn.
The time to be those ancestors our grandchildren are waiting for is upon us.
What seeds are you sowing?
— Rowen White
Photo below by Daniel Haldack on Unsplash

04/22/2024

Today we mark Earth Day, and the beginning of Passover at sundown. Two sacred days in one........and they connect as they focus on protecting all life.
Read Matthew Fox reflecting on this......

In Saturday’s DM, we shared Rabbi Heschel’s valuable reflections on Liberation and Redemption, and how all human deeds are meant to “advance the drama of redemption.”  All are called to participate in such works of liberation—and Passover commemorates that. He says our work for compassio...

04/04/2024

Another gift from The Center for Spirituality in Nature........this time a meditation on many of the small, often invisible beings who continue to life for all

Monday Note From Nature

Lord, there are creatures in the understory,
snails with whorled backs and silver boots,
trails beetles weave in grass, black rivers
of ants, unbound ladybugs opening their wings,

spotted veils and flame, untamed choirs

of banjo-colored crickets and stained-glass cicadas.
Lord, how shall we count the snakes and frogs
and moths? How shall we love the hidden
and small? Mushrooms beneath leaves

constructing their death domes in silence,

their silken gills and mycelial threads, cap scales
and patches, their warts and pores. And the buried
bulbs that will bloom in spring, pregnant with flower
and leaf, sing Prepare for My Radiance, Prepare

for the Pageantry of My Inevitable Surprise.

These are the queendoms, the spines and horns,
the clustered hearts beating beneath our feet. Lord
though the earth is locked in irons of ice and snow
there are angels in the undergrowth, praise them.

–Psalm by Dorianne Laux