To the Ancients, as well as to many contemporary seekers, the world is alive with spirit. The surrounding landscape is infused with creativity and meaning and each place speaks to us of the divine.

‘Every day is a god, each day is a god
And holiness holds forth in time…’

—Anne Dillard

The notion of a sacralized world may seem strange to the mainstream Western world. We live in a secular landscape. We have been taught to identify the sacred primarily with cathedrals, churches and temples. The rest of the earth is real estate. It is there for us to buy and sell and make money, .We have commercialized the earth and many don’t see the earth as sacred at all. We are wrong, of course. We have used this philosophy to plunder the earth of its rich bounty. We have dispelled our planets sacred aura.

The Holy Book of Nature

“It is written on the arched sky,
It looks out from every star….
It is spread out like a legible language upon the broad face of an unsleeping ocean.
It is the poetry of Nature,
It is that which uplifts the spirit within us.”
—John Ruskin

“The beauty of the trees,
The softness of the air, The fragrance of the grass, speaks to me.

The summit of the mountain, the thunder of the sky, the rhythm of the sea, speaks to me.

The faintness of the stars, the freshness of the morning, the dewdrop on the flower, speaks to me.

The strength of fire, the taste of salmon, the trail of the sun, and the life that never goes away, they speak to me.

And my heart soars.
—Chief Dan George

Today, we need more jobs and more energy. We need more affordable energy. We have more resources here in America and actually all over our planet. What is the problem? It is that we cannot kill our Mother Earth retrieving these resources. We can’t plunder our planet and strip her of all of her treasures. Treasures which have taken billions of years to form. We have to find a way to take care of the living planet under our feet and have the energy we need. It will take many wise people to work together to figure out how to accomplish this. But it must be done. We need to listen to what scientists tell us and not to the politicians who have their own agendas. If our planet dies, this planet we walk on, drive on, build on, we will die. So let us not commit environmental suicide. There is global warming. The North Pole is an island. I am 62 and this is not right. This means that the oceans and seas are higher and they will flood land areas more easily.

We saw this with Hurricane Sandy and now with Winter Storm Athena. Manhattan experienced flooding just as the scientists have predicted. Venice is in danger of flooding and many other places we love on Mother Earth. The time for scoffing at the experts is over. We are already in danger. It is time to remember the sacredness of our planet and to all begin to work together to save our world, its animals and its people. If we want to have a future, we must do this.

Our planet is sacred. It is time to once again revere her.

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