I’ve been thinking about the thoughts Sarah shared last week about connecting to the world around us as a way to deepen our sense of presence. I wanted to share a powerful quote from a recent interview with the incredible Buddhist philosopher, poetry translator, and environmental activist Joanna Macy. Macy was interviewed by Krista Tippett for the radio program On Being. In discussing her “wild love for the world,” Macy said:
It’s okay for our hearts to be broken over the world. What else is a heart for? And there’s a great intelligence there.
We’ve been treating the earth as if it were a supply house and sewer. We’ve been grabbing – extracting – resources from it for our cars and our hair dryers and our bombs. And we’ve been pouring the waste into it until it’s overflowing.
But our earth is not a supply house and a sewer. It is our larger body. We breathe it. We taste it. We are it. And it is time now that we venerate that incredible flowering of life that takes every aspect of our physicality.
Macy’s words have stuck with me, and I thought I would share them here as a follow-up to Sarah’s thoughts on deepening faith.
In other news: I have officially moved out of my apartment and am wandering for a while. And it is with deep gratitude to my generous friends that I embark on an adventure of couch-surfing and house-sitting until graduation. For now, I’m trying to be patient and content until I know what my next steps are.
