Sunday Meditation: Animals know this world

Thank you for joining me on the final day of my Eco-Spirituality class project (click link to see more). I hope you’ve enjoyed it!

The photos that I’ve taken and the readings are meant to help us reconnect with the rhythms of nature in our busy daily lives. I’m taking inspiration from two practices: the Daily Office and Lectio Divina to create a daily meditative practice with poetry.

To learn from Animal Being
By John O’Donohue,
To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

Nearer to the earth’s heart,
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world
In a way we never will.

We who are ever
Distanced and distracted
By the parade of bright
Windows thought opens:
Their seamless presence
Is not fractured thus.

Stranded between time
Gone and time emerging,
We manage seldom
To be where we are:
Whereas they are always
Looking out from
The here and now.

May we learn to return
And rest in the beauty
Of animal being,
Learn to lean low,
Leave our locked minds,
And with freed senses
Feel the earth
Breathing with us.

May we enter
Into lightness of spirit,
And slip frequently into
The feel of the wild.

Let the clear silence
Of our animal being
Cleanse our hearts
Of corrosive words.

May we learn to walk
Upon the earth
With all their confidence
And clear-eyed stillness
So that our minds
Might be baptized
In the name of the wind
And the light and the rain.