Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation of September 5 is titled "Fall in Love With A Place." The idea is to have somewhere in nature where one becomes intimately aware of all its nuances, gifts, and challenges so that one is willing to work to sustain it. My "place" is Alan Seeger Natural Area in central PA. Another is my backyard garden, and I do put in quite a bit more effort there.
Brian McLaren offers these words relative to our grief regarding our abuse of nature:
Through the years, I’ve been involved in a lot of different areas of activism and so often what sustains us and motivates us in our activism work is anger. That’s legitimate because wherever we see injustice, we ought to be angry. But anger … can toxify our motivations if anger is all that’s driving us. That’s why I think it helps often for us to trace our anger back to grief... and then to trace our grief to love. It’s because we love something that we feel grief when it’s threatened. In fact, one of my favorite definitions of grief is that grief is love persisting when what we love is passing away. What you love, you try to save, and that’s why so many of us see the natural world around us with such tenderness, with such grief, sometimes with such anger, because what we love is passing away.I love McLaren's definition of grief. I have experienced considerable grief over the past couple of years, and I think that's true for the rest of humanity also.
Leta
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| A mossy decaying tree stump in Alan Seeger Natural Area, PA |
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