“We need the tonic of wildness—

To wade sometimes in the meadows where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe;

To smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.

At the same time we are earnest to explore and learn, we require that all things be mysterious unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.

We can never have enough of nature,

We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features: The sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and decaying trees, the thunder cloud, the rain that lasts three weeks and produces freshets.

We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

today’s pilgrimage, today’s wandering in wonder opens into so many wild and precious moments of inscendence, of burrowing into the soul, of taking full advantage of the dreaming moon of journeying january to ground in the earth and listen deeply for her soul song echoing heaven’s spirit song of how soul will be unfolding in this new turn around the sun…

may we all be gentle with ourselves and each other as we deepen into a spaciousness of silence, a consciousness of generosity, of the wisdom of the heart giving us the strength to awaken the dreamer and be the ones we have been waiting for, all our relations one unbroken field of rainbow pillars of light…