When the tire is no longer useful for a car, it is still good for a swing. But when summer ends, or children grow up, what is the swing good for? Sometimes the answer comes with patience, sometimes with determination, sometimes with burst of creativity that makes everything new.
How do you hold on to your sense of purpose in life during the times when you feel adrift?
What did you have for breakfast today? When you got up this morning did you know that you would be able to have enough food today to sustain you? Today marks World Food Day, an international event that honors the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on this day in 1945.
How do you express gratitude for the food that sustains you? How do you express that gratitude through choices that enable others to eat?
You stop to admire a rose in full bloom, glowing with the colors of the sunset. You bury your nose in the blossom and inhale the rich scent. As you pull your face back you notice that one of the petals on this glorious rose is bent and bruised, that the rose is not, after all, perfect. Do you enjoy the rose any less for its flaw?
How do you move past flaws to find the glory in your day?
Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light writes Mary Oliver. In the same way that the colors of a sunset get more intense before they fade to dark, autumn offers us nature’s brightest beauty before the dullness of winter takes over.
How has aging brought out the color and beauty in you or someone you love?
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
—Aldo Leopold
How do you experience yourself as being in community with the non-human world?
