Spiritual Ecology

A woman takes a knee by the side of the road thinks: “Surely the Mourning Cloak I spied this morning is mourning. Having surveyed our condition from its higher vantage point, it must wonder, as I do, if the storm that fell so many trees, that destroyed this holy place, did so on purpose. Barring us from passage. Asking us who we think we are, as Frost wrote, insisting always on our own way so. Our own way. God help us. Who DO we think we are…littering these open spaces with our trash, leaving our detritus and dog shit behind? Dragging our noisy selves and our machineries along paths as if we have some lofty right? Infesting the woods with our toxic nature, our assumed religions, our fabricated joy? Infesting the world with our opinions, our politics, our petty, pathetic proclivities? Insisting on our own way and ever ignorant of the ripple effect, the consequences?”

A woman takes a knee by the side of the road — butterfly, startled, flies away, a world away a world dies — and we think she is praying.