Sunrise Ceremony

“The land is my mother. Like a human mother, the land gives us protection, enjoyment and provides our needs – economic, social and religious. We have a human relationship with the land: Mother, daughter, son. When the land is taken from us or destroyed, we feel hurt because we belong to the land and we are part of it.” – Djinyini Gondarra

"Every seed is awakened and so is all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being and we, therefore, yield to our animal neighbors the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land." - Sitting Bull

"Never take over the world to tamper with it. Those who want to tamper with it are not fit to take over the world." - Tao

"So to breathe in and be aware of your body and look deeply into it and realise you are the Earth and your consciousness is also the consciousness of the earth. Not to cut the tree not to pollute the water, that is not enough."  - Thich Nhat Hanh

"Our task must be to free ourselves, by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it’s beauty.”-Albert Einstein

“We have a mother, and that mother is our territories, our common home of all the Indigenous peoples and everyone who inhabits this earth” – Maximiliano Ferrer

Knowing something is nothing like understanding the thing you think you know about. Life isn't just life as lived by humankind. Life is life beyond the conceptual thinking of humans. Life isn't small nor is it large for only humans visualise things in sizes. Atoms are small. You don't need to know your shoe size to understand you have feet. You don't need to know your shoe size to know you can walk. Life enters us as when we are conceived. Life stays with us when we are born. Life stays with us when the body dies. Living is what connects us to life. a life lived on the planet we are part of. There is no better adage than 'home sweet home.' Earth is home.

Passion

 

Do not be afraid of that word `passion’.

Most religious books, most gurus, swamis, leaders,

and all the rest of them, say “Don’t have passion”.

But if you have no passion, how can you be sensitive to

the ugly, to the beautiful, to the whispering leaves, to the sunset,

to a smile, to a cry? How can you be sensitive without a sense of passion

in which there is abandonment? Sirs, please listen to me, and do not

ask how to acquire passion. I know you are all passionate enough in getting a

good job, or hating some poor chap, or being jealous of someone; but

I am talking of something entirely different: a passion that loves.

Love is a state in which there is no `me; love is a state in which

there is no condemnation, no saying that sex is right or wrong, that

this is good and something else is bad. Love is none of these

contradictory things. Contradiction does not exist in love. And how

can one love if one is not passionate? Without passion, how can one

be sensitive? To be sensitive is to feel your neighbor sitting next

to you; it is to see the ugliness of the town with its squalor, its

filth, its poverty, and to see the beauty of the river, the sea, the

sky. If you are not passionate, how can you be sensitive to all

that? How can you feel a smile, a tear? Love, I assure you, is

passion.