Gary Lawless suggests that the world, as a living being, and its inhabitants speak to us, asking for help. Do we listen?
I told the boys, as they grew up, that listening and hearing are different. We hear, but, without listening, what we hear disappears immediately. In the busyness and rush of daily living, it is hard and sometimes impossible to be mindful and attentive.
When we sense the world, other humans, animals, and plants come alive for us and give the world continuously new meaning.
In yesterday’s post, Every Movement, I wrote about creating never being completed. It becomes an infinite event that continuously occurs and calls for us to be wakeful even in our dreams. Creation sings in a delicate, beautiful language that we share with the world and its inhabitants.
When we recognize Creation as a continuous event, our hearts open up and we become one with the rest of Creation, able to help.
When the animals come to us
asking for our help,
will we know what they are saying?
When the plants speak to us
in their delicate, beautiful language,
will we be able to answer them?
When the planet herself
sings to us in our dreams,
will we be able to wake ourselves, and act?
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About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope and its anticipatory relationship with the future, and hope as an essential element in learning.
Teacher as Transformer 
I hope so before it becomes too late to help at all.
Hugs
Truer words have never spoken. Becoming grandparents brings about a different way of thinking. Hugs back David.
For sure creation and Creation are endless events. By their definition, for sure. It’s one thing to practice listening on our own; it’s quite another to attune critical masses of humanity to the call. Yet unless we collectively awaken to the need to implement many changes, our species may well be doomed. Sooner or later, and let’s hope it’s as ‘later’ as it can be, for this place is amazing. Aloha, Ivon.
There is a genuine need to find a way to listen collectively and still appreciate the individuality of each person. You are so right; Earth and its inhabitants are amazing.
It is tragic that the over-culture of our wealthy northern hemisphere nations is all about distraction. If we all stopped and listened, what a force for improvement we might be – frightening of course for the big-player wealth creators who have made themselves immune from public scrutiny.
We seem to feel we are outside nature, rather than seeing ourselves as part of nature and recognizing its importance to our survival beyond material gathering.
That is too true. We mostly talk of nature as if it’s separate, or a piece of pleasing window dressing if we find a ‘nice’ bit.
A beautiful reminder.
Thank you.
Reblogged this on Paws N Reflect.
Thank you for the re-blog.
Gorgeous poem, I suppose the answer to your question is: the answer is blowing in the wind.
Thank you Genie. I love the Bob Dylan quote. The answer likely in the wind. We have to stop and listen.
Indeed, it is the difference between surviving as a species or becoming extinct, time has run out to keep ignoring the living earth in live in the cerebral, egoic part of the brain.
Interesting, I met Wendell Barry and his wife (I see you have quite a few posts about him) on a walk, they were up here in Canada out walking in the wilderness and they said hello and started chatting with me, I was really taken with their genuine reverence for nature.
That would be have such a wonderful experience to speak to them. His poetry and essays have a deep quality of reverence for nature. I took a course several years ago about eco-ethics based on Arne Naess’ concept of deep ecology. Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Mary Oliver are the three contemporary poets quoted in the text we used.