Loving the Earth – Page 2

Joyce and I are walking down a North Carolina beach at dawn. It’s mid-September. The twilit sky is pale blue-gray, with shadings of mauve and orange. We pause, moved by the muted colors and the soft background murmur of surf.

Then, without warning, we are overtaken from behind by a flight of brown pelicans, eight or nine of them, gliding low overhead in perfect formation. Their watchful eyes are serene, their elegantly angular bodies motionless, as they suddenly come into our field of vision.

The beauty of the moment strikes us with an intensity edging on anguish. Joyce feels her fuses being blown, as though only a small dose of such high-voltage beauty can be safely taken in before some self-protective mechanism goes into shut-down mode.

[When Light Morning was an active community, those wanting to visit or intern here sometimes asked about our core values. In response, we posted three articles to an earlier version of this website: Living Close to the Earth; A New Kind of Family; and A Transformational Journey.]

How do we learn to live close to the Earth? Paying attention to the needs of our body and stretching toward higher octaves of health is a good place to start. Living close to nature and working close to home is another approach. This necessitates making a slow transition from a cash-intensive to a more labor-intensive economy.

While improving our physical health and meeting our outward needs more directly are helpful, being close to someone also implies emotional intimacy. According to the dictionary, an intimate relationship is “a warm friendship developing through long association.” Might it be possible to nurture such a friendship with the planet we call home?

Category: Loving the Earth

The Gift of Beauty

Living Close to the Earth