“May the tree of our life be firmly rooted in the soil of love. Let good deeds be the leaves on that tree; may words of kindness form its flowers; may peace be its fruit.”

Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, also known as Amma

“What is a blessing but a rain of grace
falling generously into the lives of those in need;
and who among us is without need?
May the Spirit touch your spirit in this midmorning pause.
May this day be a pathway strewn with blessings.
May your work this day be your love made visible.
May you breathe upon the wounds of those
with whom you work.
May you open yourself to God’s breathing.
May you honor the flame of love that burns inside you.
May your voice this day be a voice of encouragement.
May your life be an answer to someone’s prayer.
May you own a grateful heart.
May you have enough joy to give you hope,
enough pain to make you wise.
May there be no room in your heart for hatred.
May you be free from violent thoughts.
When you look into the window of your soul
may you see the face of God.
May the lamp of your life shine
upon all you meet this day.”

Macrina Wiederkehr, OSB (1939 – 2020)

“We notice and remember features about walking journeys that are not apparent to us when we drive. The spirit of the land cannot speak to us directly when we speed through it; it cannot catch our eyes through the outstretched branches of the trees, or in the gleam of hidden water, or in the deer-brown bracken of the hillside under the glancing winter sunlight.

The time-sequencing of our landscape perception changes radically when we speed by unaware of what we are passing, or when we use a journey to work or read. We can pass through areas and have no recollection of having travelled through them.

Our subtle perceptions are never engaged when we are car-bound because our senses themselves are not engaged; these outer and inner senses are connected. The sense of our own velocity when we move under our own steam, rather than with the help of wheels, imparts the message of the wind; the feeling of our feet upon the ground brings us into relationship with the presence of the land; our ears, unshielded by carriage walls, are able to tune into the subtle sounds of the earth; our noses can smell the distinctive scents of the landscape, most potent messengers of memory. Infused into all these experiences, but predominately over them all, is the sense of the land itself and its own story into which we are straying.

Wherever we walk, we enter the story of the land, becoming part of it. But only the one who travels slowly can perceive that story and learn from it.”

From The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year by Caitlin Matthews

World Soil Day

“’Do you pray?’ a good friend asked me recently. ‘I just wondered where you get your hope from?’ It’s a bit of an odd question to ask someone who doesn’t believe in God…

‘I don’t pray in the way that I grew up praying but I suppose I do pray,’ I tell my friend. To sow, plant, harvest and eat, for me, is an act of worship. I kneel to the ground and bow down to the forces and rhythms of the natural world. I honour them with my reverence and offer them my trust. I trust that the cycles will turn and that, even when they don’t conform to my wants or perform as I expect, there is a lesson to be learned from it. It is prayer to move in step with the seasons as they turn and with the weather as it changes, especially in these dark times of the year when memories of light and warmth and verdant growth are hard to conjure. It is prayer to remember and believe that they will return again. It is prayer to trust in the profundity of small acts – of growing and gardening and loving and feeding – and to trust that they are happening in tandem with the many other small acts of wholehearted people, and that they will, and do, add up to something meaningful.

I trust where I sit as being infinitesimal within the great elemental shifts across our planet, a planet that sits within a universe amongst universes, under a sun and moon amongst many suns and moons. I sit within this knowledge and believe it gives my modest acts more meaning, not less. That this knowing shows my existence to be both miraculous and profoundly unremarkable. From this understanding, I feel able to participate in these great flows of energy that move us all to worship at the altar of the forces of nature. So yes, I suppose I do pray. Growing plants is how I pray.”

From Unearthed: On Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught Me I Belong by Claire Ratinon

“Standing as I do in view of God and eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

Edith Cavell (1865 – 1915), nurse executed for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium, born on this day

“Our disenchantment of the night through artificial lighting may appear, if it is noticed at all, as a regrettable but eventually trivial side effect of contemporary life. That winter hour, though, up on the summit ridge with the stars falling plainly far above, it seemed to me that our estrangement from the dark was a great and serious loss. We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it.”

From The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane

“My God, so gently life begins again today,
as yesterday and so many times before.
Like these butterflies, like these laborers,
like these sun devouring cicadas
and these blackbirds hidden in the cold dark leaves,
let me, oh my God, continue to live my life
as simply as possible.”

Francis Jammes, French poet (1868 – 1938), born on this day

“”Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day… The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”
Seneca, Moral Letters, 101.7b-8a

“Live each day as if it were your last” is a cliché. Plenty say it, few actually do it. How reasonable would that be anyway? Surely Seneca isn’t saying to foresake laws and considerations – to find some orgy to join because the world is ending.
A better analogy would be a soldier about to leave on deployment. Not knowing whether they’ll return or not, what do they do?
They get their affairs in order. They handle their business. They tell their children or their family that they love them. They don’t have time for quarrelling or petty matters. And then in the morning they are ready to go – hoping to come back in one piece but prepared for the possibility that they might not.
Let us live today that same way.”

From The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Saint Andrew’s Day and First Sunday of Advent

“Clear as the endless ecstasy of stars
That mount for ever on an intense air;
Or running pools, of water cold and rare,
In chiselled gorges deep amid the scaurs,
So still, the bright dawn were their best device,
Yet like a thought that has no end they flow;
Or Venus, when her white unearthly glow
Sharpens like awe on skies as green as ice:
To such a clearness love is come at last,
Not disembodied, transubstantiate,
But substance and its essence now are one;
And love informs, yet is the form create.
No false gods now, the images o’ercast,
We are love’s body, or we are undone.”

Real Presence by Nan Shepherd (1893 – 1981), poet of the Cairngorms

International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People

“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself–
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale”

Refaat Alareer (1979 – 2023), Palestinian poet, killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza