19 Comments

I love this idea of rooting down to feel more spiritual. It reminds me of a tree. Reaching down into the earth and up into the heavens. This what we have impact on the most in our daily lives. Ourselves and our community.

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Yes Claudia! I think too often we think of spirituality as only "up," but being alive on our planet is a spiritual experience in every direction. <3 <3

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Oh I like this idea of thinking of spirituality as going down, as rootedness.

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Understanding where "here" is - that's an important part of my living well. Reading your challenging and inspiring words is also an important part. I am grateful for my small but incredibly bright constellation of friends. Thank you.

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Oh, I like this "understanding where 'here' is..." I will think about this--TY! A Happy New Year bright star!

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I love your writing. Happy New Year. We all touch each other in some way I feel. Like trees connecting to earth and other trees. I am reading Robin Wall Kimmerer on taking care of our earth and plants. It’s all connected.

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Thank you--and Robin Wall Kimmerer is so wonderful! Happy New Year to you as well. <3

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Sarah, your words are joyfully stimulating to me...and I come away with, "my sovereign awareness is my level of my sacred awareness" all words that mean things to me that may differ from other's understandings of them, but this is what 'I got' today haha... & ty

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Oh, I find that significant Phyl--understanding our capacity for sovereignty as intertwined with our capacity to embrace the sacred. TY right back!

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We have only the control we can have over ourselves and our little world. When I saw you write about treating it differently than 2016 it immediately struck a chord. I can’t take the dive again either. Years of my life that are left must be mine. Regardless. We just can’t afford to give away another second of our sacred selves or how we relate to what has meaning.

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Amen. It's a strange because I believe it's important to not turn away, and I know I'll still need to respond and to support the political and social ideals I believe in, but I just want to do it while maintaining my sovereignty and make sure I'm acting from a place of love for the planet and all life in general...

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A lesson for us all.

Once my land thaws this year (April) I’ll be like Demeter waiting for Persephone (Spring comes very late on the mountain—June!) minding my own in preparation for whatever comes … by keeping my head down for my own small advancements and results, I’ll hopefully be prioritizing internally for external triggers and learn a new way to exist that’s really an old way.

It makes me think of my grandparents in Eastern Europe doing the same through regime changes that took all my great grandfather’s carpentry made furniture (it was too elite) and battled over borders between countries that literally turned them from Ukrainian to Polish. Can you imagine? And we complain?

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This blew me away: "I root myself in a fractal cosmic structure of “mattering” that puts all my micro-actions into the largest context there is.

And as I write that, I realize that this is the definition of sacredness." This is such truth, that the tiniest actions that we take to interact with the world around us matter, make a difference, ripple out into the Cosmos, vibrating out our unique sound to join the harmony of the Universe. All from our rooted teeny-weeny space. Thank you for this.

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🩷🌈🦋

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Rooting oneself to the fractal cosmos that MATTERS is such a beautiful way to be.

Just be you, dear creator. No one can take that from you. 💞

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Great read, everything resonates with me. Currently I have cochineal growing on my cactus, will have to experiment with it!

Happy New Year!

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Thank you and so cool that you have cochineal growing on your cactus! Back in the day, I thought I saw them on a cactus in a shopping mall parking lot in Albuquerque, but I didn't harvest them--alas!

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Wonderful essay, Sarah. I love your description of how working with naturalize makes you feel more connected to the Earth. And how paying attention just feels so spiritual and beautiful. That’s a wonderful note on which to end this year. Thank you!

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Yay--I'm so glad it resonated!

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